A Brilliant Mind Taken Before His Time

1/2 Joseph Levenson, 70, wants these words etched on the footstone of his son's grave. "My own words," he says proudly.

"He was a future leader," Tillie, his 63-year-old wife, interrupts. "Aaron was going to take over the family business."

Aaron Levenson, their 30-year-old son, was shot and killed last Oct. 4, the victim of a botched robbery outside the century-old family business, Royal Furniture Co., on South Monroe Street.

Now there are only memories. And the pictures and collages of Aaron in nearly every room of the Levenson home on Lincoln Avenue. The color portrait in the gold frame -- taken Christmas 1989 -- is extra special.

"We talk to that picture separately every night," Joe Levenson says.

"We say, 'Good night,' " said a teary-eyed Tillie Levenson, "and then I start crying and ask, 'Why did God let this happen to you?' We search for meaning, but we never get an answer."

Aaron was slain two years after having been mugged near his home in Otterbein. Aaron was hit in the head with a chunk of concrete by one of the robbers. Another man grabbed his wallet with $80. "Aaron lived in fear from that day on," Tillie Levenson says.

Aaron and his wife, Christine, moved to a $400,000 house in Baltimore County after the first robbery. When he was murdered, the couple had two daughters: one 3 months old, the other 3 years old.

Jeffrey Johnson, 26, a gospel singer, was sentenced April 16 to life plus 20 years after pleading guilty in connection with the murder. As part the plea bargain, prosecutors agreed not to ask the court for a sentence of life without parole. Sentenced to life plus 20 years, Johnson is to be eligible for parole in 20 years.

"We do not get any points for good behavior," Tillie says. "Thus, we have no chance for parole. We have to serve a true life sentence. We have to visit our son at his grave while the the mother of the murderer can still visit and talk with her son."

Co-defendant Marc Sean Howell, 20, was with Johnson the morning of the shooting but claimed he did not know a robbery was planned. The Morgan State University student was acquitted of murder charges after a jury deliberated for 10 minutes on March 29.

The Levensons listened in shock as the verdict was read.

"How could you possibly study three weeks of evidence in 10 minutes?" Joe asked. "They weren't searching for the truth."

"The trial washed me out," Tillie recalled. "The minute I would walk in this door each day I would scream. I was like a teapot filled up with steam and the lid just blew off."

Joe and Tillie Levenson have been completely consumed by grief. They are haunted by thoughts of the murder. And they are frustrated at what they see as the failure of the judicial system to adequately punish those responsible for Aaron's death. They want to devote their lives now to crusading for gun control and victims' rights.

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"I really feel their pain," says Marc Howell, free for the first time in nearly six months. "It was a senseless killing. And it would be senseless to take my life for something I didn't do. I really feel bad for them, but the bottom line is that I wasn't responsible for their loss. I didn't do it and I didn't know. But I can understand how they feel."

Howell, who looks like he's still in high school, has moved back with the aunt and uncle who raised him in Mount Vernon, N.Y. They live in a big house on a quiet, tree-lined street.

"I can't go back to Baltimore," Howell says. "If I did, I'd have to live in fear Jeffrey would send someone after me. I don't think that's fair at all. Mr. Levenson is dead and Jeffrey is locked up for the rest of his life. Just over those few minutes. Life is so strange.

"Now," he adds, "I just wish for some kind of understanding."

Howell hasn't decided where he'll finish school. One of Marc's former teachers in New York helped him get a summer job teaching mentally retarded children.

"It's important to help kids," he says. "It's easy to get caught up in something that you don't want to. I never saw myself going to jail. It woke me up. Nothing in life is definite."

Alberta and Marvin Monroe, his aunt and uncle, say that they also woke up. Despite the acquittal -- and a late-night celebration at a bar with some of the jurors -- the Monroes are bitter and angry people.

Marc was a victim in this too, they say. He became "just another black kid" ensnarled in an overzealous investigation of a high-profile murder case involving a white victim.

"The system is totally screwed up," Alberta Monroe says angrily. "The trial was pure hell. I really wanted to fight. Where's the justice? I didn't see honesty there. And that hurt."

"They saw this as just another black kid whose family is not going to support him," said Marvin Monroe, a manager with a New York utility. "It was rush, rush, rush. If it had been a more thorough investigation, they would have seen that this kid was telling the truth all along."

For almost six months, Howell -- skinny and boyish and the product of 12 years of Catholic schooling -- stood out in the rough crowd at City Jail. He was called a "snitch." His life was threatened. Placed in protective custody, Howell spent four hours a day outside his tiny cell, handing out meals and mopping floors.

Like many inmates, Howell found religion behind bars. In the Bible, he says, he found peace. He even turned two other inmates onto Scripture -- one who eventually pleaded guilty in the brutal beating death of his girlfriend's 2-year-old son, another who plea-bargained in a case stemming from the racially charged stabbing of a black man.

"At first, I thought about killing myself," he says. "But then I put myself in God's hands. I really found peace. Even those last weeks in jail. What ever happens, happens. I knew God was with me. I prayed for the prosecutor every night. His back was up against the wall. And I prayed for the Levenson family."

Howell's family found another lawyer after the first one they contacted offered his sympathies and said Howell had no chance of escaping conviction. They flatly said no to a prosecutor's offer to recommend a 50-year prison term if Howell pleaded guilty.

Howell came to Baltimore a year ago after his grades slipped in colleges in Atlanta. He lived with his sister, Tracey, in Woodlawn. Howell worked nearly 40 hours a week as a maintenance man at Ms. Desserts, a Woodlawn bakery, to help pay for 12 credits at Morgan.

Howell and Johnson were introduced at work. Howell -- bookish, shy and introverted -- immediately took to Johnson, a gospel singer described at Howell's as outgoing and streetwise.

"He liked to sing a lot," Howell recalls. "He didn't seem like the type of person I needed to worry about."

The evidence in Howell's trial showed that Johnson had been planning the robbery since last summer. A former Royal employee, Don Derrick Brown, 25, testified that he told Johnson that employees carried bank bags on the street, and that it would be easy to rob them. Prosecutors said they didn't have enough to charge Brown.

Johnson testified that Howell had driven him to stake out the furniture store several times. But, the jury believed Howell's claim that he was supposed to get a haircut from Johnson's cousin the morning Johnson tried to rob Levenson.

Weeping on the stand, Howell testified that Levenson appeared to stare "right inside of me" after Johnson shot him. Levenson was hit three times. The victim landed on top of the two bank bags he was carrying. The killer ran away without the bags or the $7 in Levenson's pockets.

"When I was in jail I just kept seeing it," Howell says now. "The way Jeffrey just kept shooting him in the back. I see it every day. In slow motion. There's not a day that goes by that I don't think about it. Not one day."

*

"I was standing there when they turned Aaron over on his back," says Joe Levenson, a Parliament shaking in one hand and tears in his eyes. "I thought they were going to hurry up and put him in an ambulance. But they took a sheet and put it up over his face. It was the most horrible thing in my life."

Joe Levenson collapsed on the street that day.

"I have these flashbacks just like I was there," Tillie Levenson says. "The first thing I say when I get up in the morning is, 'Oh, Aaron! Dear God, no!' I hope that it's just a terrible nightmare."

The Levensons visit several support groups for families of crime victims. They see a therapist and take anti-depressants. Tillie Levenson pulled a white sheet of paper from a folder. "We're suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder," she read.

She looked over four pages of symptoms. Anger. Anxiety attacks. Detachment. Fatigue. Flashbacks. Grief spasms. Irritability. Nightmares. Rage. "We can relate to almost all of them," Joe Levenson says.

"I even thought of suicide," says his wife.

The holidays were the hardest. "All winter I withdrew from the world," she said. "I went to the shopping mall at Owings Mills to get the children Hanukkah gifts and started crying in the middle of the mall. I heard the Christmas carols."

The house is filled with reminders. Hand-made Father's and Mother's Day cards from Aaron. Class pictures from McDonogh, where Aaron made the varsity wrestling team. Snap shots of a chubby-faced Aaron, with braces, at his bar mitzvah. An autographed picture of Johnny Unitas. A lucky rabbit's foot.

Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke, Attorney General Joseph Curran and others expressed their sympathies in letters. A friend planted 15 trees in memory of Aaron in a park in Israel. Eight-hundred people came to the funeral and the procession of cars was a 1 1/2 miles long. "It was a solid mahogany casket," Tillie Levenson says. "He was a furniture man. He loved mahogany."

Aaron was the only child of their 33-year marriage. Tillie Levenson has another son, Robert Boyar, 39, from a previous marriage. Joe Levenson says he's adopting Boyar and giving him the Levenson name.

Aaron was supposed to take over the furniture business. That's why he studied business administration and finance at George Washington, they said. Joe Levenson wanted to retire. Instead, he's lost 40 pounds since October and is at the store six days a week.

"Life doesn't have the same meaning," Joe Levenson after taking a deep drag from another Parliament. "No matter what happens. There's no real fulfillment in our lives now."