She's known simply as Pastor Alice, and the last time she saw Keith Ray Jr. alive was in early September 2007. He was lying in a gutter on a Remington Street, struggling with a Baltimore officer who was trying to put handcuffs on his wrists.
Ray kept screaming at the officer, calling him a "punk."
His friend, 22-year-old John Mooney, pleaded with Ray to shut his mouth: "Just be quiet, be calm, be calm."
The pastor was walking home with groceries, and she paused at the scene unfolding before her eyes. Another day on another street in Baltimore, where the struggles of a neighborhood, its people and its police officers collide in a gutter in front of an Episcopal priest.
A few days later, Ray's decomposing body was found off Wyman Park Drive, hidden under a pile of logs and brush, a bullet wound to the back of his head. And soon, the victim's best friend, who had talked him through his arrest days earlier, was charged with killing him.
They had argued over $1,000 that Mooney said Ray had stolen.
On Monday, a Baltimore Circuit Court judge sentenced Mooney to life in prison after a jury convicted him of conspiracy to commit murder.
Alice M. Jellema, the vicar of the Church of the Guardian Angel on Huntingdon Avenue in Remington, knew both Ray and Mooney. She saw them regularly on the streets, and she knew Ray's four children, one of whom she had gotten into a summer camp and a homework club.
She has no doubt that both men were petty thieves and scammers and that Ray probably did take something of Mooney's. Petty disputes solved with violence. Spats worthy of children on a playground, played out by adults with guns.
The families of the victim and suspect knew each other. And in the courtroom Monday, Jellema said "nobody cheered" the judge's sentencing. One man was gone, another lost to prison. Four children left behind, to be cared for by their grandmother.
Their mother died of a drug overdose on New Year's Day 2007. Their father died of a gunshot nine months later. It took nearly another three years to render justice. And a pastor who grew up in rural upstate New York is trying to make sense of it all.
"The only innocents in all this are the children," she said.
Jellema preaches to a diverse community — Johns Hopkins graduate students studying chemistry and physics pray next to mothers struggling on welfare and fighting off drug addiction. The two groups do mingle outside the pews — students volunteer their time in the community to help those less fortunate.
But the violence consumes.
"We have lost Keith, and we have probably lost John," Jellema said. "What we have not yet lost are the 12-year-olds, and we have to see to it that they get what they need … and they need self-esteem and confidence. And we need everybody to help in this."
She's angry that society teaches to hit back when hit and that kids who don't know any better on the playground grow up not to know any better on the streets. Adults let kids "escape responsibility and make terrible choices," the pastor said.
In court Monday, Ray's sister, Felicia Ray, spoke of the pain of losing a loved one. She noted that the family had to have a memorial service instead of a funeral because the body had been so decomposed. She told the judge about Ray's children seeing therapists, about their nightmares, and that his daughter still wrote letters to her dead father every day.
Jellema worries most about 11-year-old Darrien Ray, who regularly attends summer camp and the homework club in which students read newspaper articles cut from The New York Times science section.
Months after his father's body was found, Darrien showed up at the Church of the Guardian Angel. Jellema was getting ready for services, and it was early. It was also Father's Day, and the little boy was wearing a T-shirt with his father's picture on it.
He was alone.
The boy sat quietly through the entire service.
In court Monday, Jellema singled out Darrien in her handwritten letter to the judge. "I worry for Darrien," she wrote, "hoping that this will not become his story: that his grandmother and family and our church will be able to keep him from the life of violence the gangs offer."
Felicia Ray talked in her statement about how her brother loved his children, enjoyed being home and grilling out, always smiling as he cleaned the kids' rooms. But, she noted, "choosing the wrong friends to hang around got him killed."
They want the children to remember their father. They're struggling to make sure the children don't follow in his footsteps.