For Tyrone Jones, the smile that stretched across his face was a smile of freedom, of justice set straight after spending a dozen years in prison for a murder he insists he did not commit.
The smile flashed across television screens and across Baltimore and into Earline Coffey's living room on a Tuesday afternoon late last month.
She knew that Jones, the man accused of killing her teenage son, had been granted a new trial and set free on bail, but it was from TV that she learned prosecutors had decided to drop the case altogether. There would be no new trial, no closure in the death of 15-year-old Tyree Wright.
"I saw him on the news walking across the street and I flipped out," Coffey told me of the suspect, who was 21 when her son was shot and killed on the front steps of her East Baltimore rowhouse on June 24, 1998. "I've been crying ever since."
Coffey told me she's never gotten over her son's death, and this new twist is sending her to counseling for depression. Her son had been an above-average student at Patterson High School. He excelled on the track team and wanted to attend college and move to California to be a police officer.
The still-grieving mother keeps Tyree's track trophies displayed in her house and his pictures hanging on the walls. She visits the cemetery three to four times a week. She named a granddaughter Tyree in honor of her lost son.
Coffey remembers the final words they spoke just before Tyree went outside to sit on their rowhouse steps.
"I said 'Who loves you?' "
He answered: "God and you."
Then came a gunshot.
The mother watched through a window as her son tumbled to the pavement.
She rushed outside, cradled his head in her lap and wiped off the blood. "He looked at me and smiled," she recalled. "He died in my arms. They buried him with that same smile on his face."
Two young men. Two smiles. Two entirely different meanings.
The tragedy is that both the victim and the suspect appeared to be escaping Baltimore's violent world lived out in near-anarchy on city street corners. Relatives said Tyree usually stayed inside at night, did homework and ran track. His friends razzed him for studying instead of hanging out.
Jones had been arrested once on a drug charge when he was 20, but the case was never prosecuted. A football player at Dunbar High School, he graduated and used his contacts in the sporting world to get into a community college in Texas to study computer science.
He was home on break — his bags packed and ready to return to school for a summer session — when he found himself standing with friends on East Federal Street. Police said someone in the group fired a gun and the bullet hit Tyree.
A witness picked Jones from a photo lineup and identified him as the shooter. Police found gunshot residue on his hands and charged him with first-degree murder. A jury acquitted him of that charge but found him guilty of conspiracy to commit murder. He was sentenced to life in prison.
But even Circuit Court Judge John N. Prevas wasn't sure justice had been done. In an unusual speech, he urged Jones: "If you come forward with any evidence that demonstrates that you did not do it, I will be more than happy to set you free."
More than a decade later, Jones' new attorneys discovered flaws in the case.
Attorneys with Maryland's Innocence Project, which works to get wrongful convictions overturned, questioned the merits of the gunshot residue.
But what really sank the case was that the witness who identified Jones as the shooter had earlier told police she hadn't seen anybody. That police report was never turned over to the defense, who could've used it to question her credibility.
A judge overturned Jones' conviction in January, set him free on bail and granted him a new trial. On May 25, Assistant State's Attorney Don Giblin, after saying he had consulted with the family, concluded that the case couldn't proceed.
Getting safely out of Baltimore or off its streets is not easy. Tyree Wright appeared headed down the right path, but even taking a break and sitting on the front steps can be a risk in a city filled with guns and drugs. Police never said whether they believed Tyree had been targeted, but his mother told me the gunman was aiming for another youth farther up the street.
And Jones didn't do himself a favor by returning from school — the escape so many dream about — and hanging out with old friends tied to a losing way of life. Even if he was not the gunman, he put himself in an indefensible spot.
As a result, two people who had a way out ended up like too many others who choose guns and the corners over books and study halls.
"He was not a child of the streets," Coffey told me, her voice firm and emphatic, the unstated message being that his death can't be written off as another killing that is the inevitable outcome of a typical drug dispute or a petty argument settled with bullets.
That's why she's so angry at finding out from the evening news that the case was being dropped. She doesn't understand the rationale, and said nobody bothered to explain it to her.
"I don't think it's fair for him to be out and my son six feet under," Coffey said. "I feel as my son died in vain. And I don't want it to be like that."
Margaret T. Burns, a spokeswoman for the city state's attorney's office, said Giblin thought he explained to Coffey that the case would most likely be dropped, but she conceded that the two never spoke between the time the new trial was granted and the point at which charges were dismissed.
"It was an unintentional oversight," Burns said. "We certainly understand why she would feel this way, and we apologize for the trauma of her seeing this on television."
Coffey didn't want to end her interview in anger. She called back. She wanted to add something she couldn't bring herself to say at the trial so many years ago.
She told me she's forgiven Jones.
But she'll never forget his smile.
Nor the smile of her son.