Cherand Monroe raised two children and lost them both to Baltimore violence.
Sadly, that is not unusual.
Both her childrens' killers have been convicted of their crimes. And that, even sadder still, is what makes this case unusual.
I've spent too many years writing about justice undone, talking to families waiting for killers to be found, about cases unsolved, about killers roaming free and gunmen taking lives. On Friday, jurors took just three hours to convict the man of raping and brutally stabbing Jerrisha Burton as she drove to a friend's house in Northeast Baltimore 12 years ago. She was 18 years old
Burton's brother, Michael LeMaris Simms (in photo), was killed nine years later, also at the age of 18, shortly after becoming a Marine reservist. He stepped in to help his friends in a fight near Butcher's Hill and got stabbed.
His killer was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and spent two years in prison. Burton's killer. Ernest Roy Rivers, is to be sentenced in May and could spend the rest of his life in prison.
His attorney, Stephen H. Sacks, argued that his client had sex with the victim but didn't kill her. It's about all lawyers can say when DNA puts suspects at the scene. But the lawyer pointed to a mysterious phone call made from a pay phone a few days after the body was found in the back seat of a car. A man gave a homicide detective the names of two other suspects, one of whom had been on a single date with the victim. Police cleared those men in the case and Sacks said the judge wouldn't allow the phone call into evidence.
And Rivers didn't help his case by writing two letters from his jail cell while awaying trial. He wanted to show that he knew the victim, and he begged two friends to tell police they had seen him with Burton in his apartment several times before she died.
"The testimony I need from you is you visited me at that address on several occaisions and saw me with Risha," one letter contained in the court file says. In another, he wrote: "So to prove that I know or knew 'Risha' my lawyer asked me if I could find some witness that could testify to seeing me with this person at least once."
He offered to pay one friend $100 for his efforts.
"This could very well keep me from getting life," Rivers wrote.
Monroe had to take the witness stand and face her daughter's killer. She had to tell the jury that she had never met him before, and that her daughter had never mentioned him. Prosecutors pressed this was a stranger-on-stranger attack.
"I didn't want to see that gentleman," Monroe told me.
She called him a gentleman because that's the way she was brought up. She apologized for her use of words. She's naturally polite, but the jury has spoken, and the last of her childrens' killers has now met justice, and Ernest Roy Rivers can be stripped of his title of gentleman and formally be called a murderer.