Baltimore is often maligned as a shrinking city beset by crime and intractable poverty. But take a walk down President Street just south of Little Italy on a Friday night, and you will enter a world that appears far removed from the idea of a city that is terminally in decay.  

Past the empty pavilions of the Inner Harbor and east of the city’s increasingly troubled downtown business district, a cluster of towering high-rises emerges from the harbor like a defiant mountain range of concrete. 

A cobblestone boulevard leads to a European-style thoroughfare dotted with a dazzling array of upscale restaurants and outdoor dining patios. Lines of traffic spill onto the side streets as eager tourists vie for hard-to-find parking spots.

The outdoor bars and retail shops thrum with activity while the upscale Four Seasons Hotel sits astride panoramic views of the tranquil harbor. Stories of luxury condominiums extend into a swanky dance club, which perches atop the building like a palatial penthouse. An express elevator operated by a top hat-wearing attendant delivers partygoers to an often-packed dance floor.

It’s a world unto itself, seemingly far removed from the David Simon-conjured Wire-fied landscape of a failed city beset by corruption, drug dealing, and over policing: An upscale bubble that offers a gleaming rebuke to the naysayers who deem Baltimore a dysfunctional city of a dwindling population and violent crime.  

But it’s a success story that comes with a hefty, less obviously apparent, asterisk. Harbor East is, in some sense, a taxpayer-bolstered paradise. 

Based on the findings of our nearly year-long investigation into how Harbor East came to be, this shining city within the city is a success story heavily dependent upon public subsidies to an extent that has not previously been reported. It is a waterfront oasis fueled by dozens of tax breaks and incentives, built and sustained by tens of millions of dollars in city money.

How these tax subsidies have both defined and transformed Harbor East is a story entangled in the city that surrounds it. As our ongoing investigation Tax Broke has revealed, it is a tale of how a community walled off from its affluent suburban neighbors turned to tax incentives to reverse years of decay and population loss. But it’s also an example of the secrecy that obscures the details of how much this policy costs and who it really benefits.

As this spreadsheet illustrates, records obtained by TRNN reveal that, between 2012 and 2022, Harbor East received roughly $115.8 million in tax relief from the city through various subsidies and incentives.

However, despite numerous Maryland Public Information Act requests, city officials would release only a limited range of data from 2013–2022 pertaining to Harbor East tax records. They also would not release separate tax bills regarding a series of PILOTs—payment in lieu of taxes—granted to buildings within the development, which led to additional tax savings for developers.

Still, what we were able to obtain paints a picture of a luxury development built upon a foundation of public subsidies.

The most lucrative of these incentives went to the Marriott Waterfront Hotel. To date, $57 million in property tax has been abated, part of a 25-year PILOT that requires a tax payment of $1 per year.

But the city has also granted tax relief to a variety of other buildings.  

Roughly 75% of the additional Harbor East properties garnered subsidies worth approximately $58 million in just under a decade. The bulk of the tax breaks were PILOTs, given to at least seven properties comprising the waterfront development.

PILOTs offer fairly straightforward tax relief: Property taxes are phased in over time on a sliding scale, from a small percentage of the actual tax bill to a greater share of what would actually be owed. A ten-year PILOT, for example, might require the property to pay 5% of the entire tax bill for the first three years, then 20% for the next four, and, finally, 80% for the remaining two. But the city has been opaque about the tax savings from individual PILOTs, removing the data from online tax records and ignoring our requests for additional data.

But some properties were granted more than one tax break. 

The pricey office tower built to house the Legg Mason investment firm benefited from both an Enterprise Zone credit and a PILOT. The subsidies were intended to maintain 600 jobs and keep the firm’s headquarters in the city. 

Legg Mason was acquired by California-based investment firm Franklin Templeton in 2020. The name is currently off the building, but the subsidies remain. Records show the owners of the building have not been required to pay full city property tax since 2018.  

In addition to the PILOTs, multiple other buildings within the same development also received Enterprise Zone tax credits and abatements under the Brownfields incentive program. Each forgives a percentage of property taxes ranging from 50% to 75% of the entire tax bill for five to ten years, depending on a variety of criteria. 

The Enterprise Zone credit is designed to spur commercial development in poor neighborhoods but was expanded over time to include the entire city. The Brownfields credit incentivizes developers to remediate contaminated properties and offers a similarly generous 75% reduction in tax bills for five to ten years.

The Four Seasons Hotel and Private Residences used a Brownfield credit to save roughly $10.6 million in taxes over the past decade. This incentive included nearly $6 million for the luxury condos that sit atop the hotel.

The $115 million figure does not paint a full picture of the taxpayer tab for Harbor East. The scope of our calculations is limited by the fact that many of the tax credits granted to these developments were in effect prior to 2013—records that were not available, according to city finance officials. 

The lack of transparency is, in part, due to how the city bills properties that receive tax subsidies. 

Special credits like Brownfields and Enterprise Zones are not detailed online. Instead, we had to ask the city for copies of the separate paper bills it mails annually to developers, which list the value of the credit. From the paper bills, we calculated the 10-year figure for taxes abated through Brownfields and Enterprise Zone tax credits that contribute to the $115 million taxpayer tab.

Even the taxes abated via PILOTs were challenging to calculate. The city told us tax bills for PILOTs are mailed separately from ordinary tax bills, including special credits. We asked for copies of the separate PILOT bills, but the city would not release them, again without explanation or response to our request. 

To work around the lack of data, we obtained two decades’ worth of property assessments for all the parcels that comprise Harbor East. We used the value of the buildings to calculate the property taxes owed in any given year. Then, we applied the formulas outlined in council legislation, which authorized several of the Harbor East PILOTs to estimate the tax savings for a given PILOT to arrive at the approximate figure. 

Decades of support, a meager paper trail

Tens of millions in direct tax incentives are just a small part of the taxpayer assistance received over time by Harbor East developments. An array of government-backed loans, an interest-free mortgage, and city-built infrastructure also provided critical assistance during the buildout.

The most detailed inventory of these other subsidies is recounted in a 1990 agreement between the city and Baltimore businessman John Paterakis. It outlines in some detail how Harbor East was initially financed and who paid for it.

Paterakis, who died in 2016, was a powerful Baltimore insider—a successful entrepreneur who grew a baking empire from a single row home in Fells Point into a complex of warehouses that now envelop a large swath of the area. The contours of the deal were based upon his desire to transform a dusty waterfront parking lot he partially owned into a flourishing urban enclave.

But, again, his vision came with a hefty price tag for taxpayers.

Initially, the city owned roughly 12 acres of the nearly 20 that now comprise the development. Paterakis, according to the contract, owned just 8 acres. To enable him to purchase at least part of the remaining space, the city offered a development firm he controlled, Harbor East LLC, an interest-free mortgage for $2 million.

The loan was satisfied almost 20 years later with a cash payment of $525,545.

The city also promised to make a series of “public” improvements to the site at taxpayer expense. Among them were streets, parks, utilities, and the necessary bulkheads to support new infrastructure. In the agreement, the total cost was estimated to run as high as $21 million, which in part would be financed and repaid with revenue from a city-run parking garage—which, records indicate, has yet to be built.

The city also agreed to build a $4 million marina, which it handed over to Paterakis to manage. That deal allowed the developer to lease the marina in exchange for an 8% share of gross income, save one exception: 50% on fuel sales. Finance officials would not provide the details on how much that deal has netted the city or if the parameters of the deal have changed.

But even as the development took shape in the early 2000s, public money continued to play a substantive role in financing.

In 2011, Harbor East tapped into a federal stimulus program that provided access to $45 million in Recovery Zone tax-exempt bonds. Paterakis used the money to finish the construction of the Four Seasons Hotel. But despite queries to the Maryland Economic Development Corporation, which handled the deal, state officials could not provide information on the current status of the bonds.

We asked the department of finance for updates on the status of the marina and the current terms of the deal. They did not respond. We also provided the 1990 agreement to the city and asked for comment. They did not comment.

The State Department of Commerce said the $45 million bond was a private transaction that was issued by the Maryland Industrial Development Authority and then sold to PNC bank. The Department of Commerce also stated they did not have any information on the current status of the bond.

Both the details and the history of how Paterakis was able to wrangle more help from the city, and why the city was so willing to give it, are murky at best. Jay Brodie, former president of the Baltimore Development Corporation, said much of the negotiation preceded his tenure.

“I was not there at the beginning,” Brody told TRNN.

Brody took the helm of the BDC in 1996. The quasi-public agency was often criticized for making closed-door deals with developers and being opaque about its internal decision-making process.

However, he revealed that the city had a previously undisclosed profit-sharing agreement linked to the Marriott Waterfront Hotel PILOT. That deal led to what Brody says was a low-key confrontation with Paterakis sometime during the 2000s.

“I remember meeting Mr. Paterakis when he said, ‘I know you’re going to ask for a check,’” Brody recalled. “I said, ‘Yes, I’m expecting a check for $1.5 million.’”

Brody said the check eventually arrived.

No public record exists of a profit-sharing agreement between developers and the city regarding the Marriott Waterfront Hotel. The city did require profit sharing tied to the PILOT for the former Legg Mason building, though that deal has been embroiled in controversy after the building sold for a record $438 per square foot in 2017.

The Abell Foundation, a local nonprofit, sued for records of how much developers paid from the proceeds of the sale as per the profit-sharing agreement. Like much of the inner financial workings of the project, the city has subsequently refused to release details. The Maryland Court of Appeals recently heard the case, with a decision expected next year.

Brody argues that, despite the substantive public investment, disclosing too many details about the city’s dealings with a developer could jeopardize the city’s ability to make deals with private businesses in the future.

“We’re looking at developers’ bank accounts,” he noted. “This allowed Mr. Paterakis to finance the project without revealing confidential information,” he said.

Still, Brody maintains the city had to assist Paterakis to mitigate the difficulties of building close to the water. Among the challenges he cited was the construction of a slurry wall to support bulkheads that now anchor the Four Seasons Hotel.

“He faced quite a few tough challenges,” Brody said. “But I think in the end it is a great project.”

Opaque costs, unknown and uncertain benefits

The biggest incentive for the city to forgo tens of millions of taxes from development is often the prospect that properties subsidized by taxpayers will, in the future, become self-sufficient, adding new value to the city’s existing tax base. The idea is that, by incentivizing new construction, the city will be compensated for any taxes lost, with new properties generating much-needed revenue that would otherwise not exist in the first place.

But that expected payoff, at least for some of Harbor East, may not be as quick or beneficial as expected, according to a critical measure. Several buildings in Harbor East have been saddled with steep drops in value as determined by the state’s tri-annual assessment.

The current assessment of The Marriott Hotel is 32% lower than in fiscal year 2020. Similarly, the office building that housed the former headquarters of Laureate Education is 25% lower than in 2020. The Hilton Garden Inn building at 625 South President Street also took a hit, losing 49.8% in value since 2020.

The Baltimore Business Journal reported last year that the former Laureate Education headquarters has been placed on a mortgage watchlist. The property was added to the list due to a steep decrease in tenants.

The current assessments might reflect the headwinds buffeting downtown commercial properties across the country. The ongoing fallout from the coronavirus pandemic has dented hotel valuations, as well.

But it’s also a reality that taxpayer-bolstered development does not always meet expectations and is not immune to market forces.

A prime example is the Hilton Convention Center Hotel, which was initially billed as a nearly guaranteed profit center for Baltimore when the city council approved $300 million in bonds to build it in 2005.

The project was sold as the answer to the city’s flailing convention business. But a slow opening due to the Great Recession in the late 2000s, followed by the later effects of the pandemic, left taxpayers holding the bag.

Currently, the hotel has required $23 million from the city’s general fund just to pay the bonds used to finance its construction, and its appraised value is estimated to be almost half the outstanding debt.

However, throughout the hotel’s descent into financial trouble, city officials insisted all was well through a series of press conferences where officials denied evidence the business was struggling. These concerns were only acknowledged as a problem when the city was forced to pay its bills.

Again, this points to the underlying problem with Harbor East: how can the city assess the long-term costs and benefits of a project that requires taxpayer funding when so little is known about the future performance of the project?

Baltimore City Councilwoman Odette Ramos (D-14) efforts to measure the long-term costs and benefits of another widely used tax incentive are illustrative of the difficulties in obtaining data to evaluate the benefits of developer tax subsidies.

Last year, she introduced a modest bill to study the costs and benefits of TIFs, or Tax Increment Financing. Baltimore has used TIFs to help bolster projects like Harbor Point, the home to energy giant Exelon’s Maryland headquarters, and Baltimore Peninsula, a waterfront development financed in part by Under Armour founder Kevin Plank. TIFs allow developers to borrow future property tax payments from Wall Street and use the money to invest in construction costs.

Ramos’ proposal was met with skepticism. In a rare rebuke of a colleague, the council voted it down by a 4-3 vote even though the city had already budgeted $35,000 to pay for it. For her, it was an example of how the city’s approach to tax incentive-based development lacks accountability.

“I am concerned about the lack of transparency in understanding the TIFs and the tax credits,” Ramos said. “My bill attempted to get at the information. I have requested it in another way and I’m waiting for it to be delivered to me.”

However, the lack of a detailed fiscal picture of the subsidies undergirding Harbor East is not limited to tax data. It’s also unclear how to calculate if $115 million in incentives has paid off for taxpayers in other less direct gains like the number of jobs created and new residents attracted.

A state law authorizing PILOTs requires city officials to file annual reports that provide some data on job retention and taxes paid by each beneficiary. However, there is no formal process for reporting on the cumulative economic benefit to the city for other subsidies such as the Enterprise Zone and Brownfields tax credits.

State Senator Jill P. Carter has introduced a comprehensive transparency bill during the current legislative session. She aims to create a task force to deliver a detailed picture of the costs, benefits, and long-term impact of public funding for private projects.

“We just need a better sense of how this is working and who benefits,” Carter told TRNN. “Any business would expect this kind of transparency; why can’t it be afforded to the people who are footing the bill?”

Multiple attempts by TRNN to contact the developers of Harbor East to get the developer’s perspective on both the performance of the tax incentives and problems with transparency went unanswered. In fact, simply finding a person to speak for the development was challenging.

An unidentified employee who answered the phone number listed on the Harbor East website said the development did not employ a person who handles media inquiries. Multiple inquiries sent to various emails for members of the Paterakis family were also not answered.

We also reached out to the mayor’s office and the city’s finance department multiple times. We asked both to either confirm our calculations or offer an alternative number—both have yet to respond.

Flying blindly into the future

The lack of transparency about the benefits and pitfalls of the city’s expansive use of subsidies has become apparent even as Baltimore faces a pivotal moment in its push to reshape wide swaths of downtown.

Currently, developer David Bramble is preparing to overhaul the struggling Inner Harbor. He has pledged to tear down the modular pavilions, which were once touted as the epitome of the city’s urban renaissance. Bramble says he plans to reimagine the city’s waterfront with housing and more walkable and pedestrian-friendly thoroughfares, which could cost at least $400 million in city money.

At the same time, long-term deals to develop housing and retail near Camden Yards and M&T Bank Stadium have fallen into place. Recently, the state signed an MOU with the Orioles that calls for development surrounding the stadium. The legislature has already slated $1.2 billion in pre-approved financing to upgrade the facilities and the surrounding neighborhoods.

Meanwhile, Mayor Brandon Scott has also proposed increasing the city’s debt obligation with a plan to rebuild vacant homes through a 150 million dollar TIF. The plan would tap state funding and recapture sales tax revenue, but, at its core, the program would be funded by yet another tax exemption—albeit in this case for a neighborhood that is struggling and far removed from the environs of Harbor East.

All of these disparate challenges may seem unrelated—yet they are actually informed by the same questions underlying Harbor East: What role should public money play in funding private development? How does a city grow in a way that is both fair and productive? How can a community reimagine itself while meeting the competing demands of affordable housing, attracting new residents, and not overburdening current taxpayers who pay the highest rate in the state? And what can the rise of Harbor East, in part driven by lucrative taxpayer subsidies, teach us as we ponder this momentous present and yet-to-be-determined future of the city?

These questions demand answers as the city teeters on the precipice of an existential makeover, with the shadow of Harbor East looming over what happens next.

The Price of Progress

For too long, urban centers across the country have been ensnared in a cycle of underdevelopment, hindered by property tax disparities, the absence of cohesive affordable housing strategies, and insufficient educational investments. In an effort to counteract these challenges, cities like Baltimore have resorted to controversial tactics, offering lucrative incentives to developers under the guise of benign acronyms like TIF (Tax Increment Financing) and PILOT (Payment in Lieu of Taxes), despite these strategies often exacerbating the strain on their working-class populations.

Tax Broke is not only an exploration of Baltimore’s challenges, but is also a critical examination of a pervasive issue affecting cities nationwide. This investigative documentary delves into the deep-seated problems caused by opaque tax break systems that disproportionately impact the working class, shining a light on a matter of importance far beyond Baltimore’s city limits.

Yet, the promise that such incentives would catalyze urban rejuvenation remains unfulfilled, and cities like Baltimore witness continued population decline. Tax Broke seeks to unravel the complexities of this issue, questioning why Baltimore and other similar cities find themselves in a position where they must subsidize development to achieve growth. The film invites a broader discourse on alternative methods of urban development, aiming to ignite a conversation on the necessity of transparency and fairness in tax break systems.

Through its comprehensive investigation, the documentary Tax Broke positions itself as an indispensable resource for understanding the intricacies of urban development strategies and their ramifications, offering insights that are crucial for other cities grappling with similar dilemmas across the nation.

Transcript

Taya Graham:  When you drive around Baltimore, you see a city of contrast: construction cranes dot the downtown skyline while thousands of homes remain vacant; buildings going up while the city is losing population. It’s a divide that is hard to ignore because this version of two cities is, in part, no accident.

The story of how this happened and what it means has not been fully told. It’s a tale about obscure acronyms like TIFs and PILOTs, tax breaks and other incentives, but it’s also about Wall Street and big banks and decisions made decades ago in Washington. It’s about the desire of a city to grow, and people who benefit when it can’t on its own. All the forces that drive inequity here and elsewhere that work behind the scenes to create the divide we live in.

After the death of Freddie Gray in police custody, the world watched as my city, Baltimore, burned. Some called it an uprising.

Dr. Cornel West:  And there’s such a fear. There’s a real trembling in the boots of elites at the top when poor people straighten their backs up.

Taya Graham:  Others, a reckoning.

Michelle Alexander:  We have become the most punitive nation in the world. We have constructed a penal system unprecedented in world history.

Taya Graham:  But the anger on the streets was not just about policing; It was also a cry of desperation from residents who had lived with staggering poverty for decades.

Dr. Marisela Gomez:  Because he lives in a community that historically has been abandoned, he grew up in housing that has lead paint, and then the whole uprising afterward and the community saying, no more, we’re not taking this nonsense anymore.

Taya Graham:  Which made what happened next profound.

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake:  So my office began working with Sagamore development months ago to make sure that all of the people of Baltimore benefited from Port Covington.

Taya Graham:  Less than a year after the unrest, the city rushed a deal through the council to approve a $660 million tax incentive, known as a TIF, to Kevin Plank, the billionaire founder of Under Armour, to build a luxury city on the water.

Greg Leroy:  Because the TIF was so huge, it’s the fourth biggest TIF, I think the third biggest private sector TIF in US history, the biggest TIF this side of the Mississippi. We couldn’t ignore it.

Taya Graham:  My reporting partner, Stephen Janis, and I followed the story. But despite all the promises and protests, the deal was approved.

Speaker 1:  For all the money that’s being poured into Baltimore City, it’s just not coming out to us. It’s not enough coming out to us.

Taya Graham:  And that wasn’t the only tax break fueling construction downtown — Another type of incentive known as a PILOT was approved for all new apartment buildings with more than 20 units just before the uprising, a move prompting a massive buildout of luxury apartments — All amid a public housing crisis, when advocates struggled to get the city to set aside a small sum to build affordable housing.

Speaker 2:  We need for our city leaders to be more than leaders at the podium — We need for them to join us in this great cause.

Taya Graham:  And so, in a city where a young Black child has less of a chance of making it out of poverty than a child in many third world countries, people who were already rich seemingly got richer. City leaders argued this was all necessary, just the cost of doing business, that the array of tax breaks were inevitable for a city that couldn’t otherwise attract investment.

Shortly after this, Stephen and I decided to investigate this idea to understand how we got here and why. And even more important, how much do these policies really cost, and who really benefits?

Part 1: What is a TIF?

Rally Speaker:  That swift process prevents true transparency, prevents and limits the opportunity for citizens to understand what this deal is all about.

Taya Graham:  This is Taya Graham reporting for The Real News Network here in Baltimore City, Maryland. We’re outside the War Memorial, where the community has converged in force to have their say on the $500 million tax break awarded to Kevin Plank’s Sagamore Development.

Stephen Janis:  Why do they want you to stand outside here and wait in the heat for this?

Perkins Homes Resident:  It’s about equity, it’s about injustice.

Melinda Roeder (reporter):  It seems like it’s being rushed through. People need more information. They need to understand what this is about and how it’s going to impact us for the next 41 years.

Taya Graham:  The story of how a city of such stark contrast ended up approving one of the biggest tax incentives ever starts with innocuous sounding acronyms: TIFs and PILOTs. They might seem exotic, but both are fairly common financial instruments used across the country to incentivize growth.

Board of Finance Member:  This board is requested to consider concept approval of Port Covington TIF, located on approximately 260 acres, site in South Baltimore.

Taya Graham:  A TIF, or Tax Increment Finance, allows a developer to put future property taxes into the property itself.

Roy Meyers:  So a TIF is a special tool that local governments use to try and promote economic development in a specific area of a city. So the way it’s done is that the city or county draws a line around a geographic area, and then it says that there’s going to be a special property tax treatment related to that part of the city or county. So what you do, what the city or county does, is it measures the value of the property for tax purposes before the TIF is created. And after that, any of the additional tax increases that come from increased property value is used to pay off the bonds that are sold for infrastructure developments in that TIF.

Taya Graham:  What that means is that, unlike you or I, a TIF allows the developer to keep their property taxes and invest them in the project. But this goes beyond not having to pay into city coffers — TIFs refund up to 30 years of tax payments upfront. The city raises this cash by selling bonds to investors at a premium, which means money for vital services like education or public safety goes straight to Wall Street instead. A PILOT grants years of tax exemption from property taxes, which are gradually phased in. But the devil is in the details.

Protester:  But now we find out that they’re going to give $535 million to a billionaire, which I think is appalling.

Taya Graham:  Because just how necessary or fair these incentives are and how they affect the city depends on who you ask.

Jeff Singer:  I think a TIF is, in part, a tax break, but it doesn’t eliminate the taxes, it just changes the way they’re being paid.

Jay Brodie:  Well, the TIF is probably the best single weapon that the city has. Or, if you want to think of it as a tool in a kit of tools.

Melody Simmons:  It is a tax break because, basically, the money does not go into the public general fund.

Jay Brodie:  In the old days, the city was rich. Developer would say, I’m going to build some housing in West Baltimore, and I want the city to put in a sewer system. I want the city to pave streets. Maybe I want the city to do a nice little park, and we would build the housing around the park. City doesn’t have the money to do that anymore.

Melody Simmons:  So if you’re having money that’s diverted out of your general fund for 30 years, that means that that’s less money for 30 years on that one project that the city has available.

Taya Graham:  And therein lies the dilemma for Baltimore: How can you measure the effectiveness and fairness of an idea that people can’t even agree upon a definition? And who is right? What are they really? Tax breaks, funding for infrastructure? And if they are tax breaks, how much has Baltimore spent, and are they worth the price? Those are the questions we set out to answer. But what we didn’t know is how complicated the answer would be.

Part 2: A chestful of money

Carl Stokes:  The Baltimore administrations have given money to people who never asked for it. They have just said, here, here’s a chestful of money, take as much as you want. Don’t worry about the next guy because we’re going to fill it back up with the poor people’s money.

Taya Graham:  The fierce debate over defining TIFs, and, to some degree, PILOTs, does leave out a critical question, which may help us understand what they really are: Why do we need them in the first place? How did we get here, where practically nothing could be built without them?

And to answer, we have to go back in time almost 100 years ago, when state leaders made a fateful decision: that Baltimore would forever be separate from the county which surrounded it.

Jay Brodie:  There’s two kinds of American cities in the post World War life: There’s the kind like Baltimore, Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh that lost their power, either politically or legally, to expand. So Baltimore last annexed territory, including where we’re sitting here in Roland Park, in 1919.

Matthew Crensen:  And so, as a favor to the county, the state legislature passed a law which empowered a commission of Baltimore Countians to arrange for the construction of their own jail and the rest of it. So finally, by constitutional convention in 1851, the state put the city and the county in two different judicial districts, and that was what brought about the separation.

Jay Brodie:  And so, the 80 square miles of Baltimore, a compact little city, hasn’t changed. On the other hand, Houston, Dallas, Phoenix, San Antonio have taken huge amounts of, if you use the Baltimore example, not only the Beltway, but out of the belt, beyond the Beltway in the Hunt Valley.

Matthew Crensen:  So Baltimore, I think one other city, St. Louis, is in the same position, is a free standing city, which has some real disadvantages because it means the county, where there are a lot of prosperous communities, has no responsibility for the city, no direct responsibility.

Jay Brodie:  And it’s an enormous difference, and it won’t change.

Taya Graham:  The city also pioneered racial segregation, passing a law that legally banned Black residents from living in predominantly white neighborhoods.

Matthew Crensen:  That was what Baltimore became notorious for. Other cities around the country used that as a model. It tried to look as though it were racially even handed. It said that no Black person could move into a block where a majority of the residents were white, but no white person could move into a block where a majority of the residents were Black.

Taya Graham:  Lines that were used to deny federal aid to those same communities and probably is, in part, responsible for the blight we see today. When the federal government was drafting an earlier plan to use federal money to back housing loans, it redlined Black neighborhoods.

Jeff Singer:  So these maps from the 1930s track almost exactly the maps we have today of vacant houses, of arrests, of people in prisons, of gun violence, of educational attainment. They all can be overlaid on each other.

Taya Graham:  And so much of the federal aid went to building downtown. And when the federal money dried up, blight got worse, and the long path towards tax incentives took hold — But not without help, because that century-old decision to isolate Baltimore from the surrounding counties also caused this.

I’m standing at the Baltimore City-Baltimore County line, and even though this line might be invisible, it still has huge implications for the future of our city. That’s because, a few feet either way, and the price of owning a piece of property doubles. In other words, a homeowner on this side of the street pays twice the rate as this side.

And thanks to the state, that arbitrary line is etched in stone. In 1948, the Maryland General Assembly passed a law prohibiting Baltimore from expanding at all. The result: a city isolated both economically and, to a certain extent, politically.

And so, as an exodus to the county began, the city was forced to raise taxes to maintain services. In fact, between 1958 and 1978, the city raised them — 15 times. And as the city shrunk, the cost of stepping over this line increased. The result was the city was left in a bind, with a shrinking population, the highest taxes in the state, and the federal government reluctant to help. How could the city save itself?

Part 3: Where’s the blight?

Jay Brodie:  So the challenge is to keep businesses in Baltimore and attract new ones, and it’s tough.

Taya Graham:  So with the federal government pulling back direct aid and cities looking for ways to develop blighted areas, some turn to tax subsidies.

Carl Stokes:  We’re getting people already very, very rich who have the means to just work the system, so to say.

Taya Graham:  One was the TIF, and the idea was to use it for blighted communities. And as we’ve heard already, TIFs allowed developers who were willing to build in neighborhoods that were otherwise neglected the ability to reinvest the newly generated taxes into the property. But as legalization to authorize TIFs expanded across the country, something strange happened. The initial idea about blight vanished and the number of TIF districts exploded, and the requirement that a neighborhood needed to be blighted to get a TIF disappeared.

Greg Leroy:  So TIFs actually have a very interesting legislative history. The slum alleviation language from the progressive era, almost word for word, some of the early language in those statutes was then grafted onto state laws creating TIF districts starting in the ’60s and ’70s. But it’s vague language. It’s saying areas that are depressed, that have high rates of code violation, or sagging infrastructure, or poverty, or crime, or often it’s a laundry list of conditions, any of which you can grab and say, OK, that fits the problem. The trouble is, over time — And we documented this in a study a long time ago — Over time, states deregulate these geographically defined incentives so that you can have a TIF district anywhere where it will promote commerce and prosperity.

Taya Graham:  But here in Baltimore, the idea of a TIF and what it could do about blight took a surprising twist. One of the primary boosters of TIF was this man: Jay Brodie. Brodie was the president of a quasi-public agency known as the Baltimore Development Corporation. What is a quasi-public agency? From Brodie’s perspective, a necessary evil in a city desperate for development.

Jay Brodie:  Why form these nonprofits, you might say? Well, the kinds of activity, the economic development activity, were not classic activities of city agencies, but the idea was to not have to hire and fire people through civil service, to try to find people who were more entrepreneurial than the average city civil servant.

Taya Graham:  But for others, the worst of both worlds: An agency legally able to operate outside the purview of public scrutiny.

Carl Stokes:  And there was always men who sat in rooms after the meetings, before the meetings, and they decided what was good for Baltimore. And they decided how much of the taxpayer money should go to which developer, which project.

Greg Leroy:  BDC has an unusual history, right? Because when it was created under then Mayor Schaefer and chartered by the state, it was actually exempt from the state open records act that only got reversed several years ago, 2003.

Taya Graham:  And so when the city started to grant TIFs, a pattern emerged: The areas weren’t blighted. In fact, the majority of TIFs were approved for neighborhoods that were not redlined by the feds in the past — Including this massive project called Harbor East, where the city gave developers a 25-year tax exemption to build this massive Marriott hotel — Just $1 a year in taxes for a hotel worth roughly $130 million.

But even with all this money flowing to development, there was little attention paid to the behind the scenes deal making, a lack of interest that would change when the city tried to make its biggest deal yet.

Part 4: The worst deal ever?

Melinda Roeder (reporter):  It is a pricey piece of waterfront land.

Speaker 3:  The greatest development site on the East Coast.

Melinda Roeder (reporter):  And the developer has big plans to build a corporate office complex here.

Speaker 4:  Because all I want to see is jobs, jobs, jobs.

Speaker 3:  If the TIF doesn’t get approved, what we see here today is what we will see for a long period of time, unfortunately.

Carl Stokes:  I think this might be the worst deal ever. Ever.

Taya Graham:  In 2012, the city made a big bet. It offered its most generous tax break ever, a $106 million TIF to build out Harbor Point, an undeveloped piece of waterfront property. The plan was to build office space and luxury housing, including the Maryland headquarters of the energy giant Exelon. But there was a catch: The area was not blighted. In fact, it was situated in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city, which is why Councilman Carl Stokes had concerns.

Carl Stokes:  They obviously were a neighborhood that did not need any incentive in terms of economic boost. It was already a very fine neighborhood, doing very well. The long story short is that because this particular Harbor Point wouldn’t qualify otherwise, they encircled a very large area including the Perkins Homes housing projects, low income project, and said that they were a part of the same neighborhood. Obviously, the income of the residents there were probably all less than $10,000 per annum.

Taya Graham:  And nearby residents felt left out.

Perkins Homes Resident:  And these places are so, so bad. the rodents, the bed bugs, the smells.

Taya Graham:  But the conflict over Harbor Point not only raised questions about the city’s use of tax breaks for neighborhoods that seemed far from disadvantaged — It also exposed just how secret the process was for deciding who gets them.

Melinda Roeder (reporter):  When the Baltimore Development Corporation granted preliminary approval for the tax break, Fox45 filed a formal request for details, but the city told us they are withholding that information. And today, when the City Board of Finance took up the issue, they decided to close the meeting, shutting out all media and the public.

Board of Finance Member:  So please, I ask you all to please exit so we can conduct our business. Thank you.

Melinda Roeder (reporter):  Just before conducting the city’s business, this city board charged with making decisions about your tax dollars kicked us out.

Taya Graham:  Councilman Carl Stokes was chairman of the city’s taxation and finance committee. He recalls a pivotal meeting with developer Michael Beatty prior to the approval of the Harbor Point TIF. He wanted Beatty to offer more givebacks to the community. But it didn’t go well.

Carl Stokes:  He did. He basically said, I’m not doing anything for anybody. And so, I don’t want to say he’s cursed. I don’t remember, to be honest with you, but he was adamant that he wasn’t doing anything, and he wasn’t going to consider anything. But I think he said that for a couple of reasons. Once, I think, the deal was already cut, I think, as we say, the fix was in. And so, he knew that he had the votes in his pocket, so to speak. And so, the argument that if you’re going to use the poor neighbors and their neighborhood and their community to get free money, you should at least be willing to give something legitimately. And he said no.

Taya Graham:  We reached out multiple times to ask Beatty for comment. But for Stokes, the conversation with the developer wasn’t the only troubling aspect of the deal. He was also shocked at how little info the council was provided before they voted on the deal.

Carl Stokes:  We’re giving people already very, very rich who have the means to work the system, so to say. And that’s what’s happening. So they’re giving it to rich people, people already rich, not poor people. We’re not making anybody rich. We’re making them a lot richer.

Taya Graham:  But why was the process so secret? And what was the city hiding? These are questions that we soon discovered did not lead to simple answers.

Part 5: But…for?

Taya Graham:  After Harbor Point was approved, city leaders celebrated. But many questions lingered and remained unanswered, and led us to dig deeper. In part, we wanted to gain a better understanding of what Councilman Stokes found so troubling. How could a city mired in poverty justify such a huge tax incentive? And what we learned was that critical to all these deals was an intriguing process that provided some clues to answer that. It’s called a but-for analysis. It’s supposed to make the case that the project won’t work without the TIF or financial support from the city.

But not everyone agreed that the conclusions were sound. And when New York Times reporter Luke Broadwater dug into the numbers, he uncovered something intriguing.

Luke Broadwater:  The but-for analysis is a hypothetical projection that says we could not build this project if it were not for the public subsidy. It’s totally a theoretical enterprise. It is like all these projections and these reports. To a certain degree, they’re all made up.

Taya Graham:  The but-for analysis for Harbor Point not only concluded the TIF would make the project profitable, but actually would make it more profitable. In other words, even without the TIF, the developers would still make money. It was just a matter of how much.

Luke Broadwater:  And it basically says we’d make this much money with it and this much without it. And both times they’re making a ton of money.

Taya Graham:  Which raised questions: Who created this analysis, and how? We learned it was a firm called MuniCap, a consulting firm that specialized in public finance. But for Stokes, it was a business that was benefiting from both sides of the process.

Carl Stokes:  We had the fox in the hen house. The company who was going to be handling the bonds and making money off of the whole selling of the bonds, et cetera, was the person who did the numbers for the entire project and said, these numbers are great, these numbers work. These are the best numbers in the world.

Greg Leroy:  But-for, we think, should just go away and die in the woods because it is really covering up the whole issue of a developer’s black box, their decision-making process. When people criticize a politician for overspending on a deal, they can say, well, but the developer signed the but-for clause. We’re all good to go. It wouldn’t have happened otherwise. But nobody can verify that because the developer’s decision-making process is a black box. Nobody goes in there and checks the balance, reads the board of director’s minutes, looks at the consultant’s reports to verify the truthfulness of that claim. So it gets the politician off the hook.

Taya Graham:  Which raised another concern about the deal: Was the but-for analysis an accurate assessment of the risk and rewards, and who was involved in analyzing the details? To answer these questions, we went straight to the source.

Stephen Janis:  Hello, Mr. Rice. Hi, this is Stephen Janis from The Real News. How are you?

Taya Graham:  An official from MuniCap, the firm that both creates the but-for analysis and manages the bonds which finance the TIF.

Stephen Janis:  Do you consider a TIF to be a tax break, or some people say it’s just to fund infrastructure, some people say it’s a development tool. From your perspective, how would you define a TIF?

Keenan Rice:  Well, it actually varies by project, and it can vary by law. In Maryland, a TIF can only be used to fund public infrastructure. So as a matter of law in Maryland, that’s the only way it can be used.

Taya Graham:  And we asked him how could a firm which determined if a project was viable also make money from it when the deal was approved? How could your company remain objective? And wasn’t the arrangement a conflict of interest?

Stephen Janis:  Does the developer pay for the but-for or does the city? I wasn’t clear on that when I was talking to city officials. Who pays for you to do this?

Keenan Rice:  Well, the city hires us to do it, but they make the developers pay for all of the application costs.

Stephen Janis:  So does that present any conflicts to have both sides paying you in this situation, do you think?

Keenan Rice:  No, it’s not, because it’s not that both sides are paying us, it’s just the developer has to pay the cost of our work, but we work under contract to the city.

Stephen Janis:  Now, let me ask you again: You’re doing the but-for to justify it, the bonds, you’re going to make money off the bonds. Does that, in your mind, present a conflict?

Keenan Rice:  Well, how would you find anyone to do the work if they don’t get paid for the work?

Stephen Janis:  Well, no, I’m saying, but if the bond, you’re saying this is a good deal, and then the bonds get issued, and then you make money on the bonds. I’m just asking you if that, in your mind —

Keenan Rice:  Yeah, to be clear, we make no decisions in the process. We’re not a decision maker. What we do is we prepare an evaluation, and the evaluations we prepare, we always use objective data.

Taya Graham:  And his answer was, like many we encountered reporting on TIFs and other tax breaks: It’s complicated. But is it really? Because as you look around the city, the consequences of these complicated decisions are simple to see. A veritable city within a city, one that is shiny and new and one that is forgotten and neglected. Not a tale of two cities as we had imagined when we started this investigation, but actually two communities born out of a single idea: one that is taxed and one that is not, an idea that city leaders and developers said was the only path to growth. Which left us a single question we had yet to answer: Is that true?

But the only way to truly answer that question was to wait; Wait to see if the promises made by city leaders would come true, that TIFs and PILOTs would attract more residents, create jobs, and save a city that cannot grow. So we did. We waited. And as we did, we kept digging and watching and following the story. And when we decided it was time to assess the results, we were fortunate to be joined by legendary investigative reporter Jayne Miller.

Jayne Miller:  There’s just not a single, easy, accessible place to look at all of them in real time and say, ah, there’s the number.

Taya Graham:  First we delved into the data, but we realized it was not just difficult to find, but, in some cases, did not exist at all.

Jayne Miller:  Just an example, under state law, the city is supposed to file reports every year reporting the economic benefit of about six or seven projects. All of them have PILOT agreements, Payment in Lieu of Tax agreements. What we discovered in the investigation was, since 2018, no reports have been filed. We started asking around about it, suddenly there they are for ’19, ’20, and ’21. But it’s just a good example of the lack of transparency around this process.

And so it’s frustrating that you can’t see, A, the total value. And what you want to be able to know is whether these incentives and subsidies and tax breaks are doing what they’re supposed to do, and that is to spur development, spur economic development, create jobs, et cetera.

Taya Graham:  But we were also intrigued by a book recommended by a friend and what it said about the promise that cutting taxes for some would pay off for all. It’s called Baltimore Unbound. Written by a city planner named David Rusk in 1990, its thesis was stunning: Baltimore, he argued, was inexorably designed to fail.

The book details how the fateful decision to set Baltimore’s boundaries in 1948 made it impossible for the city to grow. Isolated economically and responsible for the vast majority of the region’s poor, the city would be forced to raise taxes and inevitably shrink. But what struck me the most was the conclusion: never had a city he called “inelastic”, like Baltimore, grown or got wealthier. No city had overcome the artificial boundaries imposed upon it.

And from that simple truism, it dawned on all of us that the tax system we had been trying to unravel was a product of this same design. That is, TIFs and PILOTs and other tax breaks weren’t a byproduct of some communal failure. Instead, it was the inevitable result of the decision to isolate us.

But to understand this idea fully, we needed more than Rusk’s words and ideas. We needed to see how this concept affected the city itself, to view the reality that could not be obscured by hiding facts and figures, burying reports, or not even filing them at all. So we decided to drive and find out.

Jayne Miller:  So we’re going to take a visit to Port Covington, which is the new development going on on the south end of downtown. Now, this is phase one, but it did sit empty for a while, clearly, and I think there was a lot of questions like, well, are they going to do this?

Taya Graham:  [Inaudible] Tell me a little bit about the Marriott Hotel.

Jayne Miller:  This is the original deal in Baltimore, the original tax deal.

Taya Graham:  Hello, my name is Taya Graham, and welcome to The Inequality Watch.

Protesters:  [Inaudible] Let’s go. Hey, hey, hey. [Inaudible].

Taya Graham:  The Marriott Harbor East, situated on Baltimore’s swanky waterfront. As we pointed out in the show, that hotel was the recipient of a generous tax break.

Jayne Miller:  This is kind of what opened the gate to the idea of really lucrative incentives for a developer. This has a Payment in Lieu of Tax agreement, PILOT. It’s still in effect all these years later, went into effect in 2002, it’s still in effect. It’s more than $50 million that has been abated over that period of time — And it’s sold.

We are going right around the corner from the hotel, which was the first thing built here. And now this is what was known as the Legg Mason building. So this was the building that was built for the Legg Mason investment firm, and it has sold — And sold for the highest square footage amount ever in the City of Baltimore. There is a profit sharing agreement on this property with the City of Baltimore. And the question is, did the city get its share or take its share of the profit sharing agreement?

One thing we know is that the developer, original developer, Carbon Point, has sold now for, apparently, a profit. Looks like a nice profit.

This is like the heart of downtown. Charles Street, Baltimore Street, major transit stop, hotels around. And this is this huge hole in the heart of downtown. And it’s been like this for, what…?

Taya Graham:  Since 2015?

Jayne Miller:  2015, right.

Stephen Janis:  Sometimes you gotta go outside the city to get context, right?

Jayne Miller:  Absolutely. Especially a city like Baltimore, which is surrounded by relatively thriving suburbs, and suburbs where developers flock to.

his is a relatively new community in Howard County between Columbia and Ellicott City. And in order to build these houses, they’d build new streets, run water, sewer, all that infrastructure. And what happens here in Howard County is the developers who build residential housing are subject to an impact fee.

Taya Graham:  So why do you think areas like Howard County, Ellicott City are able to ask for impact fees from developers, but Baltimore City instead has to give away a tip?

Jayne Miller:  Because developers will pay them.

Stephen J.K. Walters:  So I’ve been studying cities for 40 years, never have I found a city that had a high property tax rate and was surrounded by a low property tax rate — In our case in Baltimore, roughly half the rate that we pay — I’ve never found a case where that situation created a viable, thriving, flourishing city.

Sandy Coles:  How you doing? You a registered voter here in Baltimore City?

Louis Miserendino:  The goal of Renew Baltimore is to bring about amendments to the Baltimore City Charter that would cut property taxes for all Baltimoreans over a six-year period.

Sandy Coles:  How y’all doing? Are you registered voters here in Baltimore City?

Speaker 5:  Yes, and I have already signed the petition.

Sandy Coles:  Yay! Oh, wow. Wonderful. Alright, I love you.

Speaker 5:  Thank you.

Stephen J.K. Walters:  Almost invariably, those cities suffer a crisis of disinvestment. The capital flows, the capital investments are invariably from the core area to the surrounding, more favorable tax climate.

Louis Miserendino:  I think one of the main challenges we face is that there’s a certain segment of Baltimoreans who worry that our plan will lead to cuts to the city budget and cuts to city services. But we’re optimistic that we have a responsible plan, and we’re confident that we know of many ways that the city can deal with any potential short run difficulties, should they arise.

Sandy Coles:  It’s compassion. That’s the word, knowing you’ve got to see and feel and you’re able to give them what they need.

Stephen J.K. Walters:  It’s terribly unfair. That’s the key thing that I’m just astounded that, in a city that stresses equity, that we think that doing this, that giving a tremendous subsidy to the people who are savvy enough to negotiate the quarters of power and get this done, and then the small homeowner or the small business person gets nothing because they can’t lobby.

Sandy Coles:  How y’all doing? Good, good, good. Are y’all registered voters here in Baltimore City? I know y’all want to sign a petition to cut property taxes. Here you go. Right here. OK.

Stephen J.K. Walters:  The status quo does work, to some extent, for some connected individuals. If you’re in City Hall and you are the broker of all these special deals, it’s, to some extent, an invitation to corruption. If people have to come to you to make their project economically work, well, I have a strong incentive to maintain that system, that status quo. That’s a structural factor that works for me, just doesn’t work for the city. And that’s why it’s necessary to go around the power structure and maybe take it directly to the people in the form of a referendum.

Sandy Coles:  We picked up the mobile unit this morning, so we’re going to be canvassing neighborhoods over the next few days, hoping to gain more signatures for the petition to bring this issue to the ballot this November.

Part 6: The price we pay

Melody Simmons:  So about four years ago, it came to our knowledge that there was a plan in the works to redevelop Perkins Homes. Perkins Homes, as you know, is an aged public housing development that is in a location, a golden location just north of Harbor East. So here comes this plan to tear it down, redevelop it, we’re going to turn it into a whole new area in the city — Of course, a TIF had to come with that.

The only way the numbers would work is if they upped the number of luxury apartments, market rate apartments in the Perkins Homes former public housing footprint, and reduced the number of reduced rate units. The Perkins Somerset TIF alone is a 36-year deal, and of that $105 million, $77 million is going to go to debt service repayment. $28 million of the $77 million is going to bond administration, legal fees, and other financial costs. So a lot of that money is going to the lawyers and the lobbyists.

Former Perkins Homes Resident 1:  We’ve been doing this gathering since 1985. Every summer we have a gathering down here, and the people who lived here in the ’60s, ’70s, they’ll come back to see each other because sometimes they haven’t seen each other for 30 years. Since Perkins is going down, and they tearing it down, we decided to have another gathering.

Former Perkins Homes Resident 2:  This was home. It was home. It was a lot crazier stuff going on. But this was home. I loved it. Even after we moved from down here, I still came to hang out.

Tom Hyatt:  I moved to Perkins Homes when I was nine. It was in the spring of 1955. But this whole street was lined with townhouses and businesses, and none of it was rich, not at all. But it was just an amazing kind of place. But you can see in the city how the needs that came about became so drastic and so great, it would be almost impossible to keep up with all of that, I think.

Former Perkins Homes Resident 3:  We got here in 1966. I came here when I was one year old. Whatever parent, you left your parents in Mason Court, the parents in Dallas Court will become your parents. If you get your [inaudible] Court, they will become your parents.

Former Perkins Homes Resident 4:  It is home, babe. It’s going to always be home no matter what they do to it, tear it down, rebuild it back up, it’s home.

Taya Graham:  [What do] you think of what the developers are doing here?

Tom Hyatt:  It is very complex. I think that new development takes place, but it needs to incorporate the people who lived here before.

Odette Ramos:  Hi, my name is Odette Ramos. I’m the councilwoman from the 14th District. In April, I introduced legislation to create a study and report so we can really drill down on the impact of TIFs, Tax Increment Financing, in the city, and think about a little bit differently how they can be applied to see if we can utilize money from TIFs for addressing our vacant property issue.

It’s not on a website anywhere. You can do the MPIA requests, but it’s very hard to get to really all of the data, and especially if you’re asking about impact, it’s very hard to get. The pitch that people are given when a TIF is introduced is, well, this is going to have all this economic activity — But what does that mean?

This legislation requires that the Department of Finance produce a report about the impact of our Tax Increment Financing projects and policies so far, examination of some of the reasons why some have failed. I had one in my district that failed.

Councilwoman:  I question studies because I just, through projects within my district, when we get studies, it seems to continue to delay and delay the project.

Councilman 1:  So, I see the TIFs already working. We should not be doing this, but right now the TIF works.

Councilman 2:  OK. Is there a motion to move the bill favorably as amended? Second by Dorsey. Costello’s a no. Burnett? Dorsey? McCray? This bill fails with four votes in opposition, three in support. OK, next bill.

Odette Ramos:  Did you just see that?

Stephen Janis:  Yeah, yeah.

Odette Ramos:  Did you see that?

Stephen Janis:  How often does it happen when a council votes against a colleague who just has something and wants a report on something?

Odette Ramos:  I don’t know. I’ve only been here for two years. I’m sure it’s happened before.

Stephen Janis:  You seemed upset though.

Odette Ramos:  Oh, I’m pissed. I’m really upset. I mean, I had no inclination that there was going to be any problems.

Jayne Miller:  I mean, this is like needles in a haystack in terms of really trying to quantify what’s the number? How much money is not going to the general fund? how much money is not being used for city services, for resources for people, et cetera, et cetera because of these tax breaks and these tax subsidies and incentives, whatever you want to call them.

Greg Leroy:  This tax break-industrial complex we have in America really is the way neoliberalism plays out in economic development for states and cities. That is, you use public dollars to reduce private risk. In some cases, in TIF, you actually guarantee a certain level of profitability for a developer by guaranteeing them future revenues to support a project. But it’s regressive taxation. In fact, we’ve got scholars now using our data to prove that, that places that use subsidies more heavily have greater degrees of inequality.

Speaker 6:  Everyone who’s been responsible for Baltimore City’s economic development has faced the uphill challenge of how do you bring businesses and other development to a city that has twice the surrounding jurisdictions’ tax rate, a less effective school system, is best known nationally and internationally for its homicide rate?

Stephen Janis:  As a reporter who’s covered TIFs for the better part of 10 years, the thing that disturbs me the most is telling the stories, the fiction that surrounds it, the fiction of things like infrastructure. One day I was just sitting at my computer looking at the numbers, and there’s no mention of infrastructure when they estimate how much a TIF is going to be worth. It has all to do with some speculative future value.

Jayne Miller:  Since 2010, Baltimore’s population has dropped by about 35,000 people. I think we’re losing — I figured it out, it’s 294 people a month. And this has been going on for 40 years. Baltimore has yet to stop its population loss.

Stephen Janis:  And this is a generational policy. These are generational decisions. The people who are going to be impacted is the future generation, not just us. And they have no say.

Greg Leroy:  Baltimore is hardly alone in this problem. This is a national issue, affecting many big cities and counties and all the states. All the control over information over the public sector so that public officials, even if they wanted to effectively represent public interests in economic development bargaining, can’t.

Jayne Miller:  It’s amazing the number of different credits, incentives that are offered in this city to try to convince people to live here, to build here, et cetera. And yet, with all of that, in the last 10 years, we’ve lost 35,000 people.

Stephen Janis:  A lot of the media here likes to report on crime and the constant drumbeat of Baltimore being a failed city of crime and dysfunction. But isn’t it a bigger crime to take hundreds of millions of dollars out of our general fund that could go for police and schools? Whatever underlies community, it has to begin with fairness. And how fair is it to ask a grandmother on Pennsylvania Avenue to pay more taxes than a rich developer from Towson? How is that fair?

We have made the inescapable conclusion that the future belongs to the few, not to us, not to the residents, not to the people who pay the taxes, but the few who have the power to avoid them.

Part 7: We are worthy

Taya Graham:  But just like a tax break is an idea, so too is a city. Meaning, what I learned telling this story is that Baltimore is not just a result of geography or boundaries or even buildings — It is an idea shaped by those who live in it. A sense of place, a community where people dream and struggle, thrive and survive in abeyance of a world that wants us to fail. And I could feel documenting this story something intangible, even hopeful, a desire within us to beat the odds despite the obstacles imposed on us, to succeed on our own terms because this is our home and we will decide how to shape it. The unassailable power of a community that will not be denied.

@KLoveThePoet:  You are worthy. You are worthy. Even with all your woes, even after all the nos, even after slacking on your goals and letting yourself go. If he decides to stay or she decides to go, whether standing right next to them or feeling completely all alone. I’m talking with or without, you’re worthy.

Speaker 7:  Our children are not going to have better. They’re going to have no homes.

Speaker 8:  If it’s really important to know where the money’s coming from and what’s the impact of TIF and where this group is a little bit different. I’ve been in fair housing or working in this work for 22 years. I’ve never seen it being led mainly by women.

David Rusk:  Hey, hello. How are you doing? How are you? 

I pulled this book out just to show you the greatest book cover ever. 

Taya Graham:  Oh, that’s an amazing cover [Janis laughs]. 

David Rusk: I was a member, a voting member of the 13-member task force on inclusionary housing appointed by the city council. And we came up with a study and a set of proposals and a draft legislation that was vastly different from the facade that was adopted, ultimately, by the city council, it was an inclusionary housing bill in name only, not an actual impact. So what you’re doing is giving tax breaks to developers, who are, for the most part, increasing the level of economic segregation in Baltimore City.

[CREDITS ROLL]

The murder of Baltimore entrepreneur Pava LaPere rocked the city. But the suspect eventually arrested for the brutal murder was not only well-known by police, but had actually committed another violent crime just a week before her murder. The Land of the Unsolved team Jayne MiIller, Taya Graham, and Stephen Janis break down the series of events that lead to her death, and investigate how Baltimore’s questionable approach of not working with the community to solve crime could have contributed to LaPere’s death.

Studio Production: David Hebden
Post-Production: Stephen Janis

Transcript

Stephen Janis:  Anyone who watches crime dramas could reasonably conclude that when someone is murdered, barring bizarre and extenuating circumstances, the case is solved. That is, through high-tech forensics, moral resolve, or simply the near-mythic competence of American law enforcement, killers are ultimately sent to jail.

But as an investigative reporter who has worked in one of the most violent cities in the country for nearly 15 years, I can tell you this is not true.

Taya Graham:  That is the point of this podcast, because unsolved killings represent more than just statistics. It’s a psychic toll of stories untold that infects an entire community, the final violent moments of a victim’s life that remain shrouded in mystery.

Stephen Janis:  I’m Stephen Janis.

Taya Graham:  I’m Taya Graham.

Stephen Janis:  We are investigative reporters who live in Baltimore City.

Taya Graham:  Welcome to The Land of the Unsolved.

Hello, my name is Taya Graham, and welcome back to The Land of the Unsolved, the podcast that explores both the evidence and politics of unsolved murders in Baltimore and beyond. Today, we’re going to be talking about two cases: one that is at least partially solved and one that is not. But we’re going to do more than just recount the evidence. We’ll be looking at the past case through the prism of what has just happened in the present, breaking down how police investigated a recent murder and what their handling of it says about the growing tally of unsolved murders across the city.

To do so, we will be reporting on breaking news about a horrifying act of violence that has rocked the city: The murder of 26-year-old Baltimore tech CEO Pava LaPere.

Reporter 1:  Our top story tonight is out of Baltimore. We’re hearing from the family of a Baltimore tech CEO fatally attacked at her apartment complex.

Reporter 2:  Police confirmed to NBC News the 26-year-old, who served as CEO of EcoMap Technologies and was featured on this year’s Forbes “30 Under 30” list, was found dead in her Baltimore apartment on Sept. 25 with signs of blunt force trauma.

Taya Graham:  LaPere’s body was found in her apartment building last week after friends reported her missing. Police said she died of blunt force trauma. Shortly after her body was found, police made a stunning announcement. There was, indeed, a suspect.

Police Officer:  We’re here to announce that we have a warrant issued for the killing of Ms. LaPere. Today, in consultation with the state’s attorney’s office, 32-year-old Jason Dean Billingsley of Baltimore was wanted for first-degree murder, assault, reckless endangerment, as well as additional charges. Our special investigation section and homicide unit have been working aggressively to identify the suspect responsible for this tragic incident.

Taya Graham:  However, the history of the suspect, what the police knew about him before the murder, and how they chose to handle that information, is not just shocking, but worth examining in detail. To do so, I will be joined by my Land of the Unsolved colleagues, legendary investigative reporter Jayne Miller, and my reporting partner, Stephen Janis. We will analyze how police handled LaPere’s murder, and discuss some key decisions they made that are raising serious questions about what more could have been done to prevent it.

Ultimately, we will consider how all this evidence bears on a case from the past that has haunted all of us for some time. In fact, the way police handled LaPere’s murder is so revealing, it speaks volumes about why this podcast exists at all. That is why we’ll be breaking it down in all of its appalling details. All of that coming up on The Land of the Unsolved.

Hey, this is Taya Graham from The Land of the Unsolved. If you enjoy our podcast and would like us to investigate even more cases, consider supporting our work by either subscribing on our anchor page, or you can also buy one of the books Stephen and I wrote that are available on Amazon and a variety of other websites: Why Do We Kill?: The Pathology of Murder in Baltimore, written with former homicide detective Kelvin Sewell; and You Can’t Stop Murder: Truths About Policing in Baltimore and Beyond, also in collaboration with a former detective and guest on our show, Stephen Tabeling.

Or if you’re in the mood for a fictive take on how Baltimore’s struggle with violence and aggressive policing has affected the psyche of the city, I recommend you pick up This Dream Called Death, a book Stephen wrote while he was covering the city’s failed attempt to implement zero-tolerance policing, and how he reveals the truly corrosive power of that policy by casting it into an alternate reality where the mind and our dreams become the new frontier for government surveillance.

Welcome back to The Land of the Unsolved. As always, I’m joined by my colleagues, legendary reporter Jayne Miller, and my colleague Stephen Janis. Thank you both for joining me today.

Stephen Janis:  Thanks for having us here, Taya.

Taya Graham:  Just two weeks ago, the residents of Baltimore woke up to a tragedy: news that yet another life had just been snuffed out. Authorities revealed that a local tech entrepreneur named Pava LaPere had been found dead in her Mount Vernon apartment. Police found her after friends called to report her missing over the weekend. Authorities said she had died of blunt force trauma.

Shortly after police announced her death, the city began to mourn. LaPere was an up-and-coming tech CEO. A former Johns Hopkins graduate who had founded an ecomapping firm that had gained her national recognition. Recently, she had secured $8 million in venture capital financing for her company. Forbes magazine had listed her as part of their 30 people under 30 to watch. She was active in the local tech community. Put simply, her future was not just bright, it was blazing. Stephen, what did the people who knew her say about her, and how did the city react?

Stephen Janis:  Well, Baltimore has a very tight-knit tech, entrepreneurial, VC capital community, and everyone who I listened to or what I read, or what they were saying, was basically that she was like this bright light that brought this community together. She had literally founded this company in her Hopkins dorm room, and had decided to stay in Baltimore. This was a person who had options to go pretty much anywhere, and decided to stay in Baltimore and build this firm.

She was a person that was able to move between different companies and bring people together on a larger purpose of not just tech, but tech in Baltimore. And had become, I guess, the public face of tech entrepreneurs in Baltimore, and someone who was just critical to that community. There was a massive amount of grieving in terms of her loss, and certainly people said it would leave a hole in that community because people know each other. It’s tight-knit, and it’s not large like Silicon Valley. Everyone knows everyone, and I think people were feeling her loss in that way.

Jayne Miller:  It’s also what gave this case national attention. This was on the evening news a couple of different times because of her stature in the tech world, et cetera. It’s also the fact that she decided to remain in Baltimore was discussed at length, because it’s not Seattle, it’s not the West Coast, it’s not New York, but she really decided to stay here and to grow this business. She was very committed, also, to equity issues, which the whole tech industry is short on diversity. She was very committed to that as well.

Stephen Janis:  Yeah. That was the whole basis of her company, the ecomapping maps ecosystem so people can understand where resources and assets are in a community. Yes, and I think critical to that was her commitment to Baltimore, which people said was fierce. That added a note of extra sadness to this case.

Taya Graham:  Almost immediately, police had a suspect. A serial rapist who was well-known to law enforcement: Jason Billingsley. They released a mugshot and used social media to let the public know that this man was armed and dangerous.

But Jayne, they knew quite a bit about this man even before they announced his identity, because he was tied to a previous case. Can you tell us a little bit about it?

Jayne Miller:  On Sept. 19, three days before the murder of Pava LaPere, there was an incident in a West Baltimore apartment, in which Billingsley was accused of kicking down the door, tying up the man and woman, a young couple that lived in the apartment. He allegedly raped the woman, cut her, cut her throat. Then before leaving, doused them with some kind of accelerant and set them on fire.

Both were hospitalized. Within hours, police developed him as a suspect. But they chose not to release his name or picture to the public at that time. This became a huge issue and lots of questions later when, in fact, what we learned, obviously, is that three days later, he now is accused of killing Pava LaPere in her apartment building in Mount Vernon.

Taya Graham:  That’s right. Billingsley had a long history of sexual assault, rape, and violence. He had previously been sentenced to 30 years in prison in 2015 for forcing a woman at gunpoint to perform oral sex on him. That victim he had also strangled, though she fortunately survived. But the sentence included a catch: All but 16 years were suspended, which meant Billingsley was released in fall of 2022 for good behavior. Jayne, can you walk us through how that release occurred?

Jayne Miller:  This is an interesting case that brings up this issue of suspended sentences, number one, and also the issue of what are called diminution credits, good time credits. This is not new, neither of these issues is new. They come up many times when we have cases like this of violent, repeat offenders that allegedly offend again. Then everybody looks back and sees this history and it’s like, well, why wasn’t he in jail? Why was he out?

This 2015 sentence actually relates to a 2013 incident in which he sexually assaulted a woman, and it gets time for trial. It had gone to court a number of times, postponed, postponed, et cetera. Now we get to February of 2015 and he enters a guilty plea to first-degree sex assault, which is a very serious crime. One of the newspapers in town actually went and pulled the transcript of the hearing and shed light on exactly what had happened.

What happened was that they reached this agreement for a 30-year sentence, but suspend all but 14 years. The prosecutor said that the woman, the victim, was very satisfied with that deal, that she had been through enough.

Let’s just stop right there. I’ve done many stories in my career about the way sex assault cases are handled in the courts. The way they have to be handled sometimes. It is a terrible crime. It’s a frightening crime. The victim goes through the crime, and then has to go through the trial. Sometimes going through a trial in testimony can be brutal, obviously. And this case raises that specter, is that she didn’t want to testify, clearly. The judge didn’t like the deal, but said because of the trauma to the victim, he accepted it.

He ended up with a 14-year sentence backdated to start date in 2013, because that was the date he had been locked up originally for the incident. Then a combination of good time credits and what’s called mandatory release. So most offenders in Maryland serve about 66% of their sentence. When you add some good time credits in there, he ended up serving about nine years.

When he came out in October of 2022, he was under the supervision of probation, and he was on the sex offender registry as a Level 3 offender. That means that he has even more supervision and has to check in more, et cetera, et cetera. Apparently, no violations until the time of these most recent crimes.

Taya Graham:  Just out of curiosity, I noticed that Billingsley had several previous convictions. I think in 2009, there was a first-degree assault. In 2011, a second-degree assault. 2015, a first-degree sex offense. Are you surprised by how he was able to get such a minimized sentence considering his record?

Stephen Janis:  Well, I don’t think the sentence was really that unusual based on what Jayne was saying. I looked at the crime, the assault case was he stole $10 from someone who he physically assaulted on the street. They were petty crimes in the parlance of Baltimore until the first-degree sex offense.

The first-degree sex offense was a woman had been kicked out of her apartment by her boyfriend. She had wandered down the street and sat next to an abandoned house. He said, do you want to spend? She was approached by Billingsley, who convinced her to crawl in through the window of another house, and she could stay there for the night. Then he said, I have a gun, you have to perform oral sex on me. And strangled her to the point that she almost died.

But up until that point, the stuff he was doing I looked at was pretty petty. In the scope of a city that has 300 murders a year, I’m not surprised. But I don’t think in the parlance of sentencing that I’ve watched that nine years is really a short sentence. Jayne, I don’t know how you feel?

Jayne Miller:  No, I agree. In covering these kinds of cases, first of all, suspended sentences are very common. Why do we have suspended sentences? It’s like the carrot and the stick. You have an offender and, okay, we’re going to give you a 30-year sentence, but we’re only going to make you serve 14 unless you screw up. Now you screw up, you’re going to come back, and I’m going to put you in jail for the rest of it. It’s like that whole, it’s an incentive for people to try to reform themselves.

Taya Graham:  Right.

Stephen Janis:  Just like good behavior, that’s supposed to incentivize good behavior in prison, to give you some reason to behave well and try to be productive.

Jayne Miller:  Yeah, that’s exactly right. I agree with Stephen, actually. If you look at the whole specter of sentences in cases that might involve these particular circumstances and this particular offender. Plus, you have the element that the victim may not want to testify, that it’s not a short sentence. It looks like, well, holy cow, he only served half the sentence, or he was only sentenced to half, but that’s exactly how suspended sentences work. I think the state’s attorney said it was a tad under the guideline, but you have to look at the circumstances. As he said, you have to look at the circumstances of the case.

Taya Graham:  Shortly after his arrest, police held a press conference, and Stephen, something really stood out. Police revealed again that they made a fateful decision. Let’s listen, and then we can talk about it after the break.

[AUDIO CLIP BEGINS]

Police Officer:  We delayed that press conference because we were within about 88 meters of capturing the suspect, but he was able to elude our capture. We knew early on that the risk was when we went public that the suspect would go underground, which is exactly what he did. We are still processing all evidence to determine exactly what occurred. We do know that there was no forced entry into the apartment building, as this was a secured building.

[AUDIO CLIP ENDS]

Stephen Janis:  Well, Jayne and I were watching the press conference, and Jayne can weigh in after I do, but the Commissioner Worley, who was just –

Jayne Miller:  Stephen was actually texting, are you watching this?

Stephen Janis:  He makes this admission because the question came up, you had him as a suspect. He had already been charged. He had been charged with this crime allegedly before he murdered LaPere – Allegedly, excuse me, sorry. The question came up in the press conference, why didn’t you tell the public, why didn’t you release this information? Worley makes this offhand comment how it was, “a targeted attack.”

Jayne Miller:  Not random.

Stephen Janis:  Not random, that was one thing. Then he said, I don’t want to speak badly about the victims. Now, Jayne, I don’t know how you interpret that, but I was stunned when he said that. Because he was saying one thing is that we just didn’t want to release this information because we didn’t feel that this guy was a danger to the public, is what they were saying in some ways. That he had just picked out this couple but wasn’t going to do this again. Then he made this victim-blaming statement that also, I think, created a firestorm of criticism.

Jayne Miller:  Absolutely. Lots of criticism of this statement about victim blaming in a case that involved absolutely horrific allegations.

Stephen Janis:  Horrific.

Jayne Miller:  Torturous allegations.

Stephen Janis:  Yeah.

Jayne Miller:  This idea that it wasn’t random. He knew the victims. He was the maintenance man in the apartment building. He may have had knowledge of these folks who lived in the building. I would not call that as… And this idea of, I don’t know, oh, it’s not random. Then we don’t have to worry people. When did that become some kind of standard for notifying the public? I’ve not been able to understand the thinking in this case, considering the Baltimore Police Department, as many police departments do, they put out pictures and video all the time.

Stephen Janis:  All the time.

Jayne Miller:  About different incidents, whether or not they’re random, whether or not people know one another, et cetera. We just had this shooting on the campus of Morgan State University, and they put some video out of some folks. It’s a very common practice.

For whatever reason, in this case on Sept. 19, when you have this really nasty incident that was covered in the media. No, it got coverage that day. I do know that from talking to the reporters that covered it that the police department was very tight-lipped, wouldn’t give a lot of information the day it happened, on Sept. 19.

We haven’t talked about the first news conference, when they identified Billingsley as the suspect in the LaPere murder. That was the first news conference.

Stephen Janis:  Right. In fact, that was the one where I think the comment was made that once they identified him that he was a suspect in the other case. I think that’s when Worley actually made the disparaging comment.

Jayne Miller:  Well, the questions, though, that got raised, the commissioner was asked at that news conference, when Billingsley was identified as the LaPere suspect, is he a suspect in the other crimes? I think they said yes, but there was no information. They did not say which incident, what happened, et cetera, et cetera.

When they had a warrant for him, it was like, why are you keeping this from the public? Why is this such a secret? Then obviously, and it really emerges that it was, okay, it was that incident. That it had already gotten media coverage, and then just this flood of questions about the failure to warn the public.

Stephen Janis:  I think what we see here is how Baltimore manages crime and what sometimes the misplaced priorities of the police department is. Because people I’ve talked to have said this is not uncommon for the police department to try to, if it can… I’m not going to use the word publicize, but make this information widely available, because the fear is it will scare people, and they won’t want to come downtown, and they won’t want to go to the Inner Harbor.

I’ve seen this over and over again. Years ago, I covered a serial killer case in Baltimore, and police were just adamant that they didn’t want to connect cases or call someone a serial killer. It was much more important, not the safety of the individuals, but much more important to make sure that there wasn’t a serial killer in Baltimore. That is why, I think, this got so much attention, because it illustrated the real risk of this kind of idea. Because as Jayne pointed out, they had this guy’s identity. They could have released it to the public and made people aware, and they did not. I think that’s where the criticism has come from.

Jayne Miller:  There’s this whole idea, too, of the use of the word “targeted.” This is like a code word. Police departments do this everywhere, oh no, it was a targeted killing. In other words, you don’t need to worry about this. It was a targeted killing. Okay. Well, I don’t know what was targeted about that Sept. 19 incident except that maybe an opportunity presented itself. What could have been targeted about the LaPere murder? It just seems that it is an excuse in some ways to, first of all, we don’t have to warn you about it. You shouldn’t be alarmed. That’s really what’s code for, you shouldn’t be alarmed. When in fact, you had every reason to be alarmed about Jason Billingsley, it now appears, after that incident in West Baltimore.

Taya Graham:  Just to get a quick update, because this was such a vicious crime. It was a man, a woman, and a five-year-old child that were injured.

Jayne Miller:  There was a child present, right.

Taya Graham:  There was a child present. Do we have any update on the status, the health of the people involved?

Stephen Janis:  Well, they survived. We know that. But no, they have not released information. We do know that Billingsley forced the door open. Obviously, if this was targeted, the people didn’t want to let him in the apartment. So that he had forced his way in and then duct taped both the man and the woman, and then raped the woman. Then, as Jayne said, poured an accelerant on them. But we do know they survived. One was still in the hospital and one had been released at the time of the last press conference, but they haven’t given any update on what kind of injuries that I have heard in terms of long-term prognosis, no.

Jayne Miller:  Billingsley is also accused of going to an acquaintance’s house in Baltimore County and stealing a gun. This was three days after they believe LaPere was killed. Now he’s also accused of that. I think that’s where the idea of being armed came from, is that they had known that he had gone to that house in Baltimore County and stolen a gun.

Taya Graham:  This decision by police would seem even more misguided when they released the charging documents that outlined, for the first time, the evidence against Jason Billingsley.

Jayne, what did the documents say, and what did we learn about the last moments of LaPere’s life?

Jayne Miller:  It’s interesting. The charging documents indicate that there is video of the lobby of the apartment building that shows on that Friday night – This would’ve been the 22nd of September – That you see her come in and sit down on the sofa in the lobby of the apartment building, which obviously indicates that she was waiting for somebody. Waiting for somebody she knew was coming behind her. Then the video shows this man that police have identified as Billingsley, and being charged that it is Billingsley, comes through the door. She lets him in, they talk for a moment in the lobby, and then they get on the elevator together.

About 20 minutes later – Although I got to tell you in that charging document, the times are all screwed up and hand-scratched out and corrected – But it appears that it was about 20 minutes later that this man, Billingsley, can be seen scrambling to get out of the building, wiping his hands on his shorts.

This raises a number of questions. First of all, was there a relationship of some kind, either some knowledge, friendship, et cetera, between the two? Did they have some prior knowledge? But to me, this all the more underlines the importance of why that picture should have been in the public. Because if that picture’s in the public and on social media, et cetera, maybe she doesn’t go to the door.

Taya Graham:  Stephen, I had read that one media organization suggested that he was standing at the door as if he was signaling that he didn’t have his key. That he needed help getting into the lobby. What did you think of that assertion?

Stephen Janis:  Okay. Well, that’s, to me, purely speculative because the charging documents, at this point, are all we have. But of course, that’s not unusual when you live in an apartment building and you don’t know everyone who lives there, and someone seems like they want to get in or they have somewhere to go, or they know somebody. For all we know, she could come to the door and he said, I know so-and-so and I just need to get up to their apartment, and the next thing you know, he’s attacking her. That’s totally possible.

Jayne, you had said you’d read some posts on Instagram that women in that neighborhood were familiar with him?

Jayne Miller:  [Inaudible]. Well, first of all, in the charging document related to the gun allegation, his address is a block away from LaPere’s apartment. If that’s his most recent address, then that would put him in the neighborhood. I don’t know. But there were posts on social media, once he was identified as the murder suspect, that there were women that commented that they had seen him hanging around some of the apartments. That he had approached some of the women, had given them stories that his mother had died, et cetera, which was not true. He was apparently known in the community.

And that is very possible that she had met him at some point too and struck up a conversation with him or whatever. I don’t know that we’ll ever know what really transpired and what brought him to that apartment, why she let him in, et cetera, and got on the elevator with him. She was found on a roof of the apartment building. There was a brick that apparently had been used in the crime, and she suffered from strangulation and blunt force trauma.

Taya Graham:  All of this, of course, raises the primary question at the heart of this podcast. How do the politics of crime affect and influence the occurrence of crime?

In this case, that question can be best answered by pointing to the defense Baltimore Police Commissioner Worley used to defend his decision not to release the information about Billingsley.

Stephen, he said he did not release the information about the arson and the rape because police believed it was targeted. What does that mean?

Stephen Janis:  Well, as we discussed before, and Jayne can weigh in on this too, I remember there was a famous quote by a former health commissioner, Peter Beilenson, it was very controversial, where he said, Baltimore is safe as long as you’re not a drug dealer, because all these crimes are “targeted.” If you’re just a random white person – And I got to use the word, it’s got to be described as that a white person living in the L –

Taya Graham:  Or a good, law-abiding citizen.

Stephen Janis:  Or a good, law-abiding citizen, all this chaos and mayhem is never going to touch you. I think underlying that idea of “targeted” is that idea of what Baltimore’s always tried to do. And that is corral crime into low-income neighborhoods and make it seem like something that won’t touch the Inner Harbor, or won’t touch Homeland, or won’t touch even Mount Vernon. That we don’t have to feel responsible or in any way think about it. We can just go on with our business and be Baltimore City, and all the ideas about crime and how crime hampers the city. It’s just unfounded because it only happens among poor African American people in poor African American neighborhoods.

I think this case exemplifies how dangerous that idea is. Not only from a social justice perspective, which is really, to me, incomprehensible, because you’re literally saying that the lives of the people in West Baltimore are not worth what the lives of the people are in Mount Vernon. But from just a practical sense, that you are literally making decisions about withholding information from the public based primarily on the fact that you don’t want to scare white people. Am I wrong on this, Jayne?

Jayne Miller:  Well, no, you’re making a decision based on your perception of that crime, whatever that is. God knows there are biased perceptions all over the place, but it gets back to this word “targeted.” It’s a code word to everybody that, don’t worry about it. You don’t have to worry about that. That has nothing to do with you. You’re not going to be a victim like this. It is used all the time. Police departments are loath to use the word “random,” because random suggests the worst nightmare of a violent offender.

But this case, look at what this case, the questions it has raised. You have a very vicious crime involving Black victims on Sept. 19. You don’t tell the public about it. You don’t tell the public you have a suspect. You don’t tell the public, here he is, you don’t look out for him, et cetera. Then you have a crime involving a well-known, white tech entrepreneur, and now you have a news conference the next day to announce the suspect, et cetera, et cetera. It just raises that same specter of Black victims get treated this way, and white victims get treated this way.

It’s most unfortunate, and it could have been avoided in many ways if they had simply treated that case in West Baltimore with much more urgency. When I say urgency, I’m not saying, oh, you didn’t do anything about it. I’m saying we used to have in Baltimore Public Enemy No. 1. Now, I’m not saying that case on the 19th of September would’ve risen to that level. But when you put a picture out and you put a video out, that means, we need your help. We want to find this guy. We need your help. They had a warrant for him. They had a lot of information about where you had lived, where you hung out, et cetera, et cetera. It does raise the question, well, what were you doing? Et cetera.

Stephen Janis:  At the press conference, the commissioner made this weird comment about being within 88 meters of him at some point prior to the murder of LaPere. He makes this comment, and you just sat there scratching your head and saying, well, if you were that close, if you’d put out his picture, you probably could have easily caught him if he was hanging around Baltimore City. It makes this even more frustrating in many ways.

Jayne Miller:  Well, and especially with those comments that I read on social media. They were making those comments after his name and photo had been put out after the murder. But the question is if those folks had seen his picture after that – I think it would’ve gotten a lot of circulation because the incident, the Sept. 19 incident got a lot of attention.

Taya Graham:  It was so vicious. We have social media, we have alerts that can be sent to our phone. There are so many ways that the public could have been informed. Like you said, these women reached out afterwards and said, I’ve seen this man. I know this man. He lives in my neighborhood. If they had received that information ahead of time, it might’ve saved LaPere’s life.

Jayne, how does this calculus figure into how crime itself is handled in Baltimore? Why wouldn’t the commissioner want the public to have this information about a serial rapist?

Jayne Miller:  That’s the question that everybody has raised is, what was it? We hear what he said. Now, of course, he has said since that it was a mistake not to put it out, and that now they’re going to have some internal procedure. He didn’t know that it hadn’t been put out or whatever. I think it gets to that whole conversation about…

We had this incident on July 2 in Baltimore that again made national news, which was 30 people shot during a party in the Brooklyn Homes community in South Baltimore. And two people died, and 28 people were injured in that incident. There was an internal report done, I guess it was really by the police department, about the failures to respond in time or beforehand. Or to try to respond beforehand when they were getting calls from people saying, hey, there are a lot of people here and they have guns. There’s fighting going on. This was earlier that night, it was on a Saturday night. There was a radio transmission of a police officer dismissing it, saying, maybe we should just call the National Guard. Those kinds of comments really convey an attitude.

There is a finding in that report that police indifference was a major factor in the lack of police response to those earlier calls in the evening, to the response when it happened, et cetera. Not having police officers there when it was very evident that they had a big crowd of people.

I think that is such an important word, because indifference means, we don’t care. Means, so what? It means, you’re not important. It means whatever. I think we saw that again in this incident involving this repeat, violent offender, Jason Billingsley. I hope that’s not true, but it feels like it’s the same thing. That there was just an indifferent feeling to this very serious incident in West Baltimore allegedly involving this man and the decision not to make that public.

Are there politics involved in this? Sure, there are politics involved in it. That kind of crime is frightening, it’s scary. It’s been another reason for people to say, oh God, look at Baltimore again. But I think that a police department has a long way to go if it has a culture of indifference.

Stephen Janis:  It also shows that some of the priorities for police are managing the perception of crime rather than the reality of crime as we’ve spoken to it. It also, I think, to a certain extent, represents the idea of Baltimore being a city of boundaries. A city that tries to instead of taking on certain things like poverty and economic inequity, head on through other types of programs, really just wants to isolate those problems.

We’re the warehouse of the state’s poorest residents, and our job in the city is to hem them in. That becomes really where a police department, like Jayne said, becomes indifferent, because the primary task of the police department is to manage the perception of crime and the perception that we’re keeping people hemmed in, not that we’re really going into communities and trying to come up with solutions.

Taya Graham:  Now, as we alluded to at the top of the show, the questions about how and when, and of course, why Baltimore Police release information brings us to another case we are currently investigating that has some similarities to the one we just discussed. It involved a woman who had achieved prominence. Actually, that’s an understatement.

It was a woman who had pioneered the field which she literally invented. A world-renowned scientist who had literally changed the way we think about and study space exploration. Her name was Molly Macauley, and her case was also marked by a sudden and unexpected burst of violence. On July 8 in 2016, police were called to Roland Park, a neighborhood just north of Johns Hopkins University. There they found a woman who had been brutally stabbed. She was transported to the hospital, but soon died of her injuries. From the onset, the case was a complete mystery. I know police have released very few details about the case, but what do we know?

Jayne Miller:  Well, that’s a good question. What do we know? We know she was walking her dog. It was like 11:00 at night. It’s on a street. Actually, it’s a street that would’ve been quiet at that hour, dark, probably. The houses – These are not row houses in that particular neighborhood, so they’re a little separated. You could easily walk on that street and not be seen at that hour of the night. It has been a mystery. They did some coverage of it a year later, I think, trying to drum up some leads in the case, et cetera, but nothing. This is now seven years and it’s just nothing on the case.

Stephen Janis:  Yeah. We know police are reluctant to release any information. We reached out to them. We actually called the homicide detective who was working the case, and he would not talk to us without permission from the police department. The police department obviously told us, well, they haven’t said anything really, Jayne, at this point.

The one thing that really strikes me about this case in some ways besides the lack of any suspects is the fact that she was walking her dogs, and I think she had German Shepherds, someone told me. We’re working on those details, but really that someone could be attacked while walking their dogs. Jayne has some very protective dogs, and I’m sure her dogs would intervene. But really, so it’s one of those cases in Baltimore where a person just basically disappears and then we hear nothing. We have been trying to get information from the police department, and we will continue to try, but we have gotten nothing.

Jayne Miller:  We have a request that’s been pending now for three months. We’re really pushing on trying… It’s an unsolved case. We have many unsolved cases in this city. There is no question about it.

Stephen Janis:  But I think the reason we wanted to explore her case, and the reason I wanted to bring it up in this particular podcast, in this particular episode, is because it was another life just snuffed out.

Then, as Jayne talked about police indifference, there’s implicit indifference in this in the sense that they won’t even work with us to try to bring attention to the case again so that maybe something would happen. I think we need to highlight that, and I think we need to reclaim these lives that are just snuffed out and then forgotten.

Jayne Miller:  Stephen, can you talk a little bit about the woman that Molly Macauley was? She has an amazing resume. It’s absolutely exceptional.

Stephen Janis:  Yeah. Her resume would put anybody, make them feel that their lives, they’ve done very little. She was an economist. She got her PhD at Johns Hopkins in economics. But over time, she evolved into a person who would apply economics to space exploration in a way that people never really thought of.

Just an example, I read one of her papers. She had come up with a way – Because there’s a big problem of detritus and space junk because so many satellites have been launched and people don’t really take care of their satellites. She had proposed an idea where you charge a tax to these satellites before they go up, and you rebate it if you take care of the subsequent fallout from the satellite.

This was entirely something that she had invented, and a way of approaching a problem that is really important, because we use satellites for everything: our cellphones, our geotracking. It could be a big problem if this space debris is not handled because it can literally destroy another satellite. She had come up with this really smart, very logical, and seemingly effective solution.

That’s why she was revered by her colleagues as being a pioneer, but also a really excellent critical thinker. Many people said she had mentored them as they got into this world of space economy. She worked for a think tank that focuses on the future and the use of resources. So many critical, elemental things about our world that it affects our lives.

Just like LaPere in a way, she was working on something very vital to the future of civilization. It’s really an extraordinary life, and we’re going to break it more down because we have reached out to her friends and we’re going to try to put together the story of her life, not just her case.

Taya Graham:  Jayne, I know you reached out to the police department for just basic information. What’s happened?

Jayne Miller:  Well, look, it’s an open case, and that makes it hard because they’re not going to release a lot of information in an open investigation. But generally, you can get the initial incident information, just the who, what, when, and where. We are trying to access that information now.

The case got a lot of attention when it happened. It got some attention a year later when they actually put the detective forward, and were trying to generate some information about it. But it’s difficult when the folks who hold the information don’t want to share it, and really don’t want to say anything about it. It can be very difficult. So we are working on other people, et cetera, that might have some information.

Taya Graham:  Well, I would imagine there’s a difference between an open investigation and an active investigation.

Jayne Miller:  That’s a really good question, Taya. That is a really good question. Yeah, that’s why you have cold case squads. You have cases that sit around and maybe something happens down the road that you get information about, but for the most part, they’re pretty inactive.

Stephen Janis:  Yeah. When we were working on the Rey Rivera case, which is the young man who supposedly jumped off the Belvedere and became a big topic of the Netflix Unsolved Mysteries. When we finally got the homicide files, this case is technically open and none of the information is supposed to be released, but it was, I think, because of Netflix. You look through the case files, and they hadn’t done anything since June of 2006.

All that time they had been saying it’s an open investigation, ongoing investigation. Well, according to the homicide files, I can’t say with complete certainty, but according to the homicide files, they hadn’t done a thing. There is, I think, a lack of balance between we have to keep it secret because it’s an open investigation, or we have to share information with the public. I think that balance needs to be rethought, in my opinion.

Taya Graham:  I think it’s interesting how Baltimore and its addiction to violence can simply swallow up victims and seem so content to just let the case languish. For all we know, Molly’s killer could have killed again. As we know, police have no incentive or legal obligation to release any information whatsoever. Jayne, in light of these recent cases, does that need to change?

Jayne Miller:  Well, I think that there’s some discussion about that going on because of what happened in the Pava LaPere case and the lack of public warning about this individual. I think there’s some discussion going on about it. But I got to tell you, so the commissioner, Richard Worley, was confirmed by the Baltimore City Council.

He was confirmed without, he sailed through. There was one no vote, happened to come from the city council representative that represents Brooklyn Homes where 30 people were shot on July 2. Only no vote. And there was very little discussion, frankly.

There is a public safety committee on the Baltimore City Council. This would certainly, to me, be something that a legislative committee like that might really take on, a real discussion of public information and when it should be public, and how do you get it to the public, et cetera? I hope that happens, because we do have a violent crime problem. And there’s always a problem of people don’t want to cooperate with police, et cetera. All of those things weave together in terms of your communication with the public and your relationship with the public in order to help reduce crime and to get to a better level of public safety. But the idea of informing the public is certainly something that should get a lot of discussion.

Taya Graham:  So as Stephen said, in our next episode, we will be delving into Molly’s case, not just about her death, but her life as well. All that will be coming up on the next episode of The Land of the Unsolved. Jayne and Stephen, thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you for joining us for this episode of The Land of the Unsolved. If you have any information or tips on our cases, please reach out to us at landoftheunsolved@gmail.com. Thank you for joining us.

The mysterious death of Emily Hauze at the Park Charles apartment building in Baltimore more than a decade ago continues to produce vexing details that raise questions about the official police report. According to police, Hauze fell down the trash chute of the apartment building while looking for a bathroom. Aside from the implausibility of this theory, there’s also the fact that another person, Harsh Kumar, died in exactly the same way in the same building just one year before Hauze. Following previous reporting on the deaths of Hauze and Kumar, Land of the Unsolved returns for a fresh look, drawing on a previously unreleased police interview with the last person to see Hauze alive.

Production: Stephen Janis, Taya Graham, Jayne Miler
Post-Production: Stephen Janis

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Stephen Janis:

Anyone who watches crime dramas could reasonably conclude that when someone is murdered, barring bizarre and extenuating circumstances, the case is solved. That is through high-tech forensics, moral resolve, or simply the near mythic competence of American law enforcement, killers are ultimately sent to jail.

But as an investigative reporter who has worked in one of the most violent cities in the country for nearly 15 years, I can tell you this is not true.

Taya Graham:

And that is the point of this podcast because unsolved killings represent more than just statistics. It’s a psychic toll of stories untold that infects an entire community, the final violent moments of a victim’s life that remain shrouded in mystery.

Stephen Janis:

I’m Stephen Janis.

Taya Graham:

I’m Taya Graham.

Stephen Janis:

And we are investigative reporters who live in Baltimore City.

Taya Graham:

Welcome to the Land of the Unsolved.

Welcome back to the Land of the Unsolved, the podcast that explores both the evidence and the politics of unsolved murders and mysterious deaths in Baltimore and beyond.

In our last episode, we told you about the death of Emily Hauze. Emily was last seen leaving Baltimore’s Fells Point neighborhood with a young man she had just met. The next morning her body was found in a dumpster in the basement of the Park Charles, a [inaudible 00:01:55] apartment building. The dumpster was attached to a trash chute connected to the upper floors of the building.

At first, police could not identify the young woman, but shortly after the gruesome discovery, a police officer observed a young man carrying a plastic bag out of the lobby of the building. It turns out in the bag where the belongings of the person whose body was lying in the dumpster, Emily Hauze.

That is where we pick up this story because that encounter led police to question the man for several hours. An interview for which we have a transcript, and we’ll be sharing it with you shortly.

But first I want to introduce my guests who will be taking us through this investigation and review the evidence that we have gleaned from a very reliable source: the criminal case file, which we obtained. In it are hundreds of pages of documents, interviews, and of course an autopsy report.

But there are also some things that are left out, which is why I’m joined by investigative reporters, Jayne Miller and Stephen Janis to review it. Thank you both so much for joining me.

Stephen Janis:

Thanks for having us too, Taya.

Taya Graham:

First, Jayne, what strikes you as the most critical question after reading through the case file?

Jayne Miller:

Well, I mean there’s a big gap here in terms of knowing exactly what happened. So what do we know? What do we know? What we know about this case is that we have this young woman who is out partying and met a man, a guy at the party, and the two of them have had a number of drinks, et cetera, and they end up going back to his apartment, which is in the building where the trash chute is.

We know that she’s in the building, we know she’s in the apartment. The man’s roommate saw her come into the apartment. The story of the man is that at some point they were in bed and at some point she said, “Don’t go anywhere. I’m going to the bathroom.” And that was it. That’s the last time of any trail of her.

What happens next is we presume that sometime between 2:00 AM, after 2:00 AM, the next thing that happens in this case is that a little after 8 o’clock in the morning, the maintenance person for the apartment building finds the body of a young woman in the trash bin that is below the trash chute of the building.

That turns out to be the very same woman, Emily Hauze, who had gone out for partying, came back to the apartment with this guy she met and ends up dead in the trash chute.

There’s a big gap in terms of how did she get there? Did she get into the chute by herself? Did someone put her in the chute? Did she get into the trash bin some other way? There’s no video in the building. At that time there were no cameras in the building. This happened in the middle of the night. There’s no witnesses to what happened. So the biggest question is what happened? How did she get into that trash container? It’s really the compactor.

The other thing that I think is really important to note here is that, in some ways, trying to link and identify and track injury is a little difficult because she was injured also by the compactor, even though it may have been postmortem as the autopsy points out. But there was contact with the compactor that also caused significant injury, so in terms of being able to say, oh, that was caused by the fall and that was caused by whatever, that could have been a little bit difficult because of what happened once the body was in the trash compactor.

Baltimore has this history of having these cases that are like, what? I mean, you have a young woman who’s out partying at night and says she’s going to the bathroom and ends up in the trash bin, in the trash compactor, which is not like, one doesn’t lead to the other. The bathroom’s in the apartment that she was in, the trash chute is down the hall. The chute itself is, this isn’t like a regular door. Anybody who lives in an apartment knows what we’re talking about here. Small door opens from the top, like 18″ by 20″, something like that, and is intended to put your trash bag in, not to put yourself in, simply by the construction of it and the way it’s constructed.

Taya Graham:

And so to get a better grasp of the questions I will read from the transcript of the interview with the last person to see Emily alive. Now just to be clear, we are not sharing his identity because he was never considered a suspect by police, nor was he charged with anything related to Emily’s death. We are simply sharing this transcript to answer the questions both Stephen and Jayne have raised.

How exactly did Emily end up in the trash chute and what, if any, clues could explain her untimely death, all that coming up on the Land of the Unsolved.

Hey, this is Taya Graham from The Land of the Unsolved. If you enjoy our podcast and would like us to investigate even more cases, consider supporting our work by either subscribing on our Anchor page or you can also buy one of the books Stephen and I wrote that are available on Amazon and a variety of other websites. Why Do We Kill: The Pathology of Murder in Baltimore written with former homicide detective Kelvin Sewell, and You Can’t Stop Murder: Truths About Policing in Baltimore and Beyond, also in collaboration with a former detective and guest on our show, Stephen Tabeling. Or if you’re in the mood for fictive take on how Baltimore’s struggle with violence and aggressive policing has affected the psyche of the city, I recommend you pick up This Dream Called Death, a book Stephen wrote while he was covering the city’s failed attempt to implement zero tolerance policing and how he reveals the truly corrosive power of that policy by casting it into an alternate reality where the mind and our dreams become the new frontier for government surveillance.

Welcome back to the Land of the Unsolved, the podcast that explores both the evidence and politics of unsolved murders and mysterious deaths in Baltimore and beyond. Today we’re on the third part of our four-part series on the death of Emily Hauze. As we discussed before, police were at a loss to explain how Emily ended up in a dumpster in the basement of the Park Charles apartment building. At first they couldn’t even identify her body. But then an officer observed a white male exiting the lobby of the building with a plastic bag. In it were the belongings of the woman they could not identify, Emily Hauze. That is why police decided to interview the man who they learned was the last person to see her alive.

It’s an interview we can actually share with you. That’s because we have the transcript, which I will read from. But first we want to explain why we are not identifying this person. That’s because police never indicated he was a suspect, nor was he ever charged with a crime. And so now here are the excerpts of that conversation, which I will read.

Before I start, I want to warn listeners that some of the details of this transcript are graphic and might be disturbing. We have limited them as much as possible. However, we felt it was necessary to include at least some of the questioning only to give a fuller picture of what transpired during the interview.

Detective: Okay. All right. On your arrival back to your apartment, again, you went into your apartment and you guys began in sexual activity. Student: Yes. Detective: In that sexual activity, you don’t mind me asking, and again, I’m pretty detail oriented, so forgive me, was there ever any point in time that she requested for the sex to be concluded? Student: No. Detective: No? Student: No. Actually, I don’t recall exactly how it came to an end. I just kind of remember laying there afterwards. Detective: Did you ejaculate? Student: I did not. Detective: You did not? Student: I did not. Sergeant: Are you positive? That’s a pretty key element. Student: Right. Sergeant: You know, who knows if she turns up somewhere with your baby, you know? Student: All right. No, I’m pretty certain that I didn’t. Sergeant: Okay.

Detective: Okay. And to your recollection, can you recall where your shorts were that you loaned her, where they might have been at at that time? Student: No, that’s all quite honestly, really unclear to me. Detective: Unclear? Student: Yes. Detective: Those shorts that you referred to, were they boxer shorts or regular shorts, like the ones you’re wearing now? Student: They’re just regular shorts, like gym shorts. This is like a vague memory I have. I remember reaching in my bedroom drawer and grabbing two pairs of gym shorts. Detective: Yes sir. Student: Handing her one and taking one myself. Detective: Can you recall what color? Student: No, I can’t. I mean I could. Detective: What pair did you keep for yourself? Student: That’s what’s not specifically clear to me. What I guess were the black ones, the lacrosse ones, so I was wearing my old ones. Sergeant: And please take no offense to any of our questions. Okay? Student: I understand. I understand.

Detective: Referring to your apartment when you directed us to the apartment, when we responded with you in plain view, there was a bottle of some medical lidocaine. Student: Yes. Detective: Now I’m not privy to medical information as far as descriptions, but lidocaine is something that’s oral or something that has to be injected? Student: Injected. Detective: Injected. Okay. Student: It’s like a numbing that you have before a local procedure. You know, the doctor will inject a little bit of lidocaine and numb the area. Detective: And I took notice that this was actually on your living room table. Student: Yes.

Detective: Now I understand that you’re a physician, but what was the reason the lidocaine was there? Student: So yeah, I just want to say I had this growth, like an infection, in the skin of my ear and the skin infection had swollen up and become kind of gross and it had some pus in it, so I asked redacted if he would mind if one of these ways to get better is to cut it open and let the pus out. And I think this was last week. Detective: Yes, sir. Student: Yeah, so I had him inject some lidocaine and open that up for me. It’s mostly healed now. Detective: Okay. So the lidocaine was more or less in the house. Student: In what? Detective: In the house. Student: Yes.

Detective: Okay. So I took notice that in close proximity to the lidocaine there were some rolling papers. Do you smoke? Student: On occasion. Detective: Now when I say smoke, I’m a little street oriented, so when I say smoke, I could refer to cigarettes or I could refer to marijuana. But for the purposes of our encounter, are you referring to cigarettes, tobacco, or are you referring to marijuana? If you don’t mind me asking. Student: I assume you’re asking about marijuana. Detective: Yes, I am. Student: Yeah, on occasion, on average, every couple of months. Sergeant: For your glaucoma, correct. Student: No sir. Sergeant: It’s a joke.

Sergeant: You taking any other drugs, illicit drugs or anything? Student: At no point, no. Sergeant: That you or Emily participated in last night? Student: No, it’s nothing. And we certainly drank a lot, but to my knowledge there was nothing. Nothing else. Sergeant: Okay.

Sergeant: So the entire time this young lady, Emily, was more or less involved with you, she was in your presence between the bar and your apartment, is that correct? She was in your company? Student: Between the bar and our apartment, yes. Detective: Okay.

Detective: And so as far as what’s to say, while at your apartment, again, there was no one else that came inside your apartment while you were there with her Student: Correct, to my knowledge. Detective: And upon waking up this morning, you had no knowledge as to where she went? Student: Right. And just to clarify. Detective: Please. Student: My roommate was home already, but no one else came into the apartment, to my knowledge.

Detective: And your roommate, again, is presently at work, is that correct? Student: Correct. Detective: Okay. Well again, let me just ask this lastly, because our encounter is based on you coming down to the lobby, and upon coming down to the lobby, you were there, from my understanding, to meet some friends of Emily. Is that correct? Student: Yes. Detective: Okay. And upon you coming down to the lobby to meet these friends, you had some items to give them, is that correct? Student: Yes. Detective: And these items were? Student: Her belongings. Detective: Okay. And during which time the police were there on the scene, is that correct? Student: Yes. Yes. Detective: Okay. And at any point in time between the initial time you woke up this morning and the time that you found that she was not there, she being Emily, the time that you woke up again around 11 is when her phone went off. Student: Yes. Detective: At any point in time did you notify 9-1-1 or the police? Student: I did not.

Detective: Okay. But did it strike you as bizarre that she was not there? Student: Yes, and I was just, honestly, I think I was just praying and hoping once I like dozed back, I don’t know, I was just hoping, I was dreaming, or I had a nightmare or something because, yeah, that’s certainly not normal. And now I’m pretty upset with myself for even dozing back off. Of course, I wish I would’ve acted on that.

Detective: Why were you alarmed more or less? Student: What’s that? Detective: Why were you alarmed when you woke up and she wasn’t there? Why were you actually alarmed? What startled you? Student: Just because I remembered that she had come home with me and, I don’t know, it’s not normal that she would be gone a few hours later when I woke up for sure. Sergeant: And just her being gone was strange or would anything make it even stranger? Student: Well, certainly. Sergeant: And how about the fact that she was gone and her belongings were there? Student: And that’s when I recall, that’s when it hit me, I think. Sergeant: So the odds of the female that you had a great time with last night, being butt naked, leaving your apartment to try to find her way home, what kind of odds do you think that would be? Have you ever seen any other naked girls wandering in your apartment building? Student: I would say. Sergeant: The streets of Baltimore? Student: No. Detective: Ever in your life? Student: No.

Sergeant: Well, one more thing. I mean, you woke up your first time at 9:30. Student: Yes. Sergeant: you said you checked for her. Where did you check? Student: I walked out and looked into the family room. I didn’t see her on the couch. I checked the bathroom. I thought maybe she fell asleep there. Sergeant: Right. Student: Obviously she was not there and I looked into redacted room to see if maybe she had gotten into that bed, and. Sergeant: So you checked the apartment pretty thoroughly. Student: No. Yes and no. I checked the whole apartment in a cursory manner, assuming that if there was a person. Sergeant: You would see her. You didn’t look under beds. Student: Right. Sergeant: Or look in drawers. Student: Right. Sergeant: Or in the refrigerator. Student: Right. And I was almost afraid to do that. If she wasn’t … I was in my head, I guess, hoping that she was hiding in a bizarre place. Sergeant: Right. Student: Which would be like, aha, that’s a funny story to look back on. But I didn’t want to find out that she wasn’t actually in the room.

Now the whole time you were in her company last night, what was her mental state? What was your mental state? Describe the time you guys were having. Student: Yeah, everyone was really happy, having a good time and I don’t know, I’m a very happy person. Like the one new friend, redacted, commented on how I was always laughing. She said, “Bring me around because you always laugh at my jokes or whatever.” I guess I’m the one who gets the crowd started. Sergeant: Right. Student: That’s just like how I am.

Sergeant: And how about Emily? What was her mental state. Student: She seemed like she’s having a great time. I mean, I just met most of them. And from what I understand, they all went to college together. And so it was like they’re all college friends. Sergeant: I mean, let’s be blunt, you were having the time of your life. You went to a house party with friends, met a pretty girl, and were getting lucky. Student: Yeah, we were having a good time.

Sergeant: Single guy? Student: Yeah. Detective: You said you searched the interior of your apartment, is that correct? Student: The what? Detective: You searched the inside of your apartment, the interior. Student: Yes, yes. Detective: Did you ever respond outside to check? Student: I opened the door and peeked my head out and there was nothing to see. Detective: You’ll never go outside your building to walk around the building or the neighborhood? I understand that you have a person that works at the front desk. Did you ever speak to the desk person? Student: Not until I came down and all the officers were there. Detective: Okay. Student: And that’s when I said. Detective: But prior to this, you’ve never done so? Student: Correct. Sergeant: At any time last night or this morning, did you ever throw out any garbage. Student: No. Detective: You’re sure? Student: Yes. Detective: When was the last time the garbage had been dumped from your apartment? Student: Earlier this week, I think redacted did it. We had a bag that was just about full and I remember weird things, so we took it out and we put a new bag in the canister, but then left the older one because sometimes there’s more room you can fill in there and I think we we’re using that, and then I think one day I came home and assumed redacted had pitched it.

Detective: Okay. So where do you throw the trash? Where’s the trash. Student: There’s a chute right outside the apartment. Right outside our door. Sergeant: Okay. Detective: There’s a chute right outside the door? Student: Yeah, it’s immediately 20 feet over. Detective: Okay. So let’s say there’s your front door. Do you make a left or a right? Student: Coming out of the apartment, you make a right. Detective: Are there any other apartments between your door and the chute? Student: Not between, no. Detective: Okay. And so at no point in time last night or this morning, did you come out to throw anything away? Student: No. Detective: You sure? Student: I’m certain. Detective: Okay. You were going to say something. Student: No, I was just telling you before we got started that I’d overheard something and I was just. Detective: Well? Student: Well, praying it didn’t pertain to this.

Detective: Okay. And for the purpose of this taped interview and for the purpose of this encounter, have you heard or seen from Emily as of yet? Student: No. Detective: Okay. I don’t know what you may have heard inside of an office now and since you’ve been here, has anybody come into the room, which is just outside this office, spoken to you, told you what to say, threaten you with anything, anything of the sort? Student: No.

It’s been brought to our attention that the remains of a young lady have been located at the vicinity of that building. Student: Remains as in no longer living? Sergeant: Deceased. Detective: The person, she’s no longer living. That is a fact. And that persons remains to be consistent with that of the individual you described. And right now it appears that at some point we may find out who this person is and if that person is in fact probably a person by the first name of Emily, the last person that was with her may have been you.

Sergeant: Well, may have been from your own words, you were the last person. Student: To my knowledge, yeah. Sergeant: To your knowledge in the apartment? Okay. Well sir, right now, unfortunately we’re investigating a suspicious death and I would hope that everything that you’ve told myself and the Sergeant has been the truth. Student: Yes.

Detective: I would hope. Sometimes in this profession I’ve been wrong and I’ve asked such young people as yourself to tell me the truth. Now, if there was something, sir, that unintentionally occurred, let’s say that young person, this Emily, between yourself or anyone else and Emily, speaking about you specifically, I implore you this ain’t TV. This isn’t the movies. I’m not looking to make a book, nor is my partner here. I’m not here to disrupt your life any more than it may have been from this point on. However, as a man, as a prudent individual with enough sense because this person, Emily has a family. Student: Yeah. Detective: Had a family. Student: Of course. Detective: Now if something happened that was unintentional, whether it be, I don’t know, love making, drugs, whatever the case might be, I don’t know. I wasn’t there, nor my partner here, however, allow us to work these things out right now. Student: I completely understand what you’re saying. Detective: Let me ask you flat out. If this young lady, Emily, and you were the last person based on our investigation right now, that this was in fact this young lady, the very last person, there is no way. Student: I mean I couldn’t have been the last person with her.

Detective: Let’s say that someone out in Baltimore City is walking around with a naked young lady and her belongings are back at your apartment up there at Charles Street. Well, let’s just say for the purpose of this investigation, she was in fact with you, and I’m going to ask you flat out, did you do any harm to that young lady. Student: In no way harmed her. I’m serious.

Detective: Did you kill anyone that we found that was at the vicinity of that apartment today? Student: No, sir. I’ve never. Detective: You didn’t? Student: Never done such a thing. Detective: Okay. Sergeant: Did you give her any date rape drugs? Student: No, sir. Sergeant: Did you inject her with lidocaine or any other medical? Student: No sir. Sergeant: Devices, drugs, anything? Because testing will be conducted on her body, okay? Student: Absolutely. Sergeant: And if lidocaine comes back in her system and lidocaine is found in your apartment, I mean, you know have some explaining to do. Student: Yes, sir. No, I completely understand the situation and, as I have been, I’m only going to be cooperative. Detective: Thank you. Student: In every way I can be. Detective: Thank you very much.

Sergeant: I don’t know if you directly answered the question. Did you provide Emily with lidocaine last night? Student: No. Sergeant: did you inject Emily with anything? Student: No, sir. Nothing. No, I didn’t. Honestly, there was no foul play. Nothing at all. Detective: Okay. And again, the last time that you had any kind of correspondence with her is when she said to you something to the effect of, “Don’t go anywhere, I’ll be back.” Was she completely naked at that time? Student: I believe so, yes. Detective: Okay. And you haven’t seen her since? Student: I have not. Detective: Okay.

Sergeant: A lot of things that you stated you appear not to be sure about. I think maybe in your own words, it’s kind of like in a haze. I don’t remember if she put the shorts on before or after sex. It’s something that comes to mind that you’re unsure about. Could you be unsure about anything else? Student: No, I think those things I’ve been unsure of, I’ve said that. Sergeant: Could you be unsure if you accidentally hurt her in your apartment? Student: No, I couldn’t. And I know there’s no substance or alcohol that would make me harm anyone, but specifically her. Sergeant: You know I’m not saying intentionally. Student: I understand. I understand.

Sergeant: So you choose not to call nine one one from a cell phone to report a girl, that you had a sexual encounter with, missing, with her belongings still in your apartment, but you choose to bag them up, and pardon the phrase, almost discard them as trash, to walk them out, to give to her friends to say good luck finding your naked friend? Student: No, not at all. This all happened so quickly. I was like, yeah, I’d come here and I figured we’d talk and then to see there was a police car parked outside our building, so I figured if I was going out there to meet them, I would be able to talk to the police officer. Sergeant: So what do you think could have happened to Emily from the time you see her naked, telling you, “Don’t move, stay right there,” to exiting your bedroom naked? I mean, now think outside the box. What happened to where we could find her deceased this morning? Student: Truthfully, I can’t even imagine. Sergeant: Just think about it.

Student: I mean, she could have wandered outside of the apartment, wandered outside of my specific apartment. Sergeant: What do you mean wandered outside? As been in the hallway? Student: Yeah, I mean, truthfully, I assumed she would be coming right back. Detective: So is there anything else you might be able to think of that may be able to assist us in part? And obviously we’re going to try to find out whether or not the remains of this young lady is Emily, but hopefully we’re wrong. Is there anything you can think of that might be able to assist us in finding out about her whereabouts or what might have happened to her? Student: Nothing comes to mind.

Student: I can’t even imagine. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to give a better hypothetical. I can’t. I assumed she would walk back into the bedroom.

Detective: Okay. So when you woke up, Emily wasn’t there at all. Student: Correct. Detective: Well, what did you do from that point? Student: I got up, I looked around, my heart was racing because I had no idea where she would’ve gone. I looked around the apartment, I freaked out, and I was texting redacted hoping that maybe on his way to work or something, she had gone straight to the bathroom and said, “Can I get a ride home?” Or something like that. And he was like, “No, I’m pretty sure she was still there when I left.” And yeah, then I think I was just laying on my bed texting him and I kind of dozed back off and that’s when I woke up for good around 11 and I was like, “Oh my goodness. Her phone had been ringing.”

Detective: Her phone? Student: Her phone had been ringing. She left all her belongings. Detective: Well what do you mean she left all her belongings? What do you mean? Student: There. Everything that she came with was still in my room. Detective: Describe it to me. Everything that she came with? Student: Her purse, her clothing, her shoes, her underwear, her jeans, her shirt, her bra, everything was still on the floor in my room. Detective: On the floor in your room? Student: Correct. Her phone was in her purse, which was near those things, near her shirt by my nightstand, and it was vibrating, so I woke up to that. I had missed the call by the time I got her phone out and returned the call to her friend, redacted. Detective: Hold on. You said initially I asked you if the alarm clock woke you up and you said you just woke up, so. Student: That was at 9:30. Detective: Okay. Student: I had just woken up and then I dozed back off while I was texting redacted to try to figure out what happened. And then I woke back up around 11 to that phone vibrating. Detective: Her phone? Student: Correct.

I called back one of the numbers that had called. It was her friend redacted, who I also met last night. And I said, “Hi,” and she said, “Hey, is Emily there with you?” And I was like, “Actually, no, I have no idea where she went. And I was praying she was with you guys somehow.” And she said, “Oh my gosh.” And I was like, “Yeah, has this ever happened before? Does she sleepwalk or anything like that?” And she said, “No, this has never happened before.” Do you want me to just keep talking to you guys? Sergeant: Yeah. She said, “Okay, well I’m coming over there right now, where do you live?” Or whatever, and I was like, “All her things are still here.” And she’s like, “Okay, we’ll get her things.” And I just said, “Okay.” I hoped that in the meantime she would be lying out somewhere else. I checked the couch, hoping maybe she wandered and slept back there. She wasn’t there, so I got her things together and I was just going to wait and try to make some calls and see if anybody had any idea. And then I saw the officers in the lobby and so right away I was like, “Well, these are the right people to speak to.”

Detective: You seem to be a prudent minded person. At any point did you notify authorities? Student: No. Detective: No? Student: I did not.

This concludes my reading of the transcript of the interview between Baltimore Police and the last person to see Emily alive as far as we know. I will be discussing what I just read with Jayne and Stephen on our next episode. We will also be sharing new information we have just obtained about the case, so be sure to join us.

Also, if you have a tip or comment, please email us at landoftheunsolved@gmail.com. We always want to hear from you and always appreciate your feedback and input.

My name is Taya Graham. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of The Land of the Unsolved.

In two separate incidents in separate years, Emily Hauze and Harsh Kumar were found dead at the bottom of a trash chute in the Park Charles apartments in Baltimore. Police ruled both incidents to be accidents, but could this truly just be a coincidence? Land of the Unsolved returns to the case, now with crucial evidence previously withheld from the public by police.

Production: Stephen Janis
Audio engineering: David Hebden

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Stephen Janis:

Anyone who watches crime dramas could reasonably conclude that when someone is murdered, barring bizarre and extenuating circumstances, the case is solved. That is, through high-tech forensics, moral resolve or simply the near mythic competence of American law enforcement, killers are ultimately sent to jail. But as an investigative reporter who has worked in one of the most violent cities in the country for nearly 15 years, I can tell you this is not true.

Taya Graham:

And that is the point of this podcast, because unsolved killings represent more than just statistics. It’s a psychic toll of stories untold that infects an entire community, the final violent moments of a victim’s life that remain shrouded in mystery.

Stephen Janis:

I’m Stephen Janis.

Taya Graham:

I’m Taya Graham.

Stephen Janis:

And we are investigative reporters who live in Baltimore City.

Taya Graham:

Welcome to the Land of the Unsolved. Welcome back to the Land of the Unsolved, the podcast where we explore both the evidence and the politics of unsolved murders in the City of Baltimore and beyond. Before the break, we told you about the mysterious death of a young woman in 2011. Her name was Emily Hauze, and she was a recent graduate of Loyola University who left a party with a young man and was found dead the next morning in a dumpster. Now, before we move forward, Stephen, can you tell me a little bit about the victim in this case, Emily?

Stephen Janis:

Well, a lot of her friends talked to police after her body was found, and what we gleaned from that was that she was a energetic, bright young woman with a bright future who had gone to a local university, Loyola, studied education and was waiting to get placement as a teacher either in Baltimore or somewhere else. She was a world traveler, someone who had traveled during her studies and done a lot of exciting things, and a very vivacious person and someone that was deeply loved by her friends. So it was very sad to read some of the statements they made about her because you could tell this was a woman who was going someplace and had a passion for teaching and things like that, and so just tragic.

Taya Graham:

So what made her death even more troubling is how she got there. That’s because the dumpster was at the bottom of a trash chute, a chute that was connected to every single floor of the 25-story building, a fact that raised an even more mysterious question: where was she before she went down the chute? Who was with her before she died? And what, if anything, could the trash chute tell us about how she died? And then even more complicated, did she fall down the chute at all? These are questions that my reporting partner Stephen Janis had tried to answer, but was thwarted when the medical examiner made a crucial ruling.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah. I mean, the medical examiner did what they always do, and we see it in cases. They wrote it up as an accident without doing, I think, an adequate investigation. And so that pretty much put the case on a back burner because no police, homicide detective who handle understandably a large amount of cases is going to work on something that isn’t ruled a homicide, because it’d just be a very difficult case to bring to court if nothing else.

Taya Graham:

But there was also very little public information released by the police. Where was she before she was found? Who was she with? What had she been doing just before she vanished? And was she spotted in the apartment building? With little to go on, Stephen stopped writing about the case even though he wanted to continue. And there was one other fact about the case that bothered him as well, something that really made him wonder if the police were truly being above board.

Stephen Janis:

As I said before, pretty early on in the case it came out that there was another death in the building of a person who fell down a trash chute, which always made me think I had to keep working on this case.

Taya Graham:

That’s right. A year before, a man named Harsh Kumar had also fallen down the trash chute and died. His case was ruled a suicide. Police never gave a reason that the 30-year-old Hopkins technology specialist died other than that he had been drinking and had taken a strong anti-insomnia sedative just prior to his death. And for Stephen, it was just too much of a coincidence to ignore.

Stephen Janis:

And I think that’s why the case always stuck in my mind, because sometimes things in Baltimore happen and you just can’t rationalize them, but you also can’t solve them. So they just stick around in your head like, “Someday, I’ll get to this. Someday, I’ll try to tell this story.” But once there were two deaths, it was just too weird to let go of.

Taya Graham:

Still, even with the new information, the police weren’t talking. And so the case became another dead end in a city that has many, a frustrating tale untold that Stephen couldn’t write about, but also could not forget, an impasse that would change with a single phone call. And what was said, and why, changed everything.

Steve Tabeling:

My name is Steve Tabeling. I’m a retired lieutenant Baltimore City Police Department, former chief of police in Salisbury, Maryland. And after retirement, called back to the police academy to teach for about seven years.

Stephen Janis:

So Steve is a great investigator, as I said before, and he often shares information. But when he started talking about a young woman found in a dumpster, I was like, “Wait. Hold on a second. I need to hear about this.”

Taya Graham:

It turned out that Tabeling was not only familiar with the case, but had actually been involved. That’s because he’d been hired to look into the case by a relative of Emily’s.

Steve Tabeling:

Well, I was working for a private company and we got the job to reinvestigate it. I did the best I could with the case. The police department, the officers that investigated, they wouldn’t talk to me. I saw some discrepancies in the case, but without getting any additional information, I wasn’t able to prove anything.

Taya Graham:

Tabeling told Stephen not just about what he learned working the case, but his concerns over how it was handled.

Steve Tabeling:

Part of the theory is that she wanted to go to the bathroom and she left the apartment. And when she came back, she couldn’t find the apartment. Finally, she opened the door and she saw… This sounds silly. And she saw what she thought was a dog entrance to the building, and she opened the door and jumped in. Now, that’s impossible because I checked that and you can’t hold that open. You could’ve never done it yourself.

Stephen Janis:

I mean, Steve is a really thorough investigator. And if he has a litany of concerns about the case and questions about the case that he couldn’t answer, to me it was like a sign that I needed to look into the case or that we needed to cover it.

Taya Graham:

He even spoke to the medical examiner, a conversation that left him with doubts.

Steve Tabeling:

I talked to the medical examiner and asked the medical examiner. She called it an accidental death, and I could never get this medical examiner to explain to me how it’d be accidental. And she said she interviewed all the police and all, and she felt confident that she did this herself.

Taya Graham:

So the fact that Tabeling had actually looked into the case and had serious questions about how it had been investigated only made Stephen more adamant that he wanted to report on the case. But the most troubling aspect of what Tabeling said was their theory of how Emily ended up where she did, an explanation that both found difficult to believe.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah, I mean that just sounded absurd to me that a young woman would leave an apartment and walk around naked in a hall and then climb through a hole like she was going through what he described as a little door that you would have for a pet. I really couldn’t wrap my mind around it. It didn’t make any sense to me.

Taya Graham:

But even with Tabeling’s impression that the investigation was flawed and the fact that the veteran homicide detective had doubts about how investigators had interpreted the evidence, there was little new information to go on. That was until Tabeling revealed something else, something he had in his possession which would open up a whole new chapter in the story. All that coming up next on the Land of the Unsolved.

Hey, this is Taya Graham from the Land of the Unsolved. If you enjoy our podcast and would like us to investigate even more cases, consider supporting our work by either subscribing on our anchor page, or you can also buy one of the books Stephen and I wrote that are available on Amazon and a variety of other websites, Why Do We Kill?: The Pathology of Murder in Baltimore written with former homicide detective Kelvin Sewell and You Can’t Stop Murder: Truths About Policing in Baltimore and Beyond, also in collaboration with a former detective and guest on our show, Stephen Tabeling. Or if you’re in the mood for a fictive take on how Baltimore’s struggle with violence and aggressive policing has affected the psyche of the city, I recommend you pick up This dream called Death, a book Stephen wrote while he was covering the city’s failed attempt to implement zero-tolerance policing and how he reveals the truly corrosive power of that policy by casting it into an alternate reality where the mind and our dreams become the new frontier for government surveillance.

Welcome back to the Land of the Unsolved, the podcast that explores both the evidence and the politics of unsolved murder. Today, we are recounting the mysterious death of Emily Hauze, a 23-year-old Loyola University graduate who was found dead in a trash dumpster of the Park Charles apartment in 2011. Police said little about the events leading up to her death. The Maryland medical examiner ruled it an accident. So with very little to go on, Stephen had stopped covering the case. But then a phone call from former Baltimore homicide Detective Stephen Tabeling changed everything. He told Stephen he was actually investigating the case. But there was more to it because as a part of Tabelings investigation, he had come into possession of the actual criminal case file, two binders full of documents that recounted every element of the investigation and, for the first time, a depiction of the events leading up to her death.

But he didn’t just read it for himself. He also asked a friend, legendary investigative reporter Jayne Miller, to review the case as well. Jayne, thank you so much for joining us.

Jayne Miller:

Happy to be here.

Taya Graham:

And now, for the first time here, is the story of Emily’s last hours on Earth, taken from witness statements from the case file itself. The night of October 15th, 2011 was like any other for Emily and her friends from college. Emily had attended and graduated from Loyola just a year earlier and was waiting on a job in her chosen path of education.

Jayne Miller:

So we’re talking about October 15th, 2011, which was a Saturday. So a Saturday night. Like many, many, many young people, all people, Emily was out partying with friends not in the part of town where the apartment building is, but in another part of town. And in the course of this socializing, et cetera, and the partying, she met this particular individual who was a medical student who happened to live in the Park Charles apartment. So after drinking and having a good time, she ends up going back to his apartment, which is in the Park Charles. And so that’s what puts her in the building sometime late at night on the 15th or early on the morning of the 16th.

Stephen Janis:

And one thing that’s interesting to note about what was said by her friends later on, or after the case began with police, was that this was a new acquaintance for her. This was not someone she had known before. This was someone she met at the party and was introduced to for the first time. So this was not someone she knew. It was a person that she had met the party. And that’s where this all begins.

Taya Graham:

So after an evening of socializing, Emily left the party with a man her friends later told police she had just met. The pair left, but Emily had not told her friends where she was headed. The next morning, friends could not get in touch with Emily. And that’s when the frantic phone calls began.

Stephen Janis:

Now, we know from the police reports, from what this young man eventually told police, that her friends had been calling her cell phone and it had not been answered, which started a panic with them because they didn’t know where she was headed that night. So they didn’t really know where she was, and so that’s why they kept calling.

Jayne Miller:

That’s also not unusual for friends to keep track of one another, check up on one another, especially if initially they don’t know exactly where she went.

Taya Graham:

And so that was the very first indication that something was terribly wrong, because the young man on the other end told her friend that Emily had left his apartment and had not returned.

Jayne Miller:

8:13 in the morning, this is now Sunday morning, the maintenance worker in the Park Charles apartments, in the apartment building, finds a really grisly discovery in the dumpster on the ground floor of the building, and it’s the body of a young woman, no clothes on, in the dumpster. Kind of partially in the dumpster, partially out of the dumpster, but obviously suggesting that she had come down the trash chute.

Taya Graham:

Police began investigating, but were stumped. For one thing, they had no way to identify the body. And two, this task was made particularly difficult by the fact that the dumpster was connected to a trash chute. Jayne, can you describe for us how this trash chute system works?

Jayne Miller:

Well, this is a tall apartment building, first of all. It’s actually two towers, and it’s really downtown Baltimore. And so the trash chute goes all the way through the building, and each floor has access to it. But the access to the trash chute is a really critical part of the questions about this story, because this isn’t some big opening to get into the trash chute. But that’s how it works.

So all of the trash comes down through that chute from each floor. Everybody uses the trash chute and dumps the trash in it. So she’s down there, I mean in the dumpster, and obviously people keep putting the trash down the chute.

Taya Graham:

But then a chance encounter between a police officer on the scene and a resident changed everything.

Stephen Janis:

From the notes in the case file, a patrol officer or a uniform officer on the scene talks about observing a young man in the lobby carrying a plastic bag and according to the note says, “This man was observed exiting the lobby.” I’m not exactly sure what that means.

Jayne Miller:

It turns out the encounter was with the medical student who lives in the apartment that Emily was visiting. So this is how police were able to… begins the process of how they were able to identify the body in the trash chute. The medical student in the lobby tells the officer that he’s searching for the woman who had been in his apartment. And I think we are to presume from the case notes that what was in the trash bag were her belongings. But this is critical in terms of identifying her, and quickly identifying her I might add. I mean, this wasn’t a case that went days and days and days without being able to identify her. They were able to identify her that day.

Taya Graham:

The police officer in the report writes that she encountered the man after she asked what he was doing. The man explained to her that a visitor had left his home last night and had not returned. That’s when the officer discovered what was in the bag.

Stephen Janis:

So it’s my understanding from the police notes that there was belongings of a woman in this bag, as Jayne mentioned, and it soon was… Those belongings were able to determine, or police were able to link those belongings to the woman in the dumpster, is my understanding.

Jayne Miller:

In the bag that the resident medical student of the apartment was carrying was, this is according to the case notes, female clothing, a purse, cellular phone and photo ID. And he advised the officer that friends were looking for the woman that he was with. And so he was… At that point, obviously this is somebody the police wanted to talk to. So he became a person of interest just in terms of being able to get information about what may have happened here.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah, I think that the fact that he had her belongings told police that he was probably the last person to see Emily alive. And that, of course, as Jayne mentioned, made it very important, I think. It made him probably the central interest in their investigation because you always want to talk to the last person to see someone alive when they end up dead.

Taya Graham:

The report about how police came to possess Emily’s belongings differed from what was written in the summary. The summary says a white male contacted police in the lobby, but the officer wrote that the male was observed exiting the lobby. However, the actual police report, to quote directly from the report, “A white male was observed exiting the lobby carrying plastics containing various articles of female friend’s whose whereabouts was unknown,” the officer wrote. Nevertheless, police took the young man in for questioning, an interview that we have obtained the transcript of. But before we get to it, the police also served a search warrant along with knocking on the door of residents both above and below the apartment where Emily had apparently entered the trash chute.

Jayne Miller:

So they executed a search warrant in the apartment which Emily was visiting, in the apartment of the medical student, and found some lidocaine in the apartment. Now, this was explained… I think we need to point out that the medical student had a roommate, and the roommate also confirms that Emily Hauze was in the apartment because he saw her. He was actually getting up. He worked in the medical field as well and was getting up early in the morning to go to work, and saw her come into the apartment and saw her for some period of time. Very short period of time.

Anyway, the lidocaine in the apartment was described as being used to… Somebody had an abscess in their ear. One of the two had an abscess in the ear, and was used for that procedure. That these are medical students, so medical people, and it was used as they were treating that particular problem.

The case notes also reflect that there were a number of used condoms in the trash in the bathroom along with some suspected blood and hair in the trash can, which certainly sets off alarms, et cetera, and that there was a scalpel with some blood in the sink. But again, there’s an explanation here that one of the two men who lived in the apartment had a problem with an ear and that there was some treatment going on, just how you treat cuts or whatever yourself, that that may well be what would explain at least that, the blood and the hair, and the scalpel, et cetera, would be used for treating some kind of a problem.

Stephen Janis:

And Taya, also police did some door knocking because they wanted to see if anyone had heard or seen anything. And they went from floors below the floor that Emily was on to the floors above Emily was on and knocked on all the doors. And those records are in there, and they probably talked to a couple dozen people. And according to the notes in the case file, police got nothing from that. No one said they’d seen anything or heard anything. Only one person mentioned, again, that this had happened before, and so that was all they gleaned from that.

But no one had actually seen Emily, no one had heard anything and no one knew anything about what had happened. Also, it should be noted, and this is important to note, that there were no security cameras in the floors going up from the residential area up to the top.

Jayne Miller:

At least in 2011.

Stephen Janis:

At least in 2011. There were no security cameras. There was security cameras in the lobby, which confirmed that Emily had entered and confirmed some of the stories about when they had entered the building, but there was nothing on the floor that she was on at that time or anything that would allow people to see how she had gotten from where she was to the trash chute. That was pretty much a preliminary part of the investigation, which is why it turned to the young man she’d been with.

Taya Graham:

Records show police tested the DNA of both young men who lived in the apartment. So Jayne, although the records show that police tested the DNA of both young men, did they actually perform any tests on Emily Hauze’s body?

Jayne Miller:

Not that is evident in the case file that we have in terms of if there was… Well, part of the story here is that she and the medical student had sex, so there’s not a whole lot additional rape kit testing or anything like that might reveal. There could be, but it’s already acknowledged that she and the medical student, they were in the apartment together and they had sex together.

Taya Graham:

But it could be of interest to look for the DNA of the roommate, perhaps, on Emily Hauze’s body.

Jayne Miller:

Or anything else that might… Exactly. But no, as far as you can tell from the case file that that kind of testing was not performed.

Taya Graham:

However, there was some key missing evidence as well.

Stephen Janis:

Well, I think it’s interesting because if you look in the case file, phone records weren’t pulled as far as I could tell. So there’s no indication of who he might’ve been calling or who might’ve been using her phone or even tracing where her phone was. So that was something that struck me as odd because I would’ve thought they would’ve pulled phone records to get a sense of what calls were made at what time and who might’ve been trying to get in touch with her or who she might’ve been trying to get in touch with. It’s a way to figure out where people are at the moment, but nothing was pulled.

Taya Graham:

But for police, all these questions would boil down to the interview that took place the day Emily’s body was found with the last person to see her alive. All that coming up on the next episode of the Land of the Unsolved.

In the early 2010s, two people fell down a trash chute in a Baltimore apartment building and died. Police say both incidents were “accidents.” In the latest installment of Land of the Unsolved, investigative reporters Stephen Janis and Taya Graham explore the evidence in both cases, raising unanswered questions about the odd circumstances of both cases and clues police might have missed.

Pre-production/Studio/Post-Production: Stephen Janis, Taya Graham

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Stephen Janis:

Anyone who watches crime dramas could reasonably conclude that when someone is murdered, barring bizarre and extenuating circumstances, the case is solved. That is through high-tech forensics, moral resolve, or simply the near mythic competence of American law enforcement. Killers are ultimately sent to jail. But as an investigative reporter who has worked in one of the most violent cities in the country for nearly 15 years, I can tell you this is not true.

Taya Graham:

And that is the point of this podcast, because unsolved killings represent more than just statistics. It’s a psychic toll of stories untold that infects an entire community. The final violent moments of a victim’s life that remain shrouded in mystery.

Stephen Janis:

I’m Stephen Janis.

Taya Graham:

I’m Taya Graham.

Stephen Janis:

And we are investigative reporters who live in Baltimore City.

Taya Graham:

Welcome to The Land of the Unsolved.

Hello, my name is Taya Graham, and welcome to the Land of the Unsolved. The podcast that explores both the evidence and politics of mysterious deaths in Baltimore and beyond. Today we will be exploring a case that actually goes beyond the normal theme of this show. A case so mysterious, so disturbing, and with so many unanswered questions that we felt compelled to report on it even though the police closed it.

In fact, the entire reason we decided to investigate was because the death of the young woman in an apartment building more than 12 years ago was a story that needed to be told simply because it hadn’t been. To be clear, we are not arguing her death was a homicide or that what happened to this young woman was anything untoward.

But there is something about this case that irks us, a tale of a mysterious death that must be explored in all its disturbing details despite the assertions by police that what happened is nothing more than a highly unusual, and I use this term, lightly accident.

The first thing to understand about this case is that the questions surrounding the death we are about to recount to you are almost too numerous to answer. But also those same questions say much about the city itself. A community as we have discussed on the show before, that often buries the truth as easily and quickly as it disposes of the dead. But today, at least in one case, we will try to give one person the attention Baltimore has failed to provide. So let’s begin.

This is a story of a promising young woman. A story about someone who disappeared. A person whose potential vanished in the bowels of an apartment building while the world slept ignorant of the tragedy that was unfolding. How we got involved and why this story caught our attention started with a phone call. A call to Stephen from former Baltimore homicide, Lieutenant, Stephen Tabling. A detective he had written a book with called You Can’t Stop Murder.

Tabling wanted to talk about a case he had taken on as a private investigator. A death of a young woman that troubled him so much, he wanted to share the details with Stephen.

Stephen Janis:

Tabling calls me all the time with cases that he’s talking about or working on or something that you know, to about the police department. And one day in 2018, I’m sitting at home and he calls me and he starts talking. Usually, I got to be honest, I kind of tune him out. But then he said a name that just hit me like a lightning bolt, Emily House.

And he started telling me about this case he was working on. And I was like, “Holy crap, I know this case. I remember this case. I remember writing about this case. And it just kind of hit me like, wow.

Steve Tabling:

My name is Steve Tabling. I’m a retired Lieutenant, Baltimore City Police Department, former Chief of Police in Salisbury, Maryland. Well, I was working for a private company and we got the job to reinvestigate it. I did the best I could with the case. The police department, the officers that investigated, they wouldn’t talk to me.

Taya Graham:

The case Tabling was recounting to Stephen was the mysterious death of a young woman named Emily House. Her body was found at 8:00 AM on October 16th, 2011, in the dumpster of a basement of a Mount Vernon apartment complex called the Park Charles. But how she got there and why remained at the time a mystery. The recent Loyola University graduate had last been seen leaving a downtown bar with an unknown man. The next morning police found her body. And Stephen remembers covering what happened next.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah, I gotten a tip from a homicide detective who was on the scene, and I remember thinking, “This is really weird.” Why would a woman be in a dumpster, like a young woman who had previously been out that evening, I guess at a bar and why would someone go to a bar and disappear and then end up in a pile of trash and the bowels of a building without explanation?

And what made it even weirder is that from the start, police said they didn’t suspect foul play. And that just struck me as really odd because I don’t see how they could come to that conclusion. So from the beginning, it was a weird story.

Taya Graham:

Of course, this just wasn’t any dumpster, not at all. And its connection to the building and how Emily House died would not just haunt Stephen, but raise questions about one of the most mysterious cases he and I have ever seen. All that coming up on The Land of the Unsolved.

Hey, this is Taya Graham from The Land of the Unsolved. If you enjoy our podcast and would like us to investigate even more cases, consider supporting our work by either subscribing on our anchor page. Or you can also buy one of the books Stephen and I wrote that are available on Amazon and a variety of other websites.

Why Do We Kill, The Pathology of Murder in Baltimore, written with former homicide detective Kelvin Sewell. And, You Can’t Stop Murder, truths about policing in Baltimore and beyond. Also in collaboration with a former detective and guest on our show, Stephen Tabling.

Or if you’re in the mood for fictive take on how Baltimore’s struggle with violence and aggressive policing has affected the psyche of the city, I recommend you pick up This Dream Called Death. A book Stephen wrote while he was covering the city’s failed attempt to implement zero tolerance policing. And how he reveals the truly corrosive power of that policy by casting it into an alternate reality where the mind and our dreams become the new frontier for government surveillance.

Welcome back to The Land of the Unsolved. Before the break, Stephen was talking about one of the strangest cases he had ever encountered as a reporter, the death of a young woman who was found in a dumpster on October 16th, 2011. So Stephen, when did you first get an inkling of how strange this case really was?

Stephen Janis:

Well, I guess it had something to do with that dumpster. Because it wasn’t just a dumpster sitting in the basement, it was actually attached to a chute.

Taya Graham:

So can you tell me a little bit about the chute?

Stephen Janis:

Well, first I have to describe the building itself. It’s an apartment complex called the Park Charles. And it’s sort of on the edge of Baltimore’s Mount Vernon neighborhood. A somewhat hip community that includes a lot of med students. People who work at Hopkins and employees of a university here called University of Baltimore. But the building is tall. It’s roughly 25 stories.

So buildings at that height normally have what’s known as a trash chute. Usually located somewhere on each floor there’s a closet or a door, and you walk inside and there’s a container which opens up and has a spring. And you open the door and you put the trash in and it kind of snaps in and the trash goes down a chute. And the chute leads to the dumpster, which is of course at the bottom of the chute that goes through the entire building.

Taya Graham:

So this trash chute, it opens up at a 45 degree angle. The chute itself is only two feet wide. It doesn’t have any twist or turns in it, and it drops directly into the dumpster below. Is that correct?

Stephen Janis:

That’s absolutely right. And just to describe it, it’s very small. It’s just supposed to fit a bag of trash. It’s not something to convey a human body or a person. It’s really just meant to put a piece of trash in and then make sure that it gets down to the basement.

Taya Graham:

And this is what bothered Stephen. Why would a young woman crawl into a trash chute? What could possibly prompt anyone to do something so strange? And what was she doing before this weird turn of events? What led up to Emily apparently falling to her death? Turns out at the time he was writing the story, there weren’t many answers. Because for one thing, police weren’t talking, and second, no one else was either.

Stephen Janis:

Sometimes when you have, Taya, a mysterious death, there’s family or someone to advocate or just someone to raise questions so that you can raise questions as a reporter. But at this point, no one was talking about it. And police weren’t releasing any information because kind of from the get-go police were just kind of tamping down on any idea that there was something foul play that had happened. So it was really hard to get traction with the story because nobody was talking, not even the cops.

Taya Graham:

And Stephen might have left it there except for one fact that came up as he and other reporters were researching the story, something that made him suspicious. Turns out this wasn’t the first time someone had fallen down the trash chute in that building. And probably this had happened before.

Stephen Janis:

So someone tipped me off and said, “Hey, there was another case, same building, different person.” And I looked it up and I was like, “Wow, how is that possible that just a year before another resident, a year before Emily died, fell down that trash chute and was found dead in the same exact dumpster?”

Taya Graham:

Indeed, a year before Emily disappeared, another resident of the Park Charles, had allegedly fallen down the trash chute. Police had ruled that case a suicide, but again, the evidence was sketchy.

Stephen Janis:

And just like Emily’s case, there was very little info about it. Nothing from police that they believed it might have been anything more than a suicide. But I was like, “That doesn’t make any sense. I mean, how often does this happen? Why would someone commit suicide in that way?” If you wanted to jump, wouldn’t it be easier just to jump off a building if you live on the 25th floor? But two cases a year, that was just hard to ignore.

Taya Graham:

That man was named Harsh Kamar, a Johns Hopkins employee who had died after the medical examiner claimed he ended up in the trash chute accidentally. An explanation Stephen found hard to comprehend.

Stephen Janis:

When I was working on this story, I thought back to my own experience. I had lived in New York in a tall building that had a trash chute. And to me, it was inconceivable that someone could purposely put themselves in it, even get through the chute, it’s so small and tight and compact. And then to think that two people had done this within a year, I couldn’t wrap my mind around this idea. It just seemed to me to be impossible.

Taya Graham:

I also lived in an apartment building in Lower Charles Village, and these trash chutes are really small. And I was thinking about how difficult it would be to get your body through it without help. They are small. The industry standard has a dimension of two feet access or 24 inches, and they’re roughly about 15 to 18 inches deep. And that is a really small compartment. And remember, they’re on a hinge that forces it shut once the trash is inside. So this is a very unusual thing for one person to engage with on their own.

So Stephen wrote several stories for his then website called Investigative Voice. With little to go on and not much information from police, he really couldn’t dig into the story. And then came a ruling on the case, which would change everything. A ruling from an agency Stephen was quite familiar with.

Stephen Janis:

A critical backdrop in these cases is often The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. If the medical examiner rules it a homicide, then the case cannot be ignored. But if they rule it, say an accident or natural, well, in a city like Baltimore that has more than its fair share of homicides, it’s unusual for police to move in. And then of course, there’s the most difficult category called undetermined, which puts everything in limbo.

Taya Graham:

And Stephen, we both had a run-in with that office. I remember when we were working on the Truth and Reconciliation podcast for WYPR, we produced a show on the death of five sex workers, which also remains unsolved. And we talked about your challenges investigating that case.

And we discussed the large number of cases ruled undetermined by the Chief Medical Examiner, Dr. David Fowler. And they didn’t like our report because we specifically discussed them in the context that using that category was by comparison, excessive, to say the least. And just a note, for those who don’t know, undetermined deaths can be best described as unclassified deaths. The medical examiner has four options to rule a so-called manner of death, accident, suicide, natural causes, and homicide.

But again, what was unusual about our then medical examiner, Dr. David Fowler, was that he ruled an unusually high number of cases, undetermined, which we both raised questions about in our podcast and definitely prompted some pushback. But before we go into depth about Dr. Fowler, Stephen, let’s talk about what happened next.

Stephen Janis:

So yeah, we’re kind of waiting for the medical examiner’s opinion as journalists because that’s what often determines what police will do next. If the case is ruled a homicide, they have no choice to investigate it. But if it’s ruled something else, there’s not much that’s going to be done. There’s tons of murders in Baltimore, so they’ll move on.

Taya Graham:

But in this case, that’s not what happened. That’s because The Office of the State Medical Examiner ruled Emily’s death in accident. Stephen, tell us about the medical examiner rule in this case.

Stephen Janis:

Well, it was the standard analysis of injuries saying that she fell from a height. And that’s obvious because she definitely fell from that trash chute. But what it didn’t talk about was how she got there or any of the mystery surrounding it. So it was your standard very, I think, yeah, sure you can say that, but why didn’t you go deeper?

And I think that’s the problem. It talked about some of her scratches on her hands. And the injuries were all related to a fall, but it didn’t ask how did she actually get through that thing. And kind of what you brought up, what kind of injuries would you sustain if you’d been pushed through a trash kind of thing. And she also went through a compactor. So it was a very, very, I think, cursory examination of the case.

Taya Graham:

Stephen, I have to ask, you noticed that there could have been a deeper analysis. Was there any sort of toxicology report done?

Stephen Janis:

Yeah, there was toxicology and she had alcohol in her system. But they only tested for things like alcohol and cocaine and some narcotics. But all she had was alcohol. So she was at the time, perhaps intoxicated, although you can’t always tell when the body is found and when things decay. But yes, she had alcohol, so that’s all, nothing else.

Taya Graham:

And so with the police and the medical examiners insisting that Emily died as a result of an accident, the case was all but closed. But the story wasn’t over because that phone call years later changed everything. All that coming up on the next episode of The Land of the Unsolved.

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Taking a major step toward improved public transparency regarding the city’s use of tax incentives to spur development, the Baltimore Finance Board approved a resolution this week that will require the city to post critical data about the costs and benefits of one particularly controversial tax break. 

Sponsored by Comptroller Bill Henry, the resolution will require the city to produce an annual report aggregating a wide swath of financial information on what are known as TIFs, or tax increment financing deals. 

TIFs give decades’ worth of future property taxes to developers in advance, the total amount of which is calculated based on projections of how much revenue the new property will generate. The city raises the funds to pay for TIFs by issuing long-term bonds, which the developer pays back using property taxes generated by the new development. 

This means that, in order to finance a TIF, the city forgoes any new revenue from the property for decades. However, as we have reported on extensively, for all the money the city diverts to developers (and away from the general fund) in the form of tax break instruments like TIFs, the criteria for calculating the size of these tax breaks—and the system for retroactively evaluating whether or not Baltimore and its residents actually benefit from them—are opaque at best (and non-existent at worst). 

The reporting requirements outlined in Henry’s resolution include the total amount a developer has received from TIF proceeds to build a project, cumulative interest payments for each development, and the total aggregate sum the city has borrowed to finance TIF projects to date. 

But it also drills down into some details of TIF spending that have otherwise been difficult to obtain.

For example, the resolution requires reporting on administrative expenses—such as legal fees and analysis costs—which result from issuing the bonds that finance TIFs. It also includes a side-by-side comparison of how actual spending by developers on the project compares to the original estimates presented when the TIF was approved. 

In total, the resolution will require the city’s Board of Finance to post roughly ten sets of data on TIFs on its website every year. 

After a finance board meeting this week, Henry said the resolution will provide residents of Baltimore a centralized database to monitor the status of TIFs. He also hopes it will answer one of the fundamental questions surrounding the city’s extensive use of tax breaks: are they delivering on the benefits promised when the city approved them?

“What I hope it does is what we have been moving towards,” Henry said. “The idea that all of this information about development incentives that the city is providing in an effort to build out tax base… all that information should not just be public information, but it should be as accessible and available as possible.” 

Originally, TIFs were designed to stimulate development in areas that were considered blighted.  However, Baltimore has used TIFs to spur growth in already prosperous neighborhoods like Harbor Point, a waterfront property bordered by the already affluent neighborhoods of Fells Point and Harbor East.  

In Tax Broke, TRNN’s ongoing series of investigations into Baltimore’s reliance on tax breaks to fuel development, we examine the lack of transparency surrounding TIFs and other tax incentives.

The centerpiece of the series is a documentary outlining the history of the city’s struggle to grow, and the process by which incentives created to attract residents and new development have led to burgeoning costs to taxpayers, and little transparency on the final price tag or the performance of the projects financed with tax breaks.

The film also documents how a similar bill aimed at analyzing the benefits of TIFs was introduced by Councilwoman Odette Ramos last year. However, the bill failed to pass out of committee. 

Henry said his proposal was a first step towards shedding more light on the process of using TIFs as a development tool. He also hopes it will prompt the city to delve deeper into the details of how TIF money is actually spent, which he believes has thus far been lacking: “The way the system is currently set up, the Board of Finance is the only body that continues to monitor TIFs after they’re approved.”

Henry also said he is hoping that more work will be done to publicly vet substantive changes to construction plans that occur during development. He pointed to the yet-to-be-built greenspace promised during the approval of one of the city’s largest TIFs, the $105 million incentive for the development of Harbor Point in 2012. 

“Things like public amenities got pushed to the end of the project, like Point Park,” Henry said, referring to a still-to-be-built park encompassing the outer edge of the Harbor Point site. 

“The total amount being spent on greenspace is significantly less than initially approved,” he added. 

Henry qualified that the decreased amount spent on greenspace was due to spending on a bridge that connects Harbor Point to Central Avenue. Still, he asserted that these types of changes—changes that significantly alter the public component stipulated in the city’s approval of a TIF—will receive more public scrutiny in the future. “That was never a conversation that had to happen under the current process.”

Harbor Point is a private, mixed-use development encompassing 27 acres of prime waterfront real estate. The property is also the site of the Maryland headquarters of energy giant Exelon. 

Currently, the city has more than a dozen active TIFs that were awarded for projects that are already built or are in development. According to the city’s most recent Comprehensive Annual Financial Report, or CAFR, the city has committed roughly $580 million in future property taxes to TIF projects. That includes roughly $242 million in interest.

When it comes to putting a price tag on Baltimore’s expansive list of tax incentives for developers, even a simple request for financial data can lead to complicated answers. City officials learned this the hard way when they asked the Maryland Department of Environment (MDE) for data on what was being spent on cleaning up contaminated sites that have earned a lucrative tax break known as a Brownfields tax credit. 

Instead of sharing the data, the MDE forced the city to file a Maryland Public Information Act request in order to access it. The request also prompted state officials to reveal that the program is not required to track remediation costs for these cleanups. 

“The Land Restoration Program has repeatedly informed the city that we do not have costs of remediation for projects,” MDE spokesman Jay Apperson told TRNN when asked why the city had to file an MPIA request. “MDE’s Land Restoration Program’s responsibility is to review the assessment and remediation of sites. The program neither asks for nor is provided with cost information for remediation.” 

The revelation that the state does not tabulate what property owners are spending to clean up contaminated sites comes as city officials have expressed frustration with the increasingly costly tax credit. Baltimore grants roughly $20 million annually to developers who qualify for the credit, and the city must also pay into a state program that funds remediation across Maryland. However, finance officials have little control over who receives the credit and how much the incentive benefits Baltimore in return.  

Concerns over the rising cost of the credit and how it was being used by developers was the subject of an internal memo circulated among the top staff of Mayor Brandon Scott’s administration in 2021. 

“According to conversations with BDC, most of the City can technically qualify as a brownfield due to small traces of toxic material that can be found in soils from prior industrial uses. As such, the State does not designate individual parcels as brownfields before development begins,” the memo outlines.

“Instead, builders eye land that is ripe for development, and then get the parcel certified as a brownfield site through MDE. This turns the intent of the program on its head. Instead of compensating builders for performing clean ups of known contaminated sites, it allows developers to purchase land and then perform the minimum cleanup effort in order to qualify for a generous credit,” the memo argued.

The increasing costs and lack of data on what’s being spent to reclaim contaminated property prompted the city to ask MDE for data. Apperson explained the city was asked to file a MPIA request — an unusual demand of a municipality seeking information — due to the breadth and scope of information the city asked the agency to provide. “The Land Restoration Program often provides information without a PIA request, however this request was large, for files — related to, initially, 14 sites, later about 28 sites — requiring time and resources,” Apperson wrote in an email to TRNN.

Questions of just how much the city benefits from the Brownfields tax credit was first highlighted by a TRNN report which revealed the state application for one of the most controversial recipients, the luxurious Four Seasons Hotel and condominiums, did not include costs for remediation. The application resulted in Brownfields credits worth roughly $10.5 million: $6.8 million for the condos atop the hotel and $3.4 million for the hotel itself. However, the application revealed that in 2007 the developer’s lawyer told state officials there was no contamination on the planned site of the building.

“Prior environmental evaluations, several rounds of sampling and analysis, and environmental monitoring during construction through late 2007, did not indicate environmental contamination within the site boundary,” the lawyer wrote in an affidavit. MDE officials said that construction can serve as remediation. For example, Apperson noted while building the Four Seasons parking garage traces of chromium were found in the water near a slurry wall. Thus building the wall itself would count as remediation, he said.

Recently the cost of Brownfields credits awarded to developers in Baltimore has exploded, rising roughly 154% over the past five years. The total cost to the city’s budget has more than doubled from $8 million annually in 2016 to $20 million in 2020, according to a report commissioned by the city to study tax breaks.

The program was authorized by the Maryland state legislature in 1997 to encourage developers to remediate property that was contaminated by past industrial use. It grants a 50% tax break for five years for certified properties, and 10 years if the project is located in an Enterprise Zone, another tax credit that incentivizes commercial development in impoverished neighborhoods.

The lack of transparency around the Brownfields tax credit is examined in “Tax Broke,” a broader TRNN investigation into Baltimore’s reliance on tax breaks to fuel development. The series includes a documentary outlining the history of the city’s struggle to grow, and how incentives created to attract residents and new development has led to burgeoning costs and little transparency on the final price tag or the performance of the projects financed with tax breaks.

The investigation found that the system for awarding tax incentives is plagued by lax transparency and little, if any, analysis on the performance of the projects that receive them. The cost of Baltimore’s tax credits and subsidies is now coming under new scrutiny as the city faces an unexpected increase in state requirements on spending for education. Under the Kirwan Blueprint for Education, a revised formula requires the city to spend an additional $79.4 million on local education for fiscal year 2024, six times more than expected. City officials have called the increased spending a “gut punch.”

Tax breaks such as TIFs, PILOTS, Brownfields Credits, Enterprise Zone Tax credits are used by corporate developers across the country to defer millions worth of property taxes for decades while working class property owners pay the full tax rate. TRNN reporters Taya Graham, Stephen Janis, and longtime Baltimore reporter Jayne Miller take a deep dive into this wealth creation mechanism that remains out of the hands of the people and leaves city taxpayers on the hook.

Transcript

Taya Graham:  Hello, my name is Taya Graham, and welcome to The Inequality Watch. Now, before we go any further, I know you’re used to seeing me on the Police Accountability Report, but as we always make clear on that show, bad economic policy drives bad policing, and that’s why Stephen and I produce a show called The Inequality Watch. It’s like the Police Accountability Report in that it’s all about holding power accountable, but in this case, we focus on the uber rich, not cops. And what could be wrong with that?

Anyway, on today’s show, we’re going to be talking about a long-term investigative project we’ve been working on that gets to the heart of why the rich keep getting richer and the rest of us, well, you know the rest of that story. It’s actually a project that touches on greed, government, a political economy that boils down to something you’ve probably never thought of as an instrument of wealth: an acronym. That’s right. A couple of letters put together actually spells big profits for developers.

Now, I know right now you’re saying, how can a few letters from the alphabet strung together mean big wealth through tax breaks? Well, that’s the mystery we’re going to unpack today. And to do so, I’m joined by two of the best investigative reporters in the business who have been doing a deep dive into this little inequality machine.

But first, I need all the PAR viewers to make a slight adjustment for me, at least for the moment; Stephen is going to be inside. Not for long, of course, but just for now. And of course, legendary reporter Jayne Miller can sit wherever she wants. Okay, now we’ve gotten that out of the way.

Now, like I was saying, broad economic inequality is not only widespread, but in some respects hidden. What I mean is that the processes that can heighten inequality can sometimes be cloaked inside what otherwise seems like the routine, everyday, onward march of capitalism. Case in point is what we uncovered in Baltimore and beyond regarding a tax break system that is emblematic of how our country’s inequality machine works. It’s a system for enriching developers we started uncovering as we began digging into how several apparently upscale projects are financed.

What we’ve learned is that innocuous little acronyms like TIFs or PILOTs were basically being used to exempt rich developers from paying property taxes in big cities like Baltimore and small towns alike. And the deeper we went, the more alarming this process became, because we learned that beyond all the money flowing to the elite from poor cities like Baltimore, there’s literally no transparency about how much, exactly, these breaks were worth and what they were bringing back to the city.

That’s why, five years ago, Stephen and I started to work on an investigative documentary about what we learned. It’s called Tax Broke, and it tells a story of how decades of bad public policy have created a frankly absurd situation where the wealthy developers pay little or no property tax while the working class shoulders the burden. Recently, to help us dig deeper into the numbers, we were joined by investigative reporter Jayne Miller, which led to us uncovering even more inconsistencies and red flags with this system.

But before we get to our discussion, I want to set the scene, so to speak, by showing you a clip from the documentary. And we focus on a high profile redevelopment of Port Covington, a piece of land situated near downtown Baltimore that Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank wanted to turn into a shining city by the Patapsco River. Let’s watch.

[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]

Taya Graham:  After the death of Freddie Gray in police custody, the world watched as my city, Baltimore, burned. Some called it an uprising.

Speaker 1:  And there’s such a fear, a real trembling in the boots of elites at the top when poor people straighten their backs up.

Taya Graham:  Others, a reckoning.

Speaker 2:  We have become the most punitive nation in the world. We have constructed a penal system unprecedented in world history.

Taya Graham:  But the anger on the streets was not just about policing. It was also a cry of desperation from residents who had lived with staggering poverty for decades.

Speaker 3:  Because he lives in a community that historically has been abandoned. He grew up in housing that has lead paint, and then the whole uprising afterward and the community saying, no more, we’re not taking this nonsense anymore.

Taya Graham:  Which made what happened next profound.

Speaker 4:  So my office began working with Sagamore Development months ago to make sure that all of the people of Baltimore benefited from Port Covington.

Taya Graham:  Less than a year after the unrest, the city rushed a deal through the council to approve a $660 million tax incentive, known as a TIF, to Kevin Plank, the billionaire founder of Under Armour, to build a luxury city on the water.

Speaker 5:  Because the TIF was so huge, it’s the fourth biggest TIF, I think the third biggest private sector TIF in US history, the biggest TIF this side of the Mississippi, we couldn’t ignore it.

Taya Graham:  My reporting partner, Stephen Janis, and I followed the story. But despite all the promises and protests, the deal was approved.

Speaker 6:  For all the money that’s being poured into Baltimore City, it’s just not coming out to us. It’s not enough coming out to us.

Taya Graham:  And that wasn’t the only tax break fueling construction downtown. Another type of incentive, known as a PILOT, was approved for all new apartment buildings with more than 20 units just before the uprising. A move prompting a massive build out of luxury apartments, all amid a public housing crisis, when advocates struggled to get the city to set aside a small sum to build affordable housing.

Speaker 7:  We need for our city leaders to be more than leaders at the podium, we need for them to join us in this great cause.

Taya Graham:  And so in a city where a young Black child has less of a chance of making it out of poverty than a child in many Third World countries, people who were already rich seemingly got richer.

[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]

Taya Graham:  But that is just the beginning of the story. And to break down what we’ve learned since we started this and how we’ll move forward with our investigation, I’m joined by Stephen Janis and Jayne Miller. Thank you both for joining us.

Stephen Janis:  Thanks for having us.

Taya Graham:  So, because there’s a debate about whether a TIF is a tax break or a tax subsidy and who benefits, just tell me, what is a TIF?

Stephen Janis:  Well, a TIF is something known as Tax Increment Financing. But the basic idea and how it was created was simply to take abandoned properties in big cities that no one wanted to build on and find a way to incentivize development. And what came out of that was this idea that any new value created would be exempt from taxes, and the tax that would normally be paid would be used to invest in the property. But it’s the mechanism of how this works that makes it really, really beneficial and difficult to judge as being used as originally designed.

And primarily, what I mean by that, is they don’t say, for example, estimate what it would cost to build infrastructure or something on a site. What they do is just estimate some conflated future value of the project, and then give the property developer all the future taxes, sometimes 30 or 40 years, upfront. They use Wall Street to finance this, so Wall Street makes tons of money with what we’ve learned are much more expensive bonds than they would normally use.

And thus creating this great wealth inflater for developers. And especially in Baltimore, because you look at Harbor Point, for example, the developer made a lot of money selling this property, but all of it was financed by the public taxpayers. It’s all financed by public dollars. And that’s basically what happens. Because if you get that much property tax in advance, you’re pretty much getting all the money you need to do to finance the deal. So it is public financing of private profit, basically.

Taya Graham:  So Jayne, development is actually important for a city.

Jayne Miller:  Absolutely.

Taya Graham:  Why did you decide to dig in and investigate this?

Jayne Miller:  Well, look, everybody wants good development that benefits everybody or has great benefit for the city. So the question that we have raised in the work we’ve done is in Baltimore, is it fair, is it equitable, and is there benefit beyond the particular project itself? And so what we’ve found is that the subsidy that is going on in the city of Baltimore, what we’re really doing is subsidizing already valuable property, first of all, and affluent development. So we have tax credits that are available to apartment builders who are building these high-end apartment buildings, without any component or any real intention here on affordable housing. So I think, yes, development is good – If it is fair, if it is equitable, and it serves a greater good.

Taya Graham:  Well, Stephen, this doesn’t just happen in a city like Baltimore. It happens in small towns too. It happens even in larger cities. So can you talk a little bit about some of our investigative reporting and what it revealed in Milton, West Virginia, which has roughly 2,500 people?

Stephen Janis:  You would think that this type of tax credit would only be something that a big city could take advantage of, because what would be the point? But what we found doing reporting across the country, was that very small, poor communities are offering these kinds of lucrative tax breaks to spur development, and one would say, questionable development. In this case, in Milton, West Virginia, there was a failed coal baron named Jeff Hoops, who had bankrupt Blackjewel Coal, which had left coal miners, who had actually already received paychecks, had them clawed back from their accounts. So he caused a huge big mess. But at the same time, a small town in Cabo County, West Virginia, named Milton, was giving him a $15 million tax break to build… I don’t think they titled it ironically, but the Grand Patrician Hotel. I mean, given what we’re talking about.

And like Baltimore, a poor city, a city struggling with concentrated poverty, people making $22,000 annually, per annum, per house, much lower than the national average in Cabell County, about 40,000, about half the national average. Very poor county, very poor people. And yet, they used this lucrative tax break for a guy who had just bankrupted his company.

Now, this was in 2018, but we came upon this in 2021, and the hotel was just still sitting there like a shell. And we also uncovered that after we started reporting, they gave him the tax rate after the original bank that was supposed to handle the deal had resigned without comment. So these things just perpetuate themselves.

We found that the firm that was supposed to be reporting back to the taxpayers was also paid by Jeff Hoops, a law firm. But the reason I bring this up, it sounds sort of like inside baseball, but the point is, these are all interconnected. There’s no outside authority, as Jayne was saying, there’s no objective, transparent analysis of what we’re getting for our money. And that, I think, is intentional.

Taya Graham:  So Jayne, I know this is also happening in bigger cities like Chicago. Can you talk a little bit about what’s happening with TIFs there?

Jayne Miller:  Well, first, yes. First of all, let’s start with Chicago. The Tax Increment Financing was used so extensively, it covered a whole bunch of the land of Chicago. So recently, within the past couple of years, the mayor of Chicago actually set up an oversight commission to keep an eye on and to oversee and supervise the use of Tax Increment Financing. This is something that, in Baltimore, would be extraordinarily useful, is to have real oversight of the use of this kind of financing.

As we sit here, according to the most recent annual financial report for the city of Baltimore, the city has already committed to almost $600 million in diversion of property taxes over coming years to pay off the TIF bonds. And that’s a growing number, because more bonds get sold as these projects go forward. So it would be very useful and serve the goal of transparency if there was greater oversight of the use of these kinds of subsidies, tax breaks, tax credits, et cetera so that, A, you how much you’re diverting from the general fund, and you start to ask the question, what are we getting for it?

Taya Graham:  Right.

Stephen Janis:  And just to add to what Jayne said, there’s not a day that goes by that Jayne doesn’t call me and say, I found another one [Jayne and Taya laugh]. And when I say that, I mean another weird tax break that wasn’t really used as intended, that was saving developers more money, but also making all this impossible to figure out the big picture, as you say in the documentary, what are we really paying? We don’t know.

Taya Graham:  Well, why don’t you drill down a little bit into what’s actually happening here in our city, Baltimore, with TIFs?

Stephen Janis:  Well, with TIFs, we started out small with small TIF projects, Jayne, right, like Belvedere Square –

Jayne Miller:  20 years ago or so. Right.

Stephen Janis:  But then suddenly, someone got the idea that the whole way to transform Baltimore was to be offered larger and larger TIFs, namely Harbor Point, which is about $108 million – On face value deal, not including interest. And then Port Covington, which was a $600 million, I think at that time, the fourth largest in the history of the country. So it’s really grown into it.

And what Jayne and I have uncovered is around that grows an industry meant to make it, keep it going. Like the firm MuniCap, which is supposed to analyze these deals for the taxpayers and say whether they are necessary. But turns out, we found that MuniCap also gets paid when the bonds are issued for the TIFs. So they say, hey, this is great, and then they collect on this great thing that they say was great.

Jayne Miller:  Working both sides of the deal.

Stephen Janis:  Right, working both sides of the deal. So Baltimore has developed this culture of TIFs, this culture of developers. And Jayne, maybe you can talk about this, where developers feel entitled to these tax breaks.

Jayne Miller:  Well, I think this is really an important point of the culture that is created when a city increasingly uses and awards tax breaks. This really started in earnest in Baltimore in the mid to late ’90s with this extraordinary tax break for the construction of a hotel in a waterfront community, Harbor East, where the developer, who happens to be the baker John Paterakis, who’s also a developer, was awarded a tax break that had him paying a dollar per year, $1 per year in property tax for 25 years. This is still in effect. And so tens of millions of dollars have not been paid, have been abated on this particular project.

And from there, in the late ’90s, early 2000s, we really started this practice, this culture of awarding tax subsidy and tax breaks to developers mostly on the waterfront, which is Baltimore City’s most valuable land, no question, is on the waterfront. And the argument that many can make is that we don’t need to subsidize land that’s already valuable and is already appealing. Other developers would do this without all these tax breaks. And that’s the question that has been avoided for years in Baltimore as the number of these credits and new credits have been brought on board, have been implemented, which is, do we really need to do what we’re doing?

Taya Graham:  Well, you know what, I wanted to ask you, Stephen mentioned Port Covington, which was supposed to be developed by Under Armour CEO, founder, Kevin Plank.

Jayne Miller:  Yeah, very well known company, correct.

Taya Graham:  So can you talk a little bit about what we saw with that particular TIF and what the status of the project is now?

Jayne Miller:  Well, this was a big debate in 2016 about awarding this $660 million Tax Increment Financing deal to build out this piece of waterfront property in the very Southern tip of Baltimore City. And it started out with this grand concept of what it was going to be, with big Under Armour headquarters, et cetera. So as the years went on since 2016, they didn’t sell the first bonds under the TIF deal until 2020. So the construction has started, and some buildings are under construction, but at the moment it does not look anywhere near what it looked like in the original concept. And I think at this point, I think there are four or five buildings that are nearly built. I think at this point it’s a reasonable question to ask, is what’s ahead for this project in comparison to the way it was sold? It’s already been renamed from Port Covington to Baltimore Peninsula. It is an isolated part of the city.

Stephen Janis:  Not integrated [crosstalk].

Jayne Miller:  Right. City planners are going to argue, look, you kind of want your development to integrate and to have a spillover effect to surrounding communities so it has a greater benefit. In this case, this is an entirely isolated parcel of land, actually hard to get to because of Interstate 95, and it is not exactly connected to other communities and to other parts of the city. So it’s going to be very interesting in the next couple of years to see what that really ends up being.

Taya Graham:  Well, Stephen, these aren’t the only tax breaks that you’ve been looking at, right?

Stephen Janis:  Oh, not at all. We have so many in process right now. We have the former Perkins Homes, which was a low income housing complex right near Fells Point, and very approximate to Harbor East. That is now part of a massive TIF which is just unfolding, which has required them to build more luxury apartments than before. And then we have Harbor Point, which is still always ongoing. We also have what is called a PILOT, a Payment in Lieu of Taxes, that is available to all new apartment buildings. So almost any new apartment building over 20 units that you see in Baltimore is getting a 10-year tax break.

Taya Graham:  Wow.

Stephen Janis:  Yeah, so we’ve been looking into other buildings. And I don’t know, Jayne, if you want to talk about the brownfields a little bit?

Jayne Miller:  Well, we’re looking further, there is a credit that is offered by the state and then the city reimburses for it for brownfields. This just has to do with environmental damage. And a city like Baltimore, within all its industrial uses, et cetera, et cetera, you could argue the whole city is like a brownfield. But there have been some questions raised to us, and kind of encouraged us to really look at this, so that we’re looking at the use of that particular credit.

We also have enterprise zone credits. Again, a city like Baltimore would have a lot of enterprise zone credit territory.

Stephen Janis:  Which is credit that was created about 30 years ago that’s supposed to assist, give companies benefits to create jobs in poor neighborhoods. But right now, like the brownfields, the entire city is almost technically an [inaudible].

Taya Graham:  So wait a second. How far does this rabbit hole go [all laugh]? I mean, what’s happening here?

Jayne Miller:  You know it’s a rabbit hole because there’s no transparency of the rabbit. Now we have a situation where these credits are just kind of awarded. Back in the day, when they started, there would be city council hearings. In fact, the first one, which I talked about, was the hotel, the Payment in Lieu of Tax agreement with the hotel, that was a big deal. Controversial, we had hearings. That’s all gone away, and now it’s just kind of a standard operating procedure. This is the way we do business.

Stephen Janis:  Yeah, it’s more like an entitlement system.

Jayne Miller:  Right. It’s exactly right.

Stephen Janis:  It’s entitlement.

Jayne Miller:  You build a certain kind of building, you get this credit. You build somewhere in this particular place and you could try to claim this kind of credit. There’s no process, there’s very little oversight, and it’s very difficult to find on a year to year basis, okay, so how much money’s involved?

And most of all the, they’re supposed to, the goal here is, okay, we’re going to do this development, it’s going to create jobs. Well, okay, temporary construction jobs, sure. But then beyond that, what’s the impact? Has it increased the employment base, the tax base, and the population base of Baltimore City? And that’s a big question, as since 2010, we’ve lost 35,000 people, and we continue to lose population.

Taya Graham:  You know what, in fact, I want to show you what kind of rabbit hole we are going down. Let’s run a video clip of a city council meeting we attended where a very modest study of these tax breaks were proposed, and we were rather surprised by the results.

[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]

Speaker 8:  This legislation requires that the Department of Finance produce a report about the impact of our Tax Increment Financing projects and policies so far. Examination of some of the reasons why some have failed. I had one in my district that failed.

Speaker 9:  I question studies because I, through projects within my district, when we get studies, it seems to continue to delay and delay the project.

Speaker 10:  So I see the TIFs already working. We should not be doing this, but right now the TIF works.

Speaker 11:  Okay. Is there a motion to move the bill favorably as amended? Seconded by Dorsey, Costello’s a no, Burnett?

Speaker 12:  Yes.

Speaker 11:  Dorsey?

Speaker 13:  Yes.

Speaker 11:  McCray? This bill fails with four votes in opposition, three in support. Okay, next bill…

Jayne Miller:  Did you just see that?

Stephen Janis:  Yeah. Yeah.

Jayne Miller:  Did you just see that shit?

Stephen Janis:  How often does it happen when a council votes against a colleague who just has something, wants a report on something?

Jayne Miller:  I don’t know. I’ve only been here for two years. I’m sure it’s happened before.

Stephen Janis:  You seemed upset though.

Jayne Miller:  Oh, I’m pissed. I’m really upset. I mean, I had no inclination that there was going to be any problem.

[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]

Taya Graham:  So Jayne, you’ve been covering City Hall for a few decades.

Jayne Miller:  Long time.

Taya Graham:  Were you surprised by what you saw there?

Jayne Miller:  That day? I was kind of texting with someone else, one of the business reporters in town, about going, and I hear this kind of out of one ear, I hear these no votes. I’m like, wait a minute. They just defeated this. This is a simple thing. This was a study, $30,000 study. The administration in the mayor’s office had already approved they were going to do it. Just to look at the effectiveness, to get some information about whether Tax Increment Financing was beneficial to the greater good. That’s really what it was. I don’t think it was going to be any big deal. They voted it down, never got out of committee. Not the first time that this has happened.

Back 10 years ago, there was a bill to set up an oversight panel for tax breaks, et cetera, and never got out of committee. There has been this baffling reluctance in the city to really have a mechanism of transparency and oversight of these kinds of subsidies.

Taya Graham:  Stephen and Jayne, I have to ask, where is this investigation going to take you next?

Stephen Janis:  Well, we’re about 50 feet down the rabbit hole right now [Taya and Jayne laugh], so I think another 100 feet. But what I think, while we were saying there is no transparency and there is no number, in the documentary we do some numbers, and we’re just going to keep pushing to complete this picture. Like a puzzle, we’re just going to keep getting the pieces. Where I think it’s leading is we’re going to learn that, pretty much, if we have a tax break variety store for developers. You go and say, hmm, do I want a brownfields credit or do I want an enterprise zone credit? What do you think?

Jayne Miller:  Or something that you got both of them.

Stephen Janis:  What looks good? Oh yeah, [crosstalk].

Jayne Miller:  They’re different things. Right. Exactly.

Stephen Janis:  And our main goal here is to disrupt that little store they have going on where they give a politician $500 to go and pick out a tax break. It makes no sense. It’s not good economic policy even if you want.

And also looking deeply into other alternatives to how this can be done, how we can tax a city fairly so that the residents of this city and other small towns aren’t paying higher taxes than the wealthiest people in the nation. So we’re really going to keep looking down the hole.

Taya Graham:  All right. Well, I want to thank you both so much for joining me. Thank you, Stephen Janis.

Stephen Janis:  Thanks for having me.

Taya Graham:  And thank you, Jayne Miller.

Jayne Miller:  Thank you, Taya.

Taya Graham:  We appreciate you so much.

Jayne Miller:  A lot of work to do. That’s right.

Taya Graham:  Absolutely.

Now this is just the beginning of the story. There is so much more reporting to do and, frankly, facts to uncover that the public officials just don’t want you to know. And along with frequent updates on our reporting, we’ll be posting the full documentary of Tax Broke with a live chat right here in a few months on the Real News YouTube channel.

But what I want to make clear today is that what we’re actually doing here is deconstructing the narrative that being rich is being better. In other words, accumulating cash is a reflection of a certain type of superiority that justifies the bad policy which makes it possible. Which is why we’re going to use our reporting and the documentary and these shows to hit back at that same narrative. We are going to change the story, or, perhaps put better, offer a more fair and accurate way the story is told. And we will achieve this by holding the hoarders of extraordinary wealth and the power that comes with it accountable.

I’d like to thank my guests, Stephen Janis and Jayne Miller, for their incredible investigative reporting. My name is Taya Graham, and I’m your host of The Inequality Watch. Thanks for joining me.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Thank you so much for watching The Real News Network, where we lift up the voices, stories, and struggles that you care about most. And we need your help to keep doing this work. So please, tap your screen now, subscribe, and donate to The Real News Network. Solidarity forever.

The online sales pitch for the condominiums atop The Four Seasons Hotel in Baltimore’s swanky Harbor East development touts a plethora of amenities: a private sauna, rooftop pool, and balconies with panoramic views of the city. But one particularly pricey perk is overlooked: a lucrative five-year property tax break that has saved the project millions of dollars in payments.

To procure the abatement, the project developers made use of an incentive program that seems far removed from the condos perched high above the city’s Inner Harbor. The tax break in question was designed to incentivize the reclamation of land contaminated by the vestiges of the city’s industrial past; however, in an internal memorandum obtained by TRNN, finance officials argued it has strayed far from its intended purpose.

Known as the Brownfields Revitalization Incentive, the program was authorized by the Maryland state legislature in 1997 to encourage developers to remediate property that was contaminated by past industrial use. It grants a 50% tax break for five years for certified properties, and ten years if the project is located in an Enterprise Zone. 

Records show that, for more than two decades, the program in Baltimore was used sporadically, but recently the cost of Brownfields credits awarded to developers in Baltimore has exploded, rising roughly 154% over the past five years. The total cost to the city’s budget has more than doubled from $8 million annually in 2016 to $20 million in 2020, according to a report commissioned by the city to study tax breaks.

For The Four Seasons, making use of this program has proven to be particularly lucrative.  

Since 2016, the credit has saved the project, consisting of 60 luxury condos, a total $6.8 million in property taxes. The hotel, which charges more than $600 per night for a room, also received a break worth roughly $3.4 million, thanks to a Brownfields Tax Credit. In total, both the condos and hotel have received $10.5 million in property tax abatements.  

In fact, the Brownfields Tax Credit awarded to The Four Seasons was considered so lucrative city officials cited it by name in the internal memo obtained by TRNN. Circulated among senior staff of Mayor Brandon Scott’s administration in 2021, the document urged top officials to address the rising cost of the Brownfields program. In it, finance officials described a scenario that has provided fodder for ongoing criticisms of the city’s Byzantine process for awarding tax abatements—an uneven and often complicated tax system that favors developers over residents.

“The Four Seasons Hotel at 200 International Drive was granted a Brownfield Tax Credit, but later 60 additional private residential condominium units were built on top of the hotel and were also granted the credit,” the memo states.

“In effect, the owners’ of those condominiums are paying an effective property tax rate of 0.51% compared to the City’s base rate of 2.24%.” 

The Four Seasons is not the only property included on the Brownfields application filed in 2011. The Legg Mason building next door was also named in the application, utilizing the same consultant’s report that justified The Four Seasons incentive. But, city officials say, the Legg Mason building did not ultimately receive a credit. 

The Legg Mason building received a different kind of tax break: The building and the garage were awarded a PILOT (payment in lieu of tax agreement) in 2009. A report filed with the state said the PILOT saved at least $4.4 million in property taxes in 2021. Since tax records do not divulge incentives granted to a specific property, it is difficult to determine how much of the $4.4 million referenced in that report is due to a PILOT or Enterprise Zone tax credit, or if the total amount excludes either.  

This lack of transparency is another example of how the intricacies of the city’s system of awarding incentives is difficult to unpack and even harder to audit and assess. In fact, the Legg Mason property was the subject of a public records lawsuit filed by the Abell Foundation seeking the details of a profit-sharing agreement the city abandoned when majority interest in the building was sold for a record $165 million ($481 per square foot) in 2018.  

Last November, Baltimore City Circuit court Judge Lawrence Fletcher-Hill denied Abell’s request to make details of the deal public. Instead, the court allowed just two documents related to the sale to be viewed “in camera,” or in the presence of the judge. 

In the case of the Brownfields Tax Credit, city finance officials privately discussed how the incentives were not producing the desired effect. 

“According to conversations with BDC, most of the City can technically qualify as a brownfield due to small traces of toxic material that can be found in soils from prior industrial uses. As such, the State does not designate individual parcels as brownfields before development begins,” the report outlines.

“Instead, builders eye land that is ripe for development, and then get the parcel certified as a brownfield site through MDE. This turns the intent of the program on its head. Instead of compensating builders for performing clean ups of known contaminated sites, it allows developers to purchase land and then perform the minimum cleanup effort in order to qualify for a generous credit.”

The 2011 application for the Brownfields credit filed by the owners of The Four Seasons, obtained by TRNN through a Public Information request, raises questions about the process for obtaining a credit.

The documents reveal a series of environmental studies of the site that have been conducted over the past two decades, including a 1989 analysis that indicated the presence of chromium and lead contamination in the groundwater, likely due to known contamination of bay waters adjacent to the Allied Chemical Plant. But that study determined the contamination did not warrant further analysis. 

“Considering the groundwater of the site was not planned to be used, ATEC [the consultant] did not recommend further environmental study,” the report said.

Portions of the site were tested again in 2003. Those tests determined the soil and groundwater were “not significantly impacted by chromium.” 

In fact, the developer’s lawyer told state officials in 2007 there was no contamination. “Prior environmental evaluations, several rounds of sampling and analysis, and environmental monitoring during construction through late 2007, did not indicate environmental contamination within the site boundary,” the lawyer wrote in an affidavit. 

The law itself says a site qualifies for a Brownfields Tax Credit if it “is property that is contaminated or perceived to be contaminated.” It also stipulates that the current owner is “non-culpable,” or not responsible, for said contamination. How, given these stipulations prescribed in the statute, The Four Seasons condominium complex qualified to be designated a Brownfields site remains unclear.  

Maryland Department of Commerce Senior Director Andy Fish said his agency relies upon the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) to evaluate the eligibility of property. “We are reviewers for the process, not the facilitator,” he said. “Our role is to make sure all the letters are in place—and if this is all in place, they accept the property into the Brownfield property tax program and the letter of acceptance goes to the community and the state Department of Assessments and Taxation.”

The MDE did not respond to emails seeking comment on how The Four Seasons qualified for the incentive. Similarly, a lawyer for Harbor East developers did not respond to an email sent for comment.

The rising use of Brownfields Tax Credits, along with other tax breaks doled out to developers by the city, is the focus of an ongoing TRNN investigation into the city’s expansive system of tax incentives called “Tax Broke.” The project includes a documentary exploring the history behind the continuing policy of using tax credits to spur development in Baltimore, and how that policy has led to hundreds of millions in tax breaks for wealthy developers. We also found that key reports evaluating the effectiveness of several such programs had not been filed, as is required by law. 

The documentary examines how this lack of oversight has led to a sprawling system that enables properties to qualify for multiple incentives, often relying on tax breaks that are granted “by right” or without approval of the city council.

The film also documents the council’s reluctance to assess the impact of tax incentives specifically designed to entice developers. For instance, a council bill that would have authorized a modest $30,000 study of property tax abatements was voted down by a council committee by a 4-3 vote. The proposed analysis was designed to look at both PILOTS and TIFs (Tax Increment Financing). 

TIFs allow developers to invest future property taxes into a project. The incentive is calculated by estimating future property taxes for the development and then selling bonds to refund decades worth of payments. 

But how and if these incentives are a cost-effective means of reversing the city’s long decline remains an unanswered question. Part of the problem, as noted in the same internal memorandum obtained by TRNN, is the council’s reluctance to reassess subsidies, even when concerns were raised in the past. 

“Finance and BDC [Baltimore Development Corporation] were able to locate internal documents that show concerns were raised about this credit all the way back in 2005. However, these concerns were never translated into an executive or legislative action,” the memorandum outlines, adding that “The City Council has taken no legislative action on this credit at any time since its inception 22 years ago.”

Former Maryland state medical examiner Dr. David Fowler testified at the trial of police officer Derek Chauvin in 2021 that the cause of George Floyd’s death ought to be ruled “undetermined.” Hundreds of doctors across the country repudiated Fowler’s testimony and called for his previous rulings to be investigated. After an independent review of Fowler’s handling of 1300 cases of deaths in police custody, the State of Maryland is now reinvestigating 100 of these deaths. The 2018 death of Anton Black, a 19-year-old African American man, is included in the cases to be reviewed. Fowler ruled Black’s death an accident in spite of video footage showing three white police officers and one vigilante chasing the teen, tasering him, and pinning him to the ground for six minutes until he stopped breathing. In the latest episode of Land of the Unsolved, journalists Taya Graham, Stephen Janis, and Jayne Miller dig deeper into Dr. Fowler’s disturbing record, and the patterns it reflects in police killings across the nation.

Post-Production: Stephen Janis

Transcript

Stephen Janis: Anyone who watches crime dramas could reasonably conclude that when someone is murdered, barring bizarre and extenuating circumstances, the case is solved. That is through high-tech forensics, moral resolve, or simply the near mythic competence of American law enforcement, killers are ultimately sent to jail. But as an investigative reporter, who has worked in one of the most violent cities in the country for nearly 15 years, I can tell you this is not true.

Taya Graham: And that is the point of this podcast, because unsolved killings represent more than just statistics. It’s a psychic toll of stories untold that infects an entire community, the final violent moments of a victim’s life that remain shrouded in mystery.

Stephen Janis: I’m Stephen Janis.

Taya Graham: I’m Taya Graham.

Stephen Janis: And we are investigative reporters who live in Baltimore City.

Taya Graham: Welcome to the Land of the Unsolved.

Taya Graham: Hello, my name is Taya Graham, and welcome to the Land of the Unsolved, the podcast that explores both the consequences and politics of unsolved murders. Today, we’re going to be examining, not a specific case, but a person who works behind the scenes at a critical role, a juncture between the body on the street, and a murder investigation. It’s an often overlooked back office position that, actually, in Maryland, has become the center of controversy, which we will recap today along with my co-host, Stephen Janis and Jayne Miller, we’ll talk about the person who occupied this position here for roughly two decades. We’ll examine why how he ruled on cases is under intense scrutiny now. We will also explore some of his odd practices in the past that may have foreshadowed the future concerns that are now front and center, all that coming up on Land of the Unsolved. So Jayne, let’s start with you. What is a medical examiner and what role do they play in death? Investigations?

Jayne Miller: Well, they’re a critical element of a death investigation. A medical examiner performs an autopsy, and an autopsy is used to determine both cause of death and manner of death. So when you have a suspicious or questionable death, it’s up to the autopsy determine what were the factors that contributed to the death of an individual, and then was it suicide? Was it an accident? Was it homicide? And oftentimes, we see a finding of undetermined, which means there’s not enough information that the medical examiner could see or find to lead to a specific conclusion. But there is no question that an autopsy will guide an investigation. It will be the force as to whether it is a homicide investigation or if it is kind of close the book because the finding is suicide.

Taya Graham: So Jayne, I’m glad you brought up the manner of death. Because Stephen, I want to know, is there a difference between the cause of death versus the manner of death? And why is that so important?

Stephen Janis: Well, yes, there is. For example, just a good example. The medical examiner can cite something as a cause of death being a gunshot, but is that gunshot a suicide, self-inflicted, or is it a homicide? And so critical to these cases is the manner, because the manner, as Jayne said, will determine. So there are five manners of death, as Jayne said, undetermined, suicide, accident, natural and homicide. If a medical examiner, as Jayne points out, decides to rule something undetermined, for example, where they say, “Hey, we can’t determine what happened.” It pretty much can kill a case for a homicide detective or anyone investigating it, and there are many cases that we’ll get to that have had that sort of problem. But it gives the medical examiner the manner of death, gives him medical examiner tremendous power because that ruling, that final determination can really make, in the case of a lot of police involved, killings, make it impossible for prosecutors to move forward, so those five manners of death are critically important and that’s really where the rubber meets the road with the medical examiner.

Taya Graham: So Stephen, despite the fact that the Office of the Medical Examiner is normally not highlighted in our political conversations, our former medical examiner here in Maryland has been in the spotlight. Can you talk about why and who it was?

Stephen Janis: So his name is Dr. David Fowler, and he, I think, became Medical Examiner of Maryland. Now just a brief overview. There are two types of coroner medical examiner people that perform autopsies. One is elected, which is a coroner, which doesn’t really have to be a doctor. And then, in our state of Maryland has a medical examiner system, which is a person who’s appointed to supervise all autopsies for cases that require autopsies. So Dr. David Fowler was the head of that here for about 17 or 18 years in Maryland, and he really was worked behind the scenes. I don’t think he really… I mean, Jayne, would you say he became controversial in a broad sense, I think, it was more just for people like us who would push back on him.

Jayne Miller: Yeah, exactly. Reporters had more dealings with that office than the average person. But certainly, his testimony that would come in the George Floyd case is really what put him on the map in terms of his rulings.

Taya Graham: So Jayne, why don’t you tell me about some of the cases where Dr. Fowler’s rulings were found suspect, a great deal of those involved police in custody deaths?

Jayne Miller: There are questions about some of the rulings in Maryland. There’s a particular finding of, what’s called excited delirium. I did some stories related to this particular finding and the controversy around that finding and those cases in particular, which involve individuals who died in police custody, and these are not cases that involve a gunshot or something like that. Generally, we’re talking about people who died as a result of or during restraint. I’ll tell you about a case in particular that I actually uncovered in just a couple of years, like a year ago was a case that actually occurred in 2001 of an individual who was restrained by five or six police officers who essentially sat on him and according to their own reports, and he died. The ruling from the medical examiner’s office in Maryland was that it was a cocaine induced excited delirium, oftentimes excited delirium has that attachment of some kind of drug use at the same time, and the manner of death was left undetermined. So in that case, that means the case just kind of sits there.

I went back to that case in 2021 to really take a look at it and had Dr. Zerweck, who’s a pretty well known pathologist, take a look at it. Based on the autopsy, he said, this is positional asphyxia, and that is oftentimes, in these cases that are controversial with medical examiner rulings, what is overlooked? Is that a good way to put it or not written down or not found? Well that, and that I think becomes the question and why we are at this situation, at this juncture in Maryland where we have rulings from the medical examiner’s office during the tenure of David Fowler that are now under question.

Taya Graham: So I really appreciate that you mentioned excited delirium. Stephen, can you talk a little bit about what excited delirium is? I think it’s known as a state of mental and physical agitation where supposedly, a person is insensitive to cold, to pain or to even instruction. Can you describe what excited delirium is and what the science is behind this?

Stephen Janis: First of all, not to jump to the conclusion, but there is really no science. But to explain that. Let me paint a little picture about how my encounters with excited delirium.

During the OTS, there were a lot of taser related deaths for people who don’t know what tasers are, they’re sort of stunt guns, I guess, would be the best description, where they put a tremendous amount of voltage through your nervous system and kind of shut it down. During that time, I would head down to the medical examiner’s office. At that point, around University of Baltimore, it was kind of this black sort of building with blacked out where it was kind of eerie, actually. But the weird thing about it was that Dr. Fowler was kind of accessible. I don’t know, Jayne, if you ever had experience, but I could just walk in and knock on the door and I would get into, let’s call them debates, but with arguments with Dr. Fowler. Now, one thing people should know about him is he’s an interesting guy because he’s kind of got this Afrikaner accent. He’s from South Africa.

So he would come out and kind of give you these lofty statements, and I found it confusing. So one of my first debates with him was about this idea of excited delirium because he was ruling in these taser cases, the underlying cause. As we said before, the cause was cardiac arrhythmia. But then he would say, “But that’s only secondary to excited delirium.” And the point to me was that, I think, and Jayne, you can talk about this if you want, but I think the point was to kind of say that it wasn’t the taser that was responsible, and that’s why I got into fights with him about cardiac arrhythmia. So one day, I come in and I’m arguing with him about it and he says, “Here, Stephen. Here’s a book, and it was a book called Excited Delirium.”

I’m like, “Okay, I’m going to read this book because this will be interesting. This will give me all I need to know about excited delirium.” I open it up, and it says, “The basic science was rooted in this condition that would happen to people in the 19th century at sanatoriums, where they would inexplicably become excited over a period of several weeks and then eventually die.” And that was in the book that he gave me, and I came back to Dr. Fowler and I said, this can’t be true. You can’t be using this as your basis. And he just refused to back down. And he especially refused back down.

Now, later, when I looked into the whole taser issue, what was very interesting was that I talked to American Association of Medical Examiners, and he told me the taser would sue medical examiners who ruled that the primary cause of death was a taser and so there was fear in the community. So that kind of showed you that people in Fowler’s position are being buffeted by a lot of different forces that we don’t see. So that was my experience with Excited Delirium. Is there any signs? I don’t think so. From my research and what I’ve read about it’s totally BS. It has nothing to do with anything. But it has become a very convenient way to put a buffer between things like tasers or police behavior and the actual cause of death, in my opinion.

Jayne Miller: I can add a little bit to that, but based on a statement I used from the National Library of Medicine when I did this story in 2021, on the death of an individual, “Excited or agitated delirium is characterized by agitation, aggression, acute distress, and sudden death. But it is not a currently recognized medical or psychiatric diagnosis.” And this gets to this debate about, as Stephen has said, its use in really important cases, obviously involving police custody deaths. Now, in Maryland, there were, at the time, as of last year, there were about two dozen cases that had been ruled excited delirium involving police and custody deaths.

Taya Graham: So I just wanted to add something here to emphasize how subjective the diagnosis of excited delirium really is. This isn’t a problem just in the state of Maryland, in Colorado, since 2018 to about mid 2020, medics in Colorado dosed 902 people with ketamine for suffering from excited delirium. And later, investigation showed that these EMTs were administering ketamine at the behest of police who were trying to control a suspect. So this case was highlighted by the death of Elijah McClain in Colorado in 2019. So excited delirium is very often cited in cases where police officers are forcibly restraining someone, and it’s not just a problem in Maryland. It’s also a problem throughout the United States, this diagnosis.

Stephen Janis: It’s amazing to think about how something, as Jayne pointed out, is not a scientific diagnosis or even psychiatric diagnoses, ends up in tons and dozens of autopsies as a primary cause of death. It’s not just there to add a little flavor, it’s the primary cause of death in many cases.

Jayne Miller: And like I said, the thing that an autopsy does is it really guides an investigation. It steers it, probably a better term, it steers it. We can look at these cases that… The reason we’re talking about this is because these cases are now under review is to what really went on in them, what else does the evidence show, and how did that finding come to be? And there were used not just on this particular finding, this is just one of the findings that has raised questions under the tenure of David Fowler.

Taya Graham: Okay, so let’s recap. We have a controversial but very influential medical examiner, a person who thrusts themselves into the spotlight by testifying at the George Floyd trial, and now someone who is facing even more scrutiny from a panel, which is reviewing critical cases. But of course, this is the Land of the Unsolved. And there is another reason we want to talk about Dr. Fowler and the Medical Examiner’s Office, specifically some of the history Stephen, you, and Jayne had with Dr. Fowler long before it hit the spotlight. So Stephen, let me start with you. Can you talk about some of your encounters with Dr. Fowler and why you had, let’s say, some run-ins with him over time?

Stephen Janis: Working as a reporter, I think Jayne can attest to this. Well, actually, I’ve seen this in Jayne more than me and I’ve never seen it so intense in a person, but when you see something anomalous, you start to question it. You know you ask questions, you’re like, why is this? So Maryland, and specifically, Baltimore has a high homicide rate, but also we had these huge number of deaths that were put in that classification that Jayne just talked about, undetermined. I just kind of found it troubling.

When I checked other cities, we had a higher proportion of undetermined death than any other city of the similar size, like in Pittsburgh, and it’s a category, as Jayne said, we’re the medical examiner kind of throws up their hands and says, “We just don’t know.” And then when I probe deeper into it, there were a lot of cases. Some were gunshots, some were strangulations. It was all sorts of stuff that really raised questions, and here’s this big haystack of cases where there’s no determination by the medical examiner. So basically these cases are in sort of a limbo, which is not a good thing, and when that came really to focus for me was when a young woman named Tyra McClary was found with her legs tied in underneath some trash and some leaves.

Taya Graham: She was underneath trash and leaves found in an alley, partially disrobed with a trash bag tied around her ankles. This was a case that Dr. Fowler ruled was undetermined, as well as there was some evidence of possible strangulation.

Stephen Janis: That’s what really caught my attention, because in the autopsy, the medical examiner working for Dr. Fowler, who’d written, “Well, we can’t rule it out because there was a hemorrhage of the thyroid gland, there was a hemorrhage of one other gland…” Parietal, right. So they said, “You can’t rule out asphyxiation.” And I just thought to myself, how many cases are there like this? So I started probing into it, but of course, I ran into a lot of resistance because the Medical Examiner’s Office wouldn’t share with me, for example, the location of autopsies. So I couldn’t really track deaths. It was very hard to get an autopsy. I had to pay for it. My employer didn’t want to pay for a lot of autopsies. It was funny because at the time, I didn’t know Jayne, but the only other reporter who had reported on undetermined deaths that I could find in Baltimore was Jayne.

So he would come out with his Afrikaner accent and he would say, “These are mostly just drug addicts. It would be intellectually dishonest to say I knew exactly what happened because I don’t know how the drugs got into a person’s system.” Someone could have given them what’s known as a hotshot. So I’m not going to rule, I’m going to leave it open, even though the tradition was, throughout the country, was to actually say, “Hey, these are accidents because no one wants to die from doing drugs, and we’ll figure it out.”

Taya Graham: It seems like there was an unusually high number of undetermined deaths being found in Dr. Fowler’s office. Is it unusual to have so many, and what would be the motive behind finding these deaths as undetermined?

Stephen Janis: Yeah, I did a comparison with other cities across the country and it, Maryland and particularly Baltimore was huge. Baltimore would have 300 to 400 undetermined deaths a year during the year as reporting. So I developed a little bit of a theory, which I feel I can discuss here, which was that, the homicide rate in Baltimore is highly political, as Jayne can attest to many politicians, including the mayor then, Martin O’Malley, had based their reputation on reducing the homicide rate.

To me, looking at the case of Tyra McClary, in other cases, it was like Fowler had created this haystack into which to throw a couple needles. If you could shave a couple homicides off here and there, it was worth creating this big gray area of undetermined land, in which certain cases that were on the borderline could be shoved into undetermined. One famous one that both Jayne and I worked on was Ray Rivera, who was the subject of a Netflix series, the Unsolved Mysteries Season one. A man who supposedly jumped off the building at the Belvedere. But again, Fowler ruled it undetermined, leading to a lot of speculation.

Jayne Miller: And it sits there.

Stephen Janis: It sits there. And you know, Jayne, and you can talk about this, it not only sits there, but because it’s undetermined, it’s kind of open.

Jayne Miller: Undetermined open, right. You mean, the public information request is going to get denied. So yeah, there’s no ability to really go after the paper trail in the case, et cetera. That’s what it does. It just puts the case in limbo.

Stephen Janis: One thing people don’t understand behind the scenes in the Baltimore homicide unit, they’re working very hard to massage the stats, and these become, it’s not questionable, it’s pending. So any undetermined case where they found a body and their explanation goes into a pending file. If Fowler rules it undetermined, it stays in the pending file. Unless he rules it a homicide, it stays there and it doesn’t get added into the stats, even if they find a bullet written body, which I’m not saying has happened, but it creates a nice little buffer, I think.

Jayne Miller: Well, and these… We can get back to the issue that at hand here, which are specifically the police in custody deaths. When you rule them undetermined, the case that I covered just a year ago, et cetera, they just kind of go away. Nothing happens.

Taya Graham: I wanted to ask, because you’re mentioning the undetermined deaths, and I just have to go back to the Derek Chauvin trial for the death of George Floyd. Because Dr. Fowler asserted that George Floyd deaths should be ruled undetermined rather than a homicide and that prompted 431 doctors across the country to sign a letter questioning Fowler’s credibility and disputing his analysis. So fortunately, there’s going to be an audit to review at least a hundred of his autopsies. But Stephen, you were there with me as we watch Dr. Fowler speak to the nation and testify in this trial. Why don’t you share what we were both shocked by?

Stephen Janis: Well, it was a surreal moment because, for my whole life, I had been writing about the problems in the Medical Examiner’s Office and had gotten a lot of heat for it, to be honest with you, and kind of like you’re a crazy reporter. We had gone through the situation with Anton Black, the medical examiner’s office spokesperson tried to get us fired from a free gig because he didn’t like our reporting.

Taya Graham: It’s true. They called up our editors and tried to get us fired.

Stephen Janis: A friend of mine at the ACU said, “You know, Fowler’s testifying in the Chauvin case.” And I’m like the George Floyd case? I’m like, no, that can’t be true. I don’t believe it. But I never thought that he would go on national television in a case like this, and literally, to me, tell on himself in terms of…

Taya Graham: He’s the star witness for the defense.

Stephen Janis: I know.

Taya Graham: Now show his defense.

Stephen Janis: Come on. When you saw that, you must have been like, oh my God.

Taya Graham: Sure. Right. But I’m saying he was the star witness.

Stephen Janis: I know. As I was sitting there and he starts leading towards this undetermined conclusion, my jaw just dropped 10 floors.

Taya Graham: And part of that undetermined conclusion, if I remember correctly, was he was saying that it wasn’t the knee to the neck and the two other officers kneeling on George Floyd that contributed to his death, but it was actually the exhaust coming from the police car along with an underlying heart condition that perhaps caused the death. But because he could not say for sure, it had to be ruled undetermined. Jayne, what was your reaction?

Jayne Miller:

Well, first of all, everybody who was seeing the testimony of Fowler in the Chauvin trial, and to hear his explanation was like, “What?” And then this comes during defense testimony. So there’s already been extensive testimony on the State’s direct case from the coroner who did the autopsy, et cetera, and his cause of death and all of those factors. I can tell you that from the minute that the video of George Floyd being restrained on the pavement by those police officers became public, a very good police buddy of mine called me and said, “That is positional asphyxia. You never put somebody on their stomach like that.” And for a veteran forensic examiner coroner to testify under oath about his interpretation in the Chauvin case, I don’t think we should be surprised at what happened is that hundreds of medical examiners wrote a letter saying his work needs to be reviewed.

Stephen Janis: But I think the question is, Jayne, why? You and I reported about it, but he never really, even with cases that were controversial, for example, a young man named Tyrone West who died in police custody in 2013 and had become… Tawanda Jones had protesting for years. But there had been controversial cases, but Fowler never really rose to become a topic politically related.

Taya Graham: No, and not even in a reporting topic. There are only a few of us that were reporting on…

Stephen Janis: Absolutely.

Taya Graham: Cases that involved some of these rulings. Hey, look, he ruled in the Freddie Gray case. That was a homicide.

Stephen Janis: But he never really rose to the…

Jayne Miller: He did not testify in that case, but it was his office that ruled it a homicide.

Stephen Janis: But it never seemed like… It seemed like pretty much… What’s interesting about that position while we’re talking about today and talking about Fowler in particular, is that it’s an office that didn’t really come under scrutiny, no matter how controversial the rulings were, and particularly, we were talking about the Anton Black case, who was a young 19-year-old African-American male on the eastern shore, who was accosted by police, ran home, and then they laid on top of him during arrest, and again, Fowler was… 

Taya Graham: And also, I’m sorry to interrupt, but I believe they also put him in a chokehold as well.

Stephen Janis: Yes.

Taya Graham: While laying on top of him.

Stephen Janis: So it looked like a classic case of situation, but when Fowler ruled it an accident and all the media picked it up uncritically and said, this is an accident. I think the reason we’re talking about this is because it really took a national spotlight to have anybody question Fowler, which is where we are today, which is, we have a hundred cases basically at this point, roughly a hundred cases changed.

Jayne Miller: Right, and we don’t know what they are.

Stephen Janis: After this letter was written, the state came up with a list, actually, the medical examiner’s office of 1300 cases in police involved deaths, and that was sent to this panel. And now they’ve whittled it down to about a hundred cases, all of which include, or at least some include excited delirium, correct?

Jayne Miller: One would assume.

Stephen Janis: One would assume.

Jayne Miller: That would be exactly right. One would assume.

Stephen Janis: As Jayne points out, we don’t know which specific cases they have not released the lists. But yes, that would be it. But just to say, I think what’s extraordinary to me as a reporter is that Fowler didn’t receive any real attention until he went on national television.

Jayne Miller: And testified in that case. That is correct, and that now is causing this reflection on the work that he did over two decades. It’s an interesting kind of where we are. So now we have a hundred cases that are going to get extra scrutiny, then what? Are we going to reverse rulings? What are we going to do? I may have a whole bevy of investigations that have to start, because I can tell you the case that I did worked on. Nothing’s happened on the case.`

Taya Graham: Well, Jayne, like you said, we don’t know what’s going to happen and in the case of Anton Black’s family, they filed a lawsuit against several of the police officers and Eastern shore municipalities, and that was settled for 5 million. But what stands out to me is that a portion of the lawsuit alleges misconduct and conspiracy in the Office of the Medical Examiner. They mentioned that 57 autopsies of the people who died in police custody. In this lawsuit, it says, “They determined the death was not a homicide in 88% of the cases, despite the person having either been tasered, pepper sprayed, struck with a baton or placed in prone restraint.” So the allegations of misconduct and conspiracy to commit misconduct is incredibly troubling.

Jayne Miller: Well, the medical examiners in this country and the pathologists in the country who have been so critical of these kinds of rulings. That’s their concern is that it has cover up as a… That’s a very harsh term, but that’s exactly what they allege, is that they’re using some of these rulings that then divert from the attention on the police officer and the action of the police officer, and they stop our thorough investigation in its tracks, and that’s what I’m saying. We now have a hundred cases with the potential to cause full fledged investigations, some of them five, 10, 12 years old.

Stephen Janis: I mean, if you Google Anton Black cause of Death, you’ll see hundreds, dozens of headlines that it was an accident and that really changes the whole tenor of the case. I mean, people just accept it uncritically that it’s a medical examiner who ruled this, so it becomes part of the fabric of the narrative. Also, as James pointed out, just because it’s ruled a homicide, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a crime, right?

Jayne Miller: That’s correct. It can be…

Stephen Janis: Homicide’s just death at the hands of another.

Jayne Miller: Could be justified. That’s correct, and we certainly have had those, obviously. Police officers shoot someone fatally, it’s a homicide. But it’s a justified homicide and I mean, that’s generally the ruling, right?

Stephen Janis: Yes. What’s troubling about that is that these cases, if it was ruled in accident, in Anton’s case, the investigation, if it’s a homicide, at least maybe we had hoped they would do more due diligence of investigating the case if they’re dealing with a homicide, because they have to justify it. Whereas if it’s an accident, or as Jayne has pointed out, the police don’t have to justify their actions in this case. So I don’t think coverup is too harsh a term, but I’m willing to use it. That’s what it seemed to me, that Fowler took his playbook at George Floyd and exposed it to the world and said, here’s how I do this. This is what I do, and it goes back to my early theory. I just saw enough doubt so that we can squeak through on these things.

Jayne Miller: It excuses behavior, that conduct. That’s what happens.

Taya Graham: I just want to emphasize, this issue of excited delirium is not localized just to Baltimore, Maryland, cases of excited delirium, Natasha McKenna died in Virginia in police custody. Daniel Prude died in Rochester in police custody. Elijah McClain died in Colorado in police custody and these were all cases, allegedly, of excited delirium. So this particular pseudoscience is being used to cover up police instances where force was used, and they don’t want to rule it a homicide.

Stephen Janis: I think we have to think about this for a second because, and this is a Land of the Unsolved, and our main primary focus is unsolved murders, because that is a real horrible stain and source of pain and trauma for a community when a case is not closed. But you should think about that you’re talking about bogus science that ends up being determinative in many cases of people who have died primarily through homicide at the hands of another.

How that gets into the system, just like when we talked about ketamine, how ketamine was being used extensively in Colorado, but with no real medical basis. How do you have a system that incorporates junk science as a way to justify a ruling on a death in police custody? Which in some sense is a much more serious case because it’s the government that killed the person, not some crazy criminal. So think about how a system incorporates that, and almost uncritically is able to use it, except for people like, Jayne, who report on it. But really, you were on your own on that too, and how does that happen? That gives you some sense of what kind of system we’re dealing with and some of the problems in terms of reform.

Taya Graham: So I want to thank my guests, Jayne Miller and Stephen Janis. My name is Taya Graham, and thank you for joining me for this episode of The Land of the Unsolved.

“Tax Broke” is a TRNN investigative project focused on the use of tax break and subsidies stimulate growth in a city that continues to lose population and struggle with poverty. The centerpiece of the project is an hour-long documentary. However, as information comes to light about the cost, fairness, and political economy which fuels this system, TRNN will publish updates in the form of print pieces and podcasts.

ACLU of Maryland housing attorney Barbara Samuels joins this podcast to explain why Baltimore is critical to the growth of affordable housing and what has to happen to make it work as City Council debates a new inclusionary housing law.

Studio/Post-Production: Stephen Janis

Transcript

Taya Graham:  Hello, my name is Taya Graham, and I’m an investigative reporter for The Real News Network. Today will be the first installment of our series called Tax Broke. It’s a five-year exploration of our hometown Baltimore’s policy of doling out tax breaks to developers to stimulate growth. And the centerpiece of the work is a documentary by the same name, which we have screened and we will publish next year.

The essence of our findings is that the city of Baltimore has used a variety of tax breaks intended to stimulate growth, but has done far less to track their effectiveness or make the process transparent to account for them. We also found that this idea has primarily benefited wealthy neighborhoods, while leaving poorer communities neglected. It has, in a sense, heightened the inequality of an already unequal city.

But our 60-minute film only scratches the surface of this topic. But one important underlying question which our film raises is, ultimately, how to build affordable housing as efficiently and fairly as possible. How do we close the ever-widening gap between the demand for affordable homes and our seeming preference for luxury projects? This is a dilemma we will continue to report on to complement the film, which we hope will be a jumping off point for a broader discussion. We will do this through podcast, print pieces, and additional screenings with public discussion.

But today our topic is twofold: One, why is it so hard for the city government to generate affordable housing? And two, when it tries, why is it often embroiled in dissent and controversy? And that question we will examine through the lens of an Inclusionary Housing bill our city council is currently considering, which has been contentious, to say the least.

To do this, I’m joined by colleagues Stephen Janis and Jayne Miller, who, of course, worked together with me on this documentary. But we also have a special guest who has been instrumental in the fight for affordable housing. Her name is Barbara Samuels, and she was formerly the managing attorney of the ACLU Maryland Housing Program, and has been lead counsel in multiple cases, challenging governmental housing that fosters segregation, including the landmark public housing desegregation case Thompson v HUD. Barbara was also named one of Maryland’s top 25 Human Rights and Justice Champions by the Legal Aid Bureau in 2011. Barbara, Stephen, Jayne, thank you so much for joining me.

So Stephen, let me start out with you first, just give us a little background of the documentary, Tax Broke, how it breaks down this issue, and some of our conclusions.

Stephen Janis:  I think one of the things that we wanted to achieve with the documentary is something that is missing from some of the contemporary reporting about these tax breaks, which is the history that got us where we are today. Because part of the problem is these tax break deals come up, as Jayne always talks about, in a fragmented way, and we want to link some of the broader ideas about Baltimore, like its legalized segregation, and the fact that our tax rate is twice the surrounding counties, and look at how that history tangled together to create this weird world where the poorest city in the state actually pays people to develop, while the surrounding jurisdictions actually get paid to develop. So the point was just to link the dots so there was a way to consider everything and a way for the public to look at it and say, okay, at least I understand why we’re here now. And then also, there was an inventory of trying to calculate the number, which, of course, Jayne, was not very easy, correct?

Jayne Miller:  We’re still doing that.

Stephen Janis:  We’re still doing that.

Jayne Miller:  In other words, we have a lot of work to do here.

Stephen Janis:  Just so people know, just for reference, we’re going to publish it early next year, but right now, we’re just continuing to have discussions because there’s been so many developments that we need to go over.

Taya Graham:  Well, Jayne, you decided to expand our coverage beyond just the documentary. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Jayne Miller:  Well, I think that one of the questions that the documentary raises, a main question the documentary raises is, why are we subsidizing, and what are we subsidizing for? We have, on one hand, a very profound crisis of affordability, affordable housing. And on the other hand, we have highly subsidized, affluent communities that have been built over the past 20 years with a lot of tax subsidy, a lot of tax subsidy. And today, the greatest tax subsidy for the conversion of apartment buildings and new apartment buildings, et cetera, it goes to those that are being built in the most affluent communities. So these are the main questions, I think, that it really raises. It’s all about, it’s an equity question, it’s an equality question, and it’s an efficiency question, too. We don’t have money coming, it doesn’t grow on trees. Is this the best way to use city resources and city revenues?

Taya Graham:  Well, Barbara, you’ve been involved in the fight for affordable housing in Baltimore. I guess, I have to ask, why is it so hard to build? And how much affordable housing is actually needed in our city?

Barbara Samuels:  So the need is tremendous, and the number is probably something along the lines of 50,000 units and 70,000 in the region. But those numbers are almost so large that they become meaningless and deter us, sometimes, from getting started at all. It takes a lot of different tools to get there. There is no panacea, there’s no one thing that gets us there. And it is not easy to build affordable housing. It’s not that easy to build housing in this country. There is a really profound, and growing, housing shortage all over the country, not only for the poorest people, but increasingly that has moved up the income ladder to where it’s really being felt by middle income people, especially millennials, and is really putting this issue of housing on the political map now that it’s reaching into, frankly, middle-class white people.

But in the city, Baltimore City and other cities as well, but particularly Baltimore, affordable housing is inextricably tied up with our racial history. Because affordable housing, initially, public housing constructions, slum clearance, which were tied together, urban renewal, which was tied together, were all some of the tools that we used to create a segregated city in the 20th century. We were not spatially segregated at the turn of the century, we were socially segregated, and economically, but not spatially segregated.

Stephen Janis:  So you’re saying that before that law was passed, there were actually more integrated neighborhoods in Baltimore?

Barbara Samuels:  The pattern in Baltimore before that was that the more affluent people lived on the wider streets, the avenues with the bigger houses. The workers lived on the smaller streets in between. And then in the alley houses were mostly occupied by African Americans.

Stephen Janis:  Oh, okay. That’s really interesting.

Barbara Samuels:  And everybody had to live sort of close to the city center and to where the jobs were because they were walking or taking public transit. So Baltimore and other cities actually created this pattern of residential segregation that, during the 20th century, as we were all growing up, we just took as the natural order of things, was actually created by, in large part, public policy, but also private discriminatory practices in the lending industry. And as the appraisal industry has gotten a lot of recent attention, and even in the individual decisions of people just like us.

Jayne Miller:  Barbara, you talked about the difficulty in building housing generally at, really, all income levels. But if you could talk about the specific challenges of building affordable housing to meet the need in that middle income group.

Barbara Samuels:  Well, for the middle income group, the issue is not so much that you need public money and public subsidy to build for that group. What you really need is land that is zoned for denser housing. If you can put more units on an acre, you can produce housing that will be affordable to middle income people. However, one of those policies that created the segregated landscape was the policy decisions to zone most of our metropolitan areas, not just the suburbs, but the city as well, for single family housing, one house per one lot, an extremely inefficient and expensive way to develop compared to if you’re putting four units or 10 units, not even talking about 50 units here.

Jayne Miller:  When you think about it, you look around Baltimore, the apartment development is all going on in the White L. That’s what it is. The north-south corridor along 83 and also along the waterfront. We don’t see apartment development going on in most other parts of the city. Now, is that because of zoning?

Barbara Samuels:  That is in large part because of zoning. And we don’t see it in all of the White L either. Mount Washington, Roland Park, Guilford, those most affluent neighborhoods in North Baltimore were actually down zoned at the last comprehensive rezoning.

Stephen Janis:  When was that? When was that done?

Barbara Samuels:  That was the planned Baltimore.

Stephen Janis:  Because it’s interesting because, for people who don’t know Baltimore, Roland Park is sort of one of the first suburbs, although it’s part of the city, and it does have some apartment buildings. But you’re saying that was part of the past. No one could go into Roland Park right now and build an apartment building?

Barbara Samuels:  Correct.

Stephen Janis:  Wow.

Barbara Samuels:  Correct. Roland Park’s an interesting tale, because we talk about how we pioneered racial zoning. But Roland Park also was a pioneer in the use of restrictive covenants. And the developer of Roland Park actually was a leading real estate developer in the country in the 1920s, and went around proselytizing with other “real estate men” that housing should be developed with these restrictive covenants.

Stephen Janis:  Which were, the restrictive covenants, said you couldn’t live there if you were African American, Jewish, right? Is that what it was?

Barbara Samuels:  If you were African American, and sometimes Jewish, sometimes that was sort of an unspoken.

Stephen Janis:  I see. Okay.

Jayne Miller:  What is the ideal structure in terms of meeting the need for affordable housing? Is it an apartment building? Is it higher density attached housing, like the famous row houses that we have? What is the ideal in terms of really providing an additional supply of affordable housing?

Barbara Samuels:  So the ideal structure type, density is critical, but the ideal structure type depends on meeting different housing needs. So for a family with children, you need larger units with two or usually three bedrooms. And what we’re building in this city now, to the extent we’re building, is very heavily weighted towards studios and one bedrooms. So it really becomes difficult for families with kids to find decent, quality housing, especially in safe neighborhoods, that are family sized. We have a very, what I would call, family unfriendly housing policy. Now, you can build family friendly housing even in high density, high-rise situations. The city of Vancouver is famous for that, and it doesn’t involve only building three bedroom units. It involves building schools where you’re near downtown, where these high rises are. Parks that are particularly geared towards children, lots of amenities. We have to be one of the most family unfriendly cities in the country.

Taya Graham:  So Barbara, there’s this big middle part that seems to be missing between this history of segregation and then these subsidies that our city council is handing out. Can you talk a little bit about that portion of our history?

Barbara Samuels:  So Baltimore actually has more subsidized housing than most other cities its size. And it has historically had between 65% and 75% of all of the capital A affordable housing in the region. And that is because Baltimore has used affordable housing both as a tool for containing the Black population, which then made disinvestment in those areas possible. And that has been coupled with exclusion of affordable housing from other areas. But we aggressively used all the available federal housing programs to essentially oversaturate parts of the city, basically the Black neighborhoods of the city, with subsidized housing to the point where it was having a detrimental effect on the neighborhoods and causing skyrocketing poverty rates of 30%, 40%, 50%, 60% in some areas. As people realized that that was not sustainable, but there was still a need for more affordable housing, we ran into the racial politics.

The answer would be, well, let’s build affordable housing all over the city and all over the region. But as soon as you try to do that, you run into NIMBYism. And so the city has essentially done nothing to develop affordable housing in other parts of the city, whether the White L or Northeast Baltimore, whatever, except when they have been forced to do so by a court order. And the same is true for the region. And the fact that the region has excluded affordable housing means that, as the federal judge said in our case, the city became an island reservation for the poor of an entire region.

Stephen Janis:  Wow. I’m starting to realize that the documentary should have just been a fog of war documentary with Barbara Samuels just talking about what she went through. We may have made a mistake there. But I guess we’ll try to compensate with the podcast.

Jayne Miller:  Never too late to correct.

Barbara Samuels:  We can move up to the present.

Jayne Miller:  Just to clarify, the subsidized housing you’re talking about, which for all of us who’ve been around for a while, we’re talking about these high-rise public housing buildings, some low-rise developments that were, you’re right, they were everywhere in this city up until the Hope Six program of the mid 1990s.

Barbara Samuels:  Well, they were not everywhere, because –

Jayne Miller:  Well, true, you’re right. They weren’t everywhere. They were concentrated in certain East and West Baltimore neighborhoods. That is correct.

Barbara Samuels:  And so the city’s policy now is not to do that anymore, because everybody realized that’s not sustainable. So mixed income housing is our official policy, and you see that in things like the Perkins redevelopment. But we practice mixed income housing only in poor areas. We do not practice mixed income housing in the more affluent areas. We have a policy, or we had a policy, that said we would do that and that was the 2007 Inclusionary Housing Bill, which we never properly implemented, and only 37 units were ever built. And at the same time, the city decided at some point that the best economic development strategy, given de-industrialization, given even the flight of corporate offices like USF&G and so on, that what Baltimore could do was to build housing for people with, as they said, pocketbooks. And you could then not only get the tax base off of those developments, in theory, but also the state and local income taxes off of that.

Stephen Janis:  Right. And it’s interesting you mentioned the Exclusionary Housing Bill, which lapsed. We spoke to David Rusk who was on the committee to fashion that bill. And I want to play a little bit about what he said about what happened, because he basically characterized what happened as a fraud perpetrated on the people of the city. Let’s listen to that quickly, and when we come back, Taya has a question for you.

[AUDIO CLIP BEGINS]

David Rusk:  I was a member, a voting member of a 13-member task force on Inclusionary Housing appointed by the city council. And we came up with a study and a set of proposals and a draft legislation that was vastly different from the facade that was adopted ultimately by the city council because the city housing agencies, planning agencies, dug in their heels and just really would not make any significant change. So even though that law was adopted in 2007, it was not the law that had been proposed by a broad-based citizen and industry group.

[AUDIO CLIP ENDS]

Taya Graham:  So Barbara, I have to ask, what are your thoughts on what Mr. Rusk just said about the previous Inclusionary Housing bill?

Barbara Samuels:  Well, I think that that’s right, but as weak as the bill was rendered in the legislative process, it wasn’t as bad as the way it was implemented by the city’s Department of Housing and Community Development. Because what happened was they adopted a formula for giving waivers to developers that is not grounded in the language of the statute itself. They basically made it up. And under that formula, the waivers were pretty much automatic.

Stephen Janis:  That’s what we were saying. There was like a machine you could go and put a dollar in and get a waiver is basically what… Because I remember reporting on it, every project got a waiver. It seemed like everyone got a waiver.

Barbara Samuels:  Right. And that law was only in effect for projects that received major public subsidy or rezoning. So things like, talk about major public subsidies, Port Covington, Harbor Point, major public subsidies. But the way the Department of Housing interpreted the bill, that whole subsidy, the TIF subsidy and all the other subsidies that they got, none of that was considered in deciding whether it was feasible to build or set aside affordable housing as part of that development. It was like an entitlement for developers that was all for the market rate portion. So if the entire subsidy is going just for the market rate units under that formula, and the developer is not supposed to pay anything out of pocket, of course it’s not feasible to build the affordable units, unless the city comes up with all of the money on top of the TIF or whatever that they’ve already put into the project. The city didn’t have the money to do that, and that probably wouldn’t be terribly advisable, in any event.

Jayne Miller:  So we have this bill now, which is the replacement of the bill for the 2007 bill, which I’ll just give, it would require developers to provide 10% affordable units if they got major subsidy, public subsidy, and it would be 10% units for people, 60% of area median income. And I know that the city has come back and said, no, it has to be an additional subsidy of 15%, and it has to be split between 60% AMI and 80% AMI. But my broader question about this is, Inclusionary Housing is just a piece of this puzzle, it’s not the whole puzzle.

Barbara Samuels:  That’s right. So there’s a strong coalition of upwards of 25 groups that have been working with Councilwoman Odette Ramos on amendments to shaping the bill that she filed in February. And I’m a volunteer with that coalition. One of the things that we’ve been saying is, this is not a panacea, this will not meet all of the housing needs in the city, but we cannot have an equitable development strategy for Baltimore without Inclusionary Housing. Inclusionary Housing is not just about producing affordable units, it’s about producing inclusion and equity and racial justice. And that’s as important a part of the bill as the affordable requirements are.

But the bill is, there are something like a thousand Inclusionary Housing policies in cities and counties and even small towns across the country. This is not one of the more radical of them. It’s quite moderate, really, in its requirements. You get a lot of pushback in Baltimore that this is not San Francisco or Boston or DC. This is a weak market. And so what we’ve tried to emphasize in our advocacy around this bill is, number one, no more waivers, because we cannot go through another 14 years with only 37 units produced.

So no more waivers. It’s critical that we serve families at or below 60% of area median income, which is about $62,000 for a family of three. That serves the working people that really hold the city together. But it also puts the housing within reach of much lower income people who have vouchers, because they can use the rent set at 60% of what’s called AMI, allows them to be able to afford to rent with the vouchers. And to a certain extent, there is a trading off of fewer units than under the 2007 law, which required 20% affordability. But the trade off is for no more waivers, that is really an essential point that I can’t emphasize enough.

Taya Graham:  I just have to ask the question. It seems like it makes sense to get rid of these waivers, and it seems like it’s an obvious need for our residents to have affordable housing. What’s holding our city council members back from allowing it to be built?

Jayne Miller:  That’s a really good question. Back in 2007, this was very controversial. There was a lot of pushback. Here we are today at the end of 2022, with a bill that’s kind of the replacement of it, but we have the same thing. We have a contentious, controversial, I assume this is going to get more contentious as we go forward over this. And that’s a good question, what causes this to become so contentious?

Barbara Samuels:  It’s contentious because the business and development community opposes it. And as with many things, their threat is, if we have to comply, we’ll take our marbles and go play someplace else. If we don’t get this huge TIF to Under Armor, they won’t expand here. Of course, they didn’t expand anyway.

Stephen Janis:  But just so people know, they are already getting a tax subsidy before they’re asked to build this Inclusionary Housing, correct?

Barbara Samuels:  Correct. Now, in 2007, when the bill was passed, we didn’t have as many tax subsidies as we have today. After the 2007 bill was passed, the city council passed something called the High Performance Market Rate Rental Tax Credit, which I think you talk a little bit about in the –

Stephen Janis:  Yes. Oh yeah.

Barbara Samuels:  – In the documentary. And that tax credit was passed after the Inclusionary Housing law, so it contemplated that there would be compliance with the law, 20% affordable, and that the developers would get that subsidy for the affordable part as well as the market rate part of the development. What ended up happening, though, was that the housing department gave waivers to the developers for the affordable part. They still collected the tax credit for what would’ve been the 20% that would’ve been affordable. But they just got all these tax credits for 100% luxury buildings. And what we ended up with was this huge subsidy for segregation in the city.

Jayne Miller:  And we wonder why we are where we are with –

Barbara Samuels:  It really has exacerbated the inequality in Baltimore, where we’re characterized by some wealthy people and some wealthy areas of the city. And then on one hand, some desperately poor neighborhoods and very poor people in other neighborhoods, and the people in the middle essentially leaving.

Stephen Janis:  Does that argument hold water? That, we’re already giving a tax break, and then we’re saying, well, just in exchange for this tax break, build a little bit of Inclusionary Housing, and they’re saying we’re just going to go somewhere else. But is it really infeasible with all the tax breaks they are getting to build some percentage of affordable housing? Is that really infeasible?

Barbara Samuels:  We don’t think so. They’ll come up with their financial analysis based on information that is really only in their possession.

Jayne Miller:  I’ve heard that before.

Barbara Samuels:  But if you’re a local regional developer, it’s not like you can just go and build your big apartment building in Baltimore County or in Arundel County or Howard County. They have such restrictive zoning in those places that there are very few places that you can do that. Towson, maybe.

Stephen Janis:  Maybe earlier, but now it’s pretty full up there.

Barbara Samuels:  That’s correct. And Columbia, Howard County, well, most of Howard County is very low zoning, agricultural zoning, as is two thirds of Baltimore County. And they have a plan to densify Columbia, but it’s not like there’s a lot of land designated for high density housing in Columbia. So these local companies, I don’t know where they would go. I really don’t think there would be anywhere for them to go locally. National developers, maybe they could go somewhere else. But there are so many other parts of the country that are also very restrictive, and in some ways more restrictive in their zoning than Baltimore City.

Stephen Janis:  Wouldn’t Baltimore be the ideal place to build affordable housing, given that people are leaving, that same argument would make it the best place to build it, because we could do some density here?

Barbara Samuels:  Well, every place is a good place to build affordable housing, because families have different needs. And also, we have decentralized jobs, but we have not decentralized the affordable housing for the workers in those jobs. You have people, middle income people, who have to commute from Essex to Hunt Valley every day to work because Hunt Valley is unaffordable, even though it has the light rail there. Well, think about how much time that person spends driving around the Beltway from Essex to Hunt Valley for a commute every day, and how that detracts from their quality of life. So what we need is to build affordable housing everywhere. And we definitely need to densify. Aside from the inefficiencies of this low density single family housing, it’s very bad environmentally, because, yes, it leads to sprawl, but it also leads to a lot more vehicle miles traveled, creating pollution on the highways and whatnot. People who live in dense housing have a smaller environmental footprint than people who live in single family detached houses.

Taya Graham:  So before we go any further, I feel like it’s my responsibility to ask you about this landmark case, because I think it’s part of the history of segregation in our city and the fight for affordable housing and fair housing, and that’s the Thompson v HUD case. You were the lead attorney on this. Can you talk a little bit about the case itself?

Barbara Samuels:  Sure. And there were other lead attorneys that worked with me, both with our pro bono counsel and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and so on. So it was very much a team effort over many, many years. One thing that has come from that case that has been of lasting significance is that Baltimore has now the largest what’s called housing mobility program in the country. And it is a model for cities around the country and also for federal legislation. And what I mean by that, housing mobility, is… The biggest subsidized housing program we have, especially the one that reaches the lowest income people, is the voucher program. But when a person gets a voucher, they have to just go out and look for housing on their own. And in many places in the country, people talk about, well, I was homeless, I got a voucher, but I could never find a place to use it. I waited 10 years, I couldn’t find a place to use it, because there is a shortage of housing and affordable housing.

Here in Baltimore, over 5,500 people, families, have gotten vouchers through the Thompson case and have been able to use those vouchers to secure housing for their families. And it mostly serves families with children. Quality housing in safe neighborhoods, healthier housing. The kids with asthma, when they live in the city, have a lower asthma rate when they move through this voucher program.

And so families with vouchers are less segregated now in the Baltimore region than they are in almost any other part of the country. And also the program has a 90% rate of being able to successfully lease up the clients with the voucher. Whereas in some cities, the housing authorities have to issue four vouchers for every one that might be lucky enough to find a place to use it. But it’s a simple formula, it’s people with a voucher getting assistance to find housing. That’s the kind of counseling that is provided, and that’s the kind of assistance that is really needed to make the housing voucher program live up to its potential. And it has great potential. It’s an evidence-based program that reduces homelessness and improves health and improves educational outcomes.

Jayne Miller:  Well, I think that overall, one of the things that we’ve really been looking at is the cost to subsidize development in Baltimore, which is something very difficult to evaluate because the system is so completely nontransparent. But is there… I don’t want to say all subsidy is bad, obviously. So what is the most effective way to subsidize development?

Barbara Samuels:  There are actually two things tied up in that. One is subsidizing housing to meet people’s needs. The other is subsidizing development, economic development, community development. Those are not the same thing. And sometimes by trying to get a twofer, we actually mess it all up. I think right now one of the most efficient ways to develop affordable housing is to piggyback on the market rate development that is happening with these big subsidies. Because even if we provide additional subsidy for the affordable units, it will be far less than the cost of a purpose-built, 100% affordable housing unit, which is very expensive to build, in part because you’re very limited in where you can build it, and you have loads of complex financing and red tape that you have to work through. So for example, at the Inclusionary Housing hearing the other day, the Housing Department talked about providing an additional 15% subsidy for inclusionary units, 15% tax credit. On top of the tax credits they get now.

Now, while it’s galling to think about providing yet more subsidy, the amount that they talked about, according to the finance department, was $1 million a year or $10 million over 10 years, and would produce something close to 350 units a year, which comes out to something like $28,000 a unit. That is a very cheap way to build housing, very inexpensive, i.e. an efficient way to build housing and to make use of the subsidy we’re already providing for the market rate housing. There’s a huge question as to whether we should be subsidizing market rate housing, but if we’re doing it, we might as well be getting affordable housing out of the bargain. That’s kind of like the least of what is owed for the public investment that is going into these subsidies.

Stephen Janis:  Do you think there’s any way they could change the bill in the way they did and start writing tons of waivers? Let’s say everyone bites the bill and says, let’s give them the extra 15%, because we’re going to get that many units. Do you think then the waiver writing is going to start?

Barbara Samuels:  I think all kinds of mischief happens in the legislative process. Most of the time not out in the open. Only two developers testified at the city council hearing on this. You know who is meeting with legislators in backrooms, and that’s where the action is really happening. So yes, that could absolutely happen. I think there will be a bill. For one thing, the city committed to the federal government in its Fair Housing Action Plan, which is required in order to get federal funding, that it would renew and strengthen its Inclusionary Housing law. And so the fact that it allowed it to lapse instead is actually a violation, puts them in violation of their commitments and puts their funding at risk.

So I do think there will be a bill. But could all kinds of mischief happen behind the scenes? Absolutely. And that’s why we’re encouraging people to come to city council on Monday, Dec. 12 at 5:00 PM when the work session happens on the bill, and that’s when they start voting on all the amendments. That’s where a lot of the decisions are being made. A lot of times the deal is cut before they get to the second and third reader. And so what we’re telling people is to come. You can’t testify, but come and keep your eyes on the council.

Taya Graham:  So we are going to continue this discussion, not just on the history of affordable and fair housing in our city, Baltimore, but on its future. And I just want to thank Barbara Samuels so much for joining us and sharing her insights and her experience in the fight for fair housing in Baltimore. Barbara, thank you for joining us today.

Barbara Samuels:  Well, thank you for covering this. This is really important and timely.

Taya Graham:  And of course, I have to thank intrepid reporters Jayne Miller and Stephen Janis for continuing to go down this rabbit hole with me. Thank you both for joining me.

Jayne Miller:  It is a rabbit hole. It’s a rabbit hole to try to account for it. That’s what we’re trying to do, is, let’s account for it.

Stephen Janis:  I just want to say it’s been fascinating to just sit here and listen to Barbara talk about this stuff.

Jayne Miller:  Absolutely.

Stephen Janis:  Fill these blanks.

Jayne Miller:  Tremendous experience.

Stephen Janis:  She’s a treasure.

Jayne Miller:  On this. Absolutely.

Stephen Janis:  …City of Baltimore. And I really appreciate her, and Jayne too, but really, wow. So that was… Thank you, Taya, appreciate it.

Taya Graham:  And I want to thank everyone for listening. If you would like to reach out to us, please feel free to comment on The Real News Real Baltimore page. Also, if you’d like to try to set up a screening of Tax Broke in your community, contact us on The Real News Real Baltimore page, or reach out to Stephen Janis at The Real News Network or Taya at The Real News Network. I’m Taya Graham, I’m your host for this podcast. Thank you for joining me.

A recent HBO documentary entitled The Slow Hustle has brought renewed attention to the mysterious death of Baltimore homicide detective Sean Suiter in 2017. Police initially claimed Suiter was the victim of a lone assailant after his body was found in a West Baltimore alley with a gunshot wound to the head. But as details began to emerge regarding Suiter’s involvement with some of Baltimore’s most corrupt cops, the case took a turn that raised serious questions about what actually happened and if his death was part of a broader cover-up.

Shortly after Suiter died, Police Accountability Report hosts Taya Graham and Stephen Janis produced a podcast series that looked behind the scenes and examined how Suiter’s death told a more complex story about police corruption in Baltimore. In Part IV of this podcast series, Graham and Janis return to the case five years after Suiter’s death with Baltimore veteran reporter Jayne Miller to review a previously unreleased investigation conducted by the Maryland State Police. 

Jayne Miller was a reporter with local Baltimore tv station WBAL-TV for over 40 years.

Studio/Post-Production: Stephen Janis

Transcript:

Stephen Janis:  Anyone who watches crime dramas could reasonably conclude that when someone is murdered, barring bizarre and extenuating circumstances, the case is solved. That is, through high tech forensics, moral resolve, or simply the near-mythic competence of American law enforcement, killers are ultimately sent to jail. But as an investigative reporter who has worked in one of the most violent cities in the country for nearly 15 years, I can tell you this is not true.

Taya Graham:  And that is the point of this podcast, because unsolved killings represent more than just statistics. It’s a psychic toll of stories untold that infects an entire community, the final violent moments of a victim’s life that remain shrouded in mystery.

Stephen Janis:  I’m Stephen Janis.

Taya Graham:  I’m Taya Graham.

Stephen Janis:  And we are investigative reporters who live in Baltimore City.

Taya Graham:  Welcome to The Land of the Unsolved.

Welcome back to The Land of the Unsolved. I’m your host, Taya Graham. And today, we will be reviewing a newly obtained report on one of the first cases we explored on this podcast: the mysterious death of Baltimore homicide detective Sean Suiter. Suiter, a veteran city cop, was investigating a homicide in the city’s Harlem Park neighborhood when shots rang out. His partner found him lying on the ground, gravely injured from a gunshot wound to the head. Shortly after he was shot, then-police commissioner Kevin Davis said Suiter was the victim of a lone Black male wearing a dark jacket with a white stripe. The department locked down the neighborhood for six days, outraging residents, but soon the narrative that Suiter was the victim of foul play started to fall apart.

A week after the shooting, Davis revealed Suiter was set to testify before a federal grand jury just one day after he died. Details emerged that Suiter was involved in a 2010 case where drugs were planted on a man who had been trying to evade Suiter, along with the ringleader of the notorious Gun Trace Task Force, Wayne Jenkins. The Gun Trace Task Force was a specialized unit of crooked cops who were convicted of robbing residents, dealing drugs, and stealing overtime. But that connection between Suiter and this corrupt unit led to doubts about what really happened on an abandoned lot in West Baltimore.

And today we have new information which may shed light on that question. Through a public information request, we have obtained a report from a separate probe into Suiter’s death conducted by the Maryland State Police. This overview has never before been made public, so I will be reading excerpts from the findings and discussing them with my co-hosts, Jayne Miller and Stephen Janis.

Thank you both so much for joining me. So first, Jayne, can you give me a backstory on how you obtained this document, why you asked for it, and why this case still is so controversial?

Jayne Miller:  Well, let’s start with the last part of that first. Well, it’s controversial because it’s this heated debate. Was it homicide or was it suicide? And here we are in November of 2022, so now we’re five years later. Incident occurred on November 15, 2017, now we’re into 2022, and we still have not resolved, once and for all, really, this question. I mean, there was an independent review board investigation of the case, they concluded it was a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The coroner’s ruling indicated homicide. It was definitely a homicide investigation.

We decided, five years later, well, let’s see where we are on this case. So I filed a public information request with the Baltimore Police Department, State’s Attorney’s Office, and the Maryland State Police. And the reason I filed with the Maryland State Police is because in 2019, the Maryland State Police agency was asked by Police Commissioner Michael Harrison to review the case, to review the investigation, to review the file, to see if there was any other… What conclusion they would have, if there were things that should have been done that weren’t done, et cetera, to really review the investigation. And they issued a report to the Baltimore Police Department that has never been made public. And so we received it in response to that request.

Taya Graham:  Jayne, something I think that’s really important that was revealed in this is a revised timeline. And first I’d like to read you a little excerpt from it, and then I’d like you to respond. This timeline at best leaves eight seconds for Detective Suiter to be engaged in a life and death struggle, be overpowered, lose control of his weapon, have the gun be pressed to his head and discharged, the gun then be placed beneath his body, the assailant disappear from the scene without being seen by Detective Bomenka, and then the assailant leave no physical evidence from the struggle. Maryland State police investigators were in agreement that those events could not occur in eight seconds and that the actual time that Detective Suiter was out of Detective Bomenka’s sight was significantly less than the eight seconds captured by the 910 Bennett Place video. So Jayne, you hear this revised timeline and I think it reveals some new information here. What’s your reaction to it?

Jayne Miller:  Well, the independent review board talked about this very short timeframe, 8, 9, 10 seconds. But this is a very specific reference and analysis. I would really call it an analysis. And let me tell you what they’re talking about. So 910 Bennett Place is a house at the other end of the street, which had… There was video from that. And actually, there were some still photos of it that were made public during the independent review board investigation. So they’re using that video, and then they’re using the video of Bomenka and Bomenka’s account, and he makes a phone call. So they have a timeframe in there, a very limited timeframe. And so this is an analysis of that information. And if you think in the time it takes me to speak eight seconds, or anybody to speak eight seconds, there is a lot that has to go on in eight seconds.

That’s what they’re saying, is that there’s an awful lot that has to go on in eight seconds for this to be something other than a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The significance of it is that this is yet another group of investigators that has looked at the evidence in this case and looked at the… There’s some additional information they looked at, too, that had not been yet made public, and they’re coming up with the same conclusion. So now we’ve got an independent review board that looked at the case and they come up with a conclusion of self-inflicted. Now we’ve got another law enforcement agency with investigators, homicide investigators looking at it and they come up with a similar conclusion.

So that’s the dilemma that we’re in, in this situation involving this particular case. This is obviously a high profile case. It’s been highly politicized in many ways. Here we are five years later with really no difference. There’s been no movement in this case. This report from the State Police makes, as of 2019 at any rate, makes this very clear, that they had never identified a plausible suspect.

Taya Graham:  Before I go any deeper into this incredible report, I have to ask you. What you said kind of begs the question. If this was ruled a homicide but the independent review board said that it was a suicide, the Maryland State police analysis has found it a suicide… So where does it stand? If this is an open investigation, where do we go from here?

Jayne Miller:  That’s a very good question, Taya. That is the question. So when we filed the request, the response we got to the request to the Baltimore Police Department and to the State’s Attorney’s Office was that it’s an open and active investigation. Well, sure. We have a coroner’s ruling that remains homicide. Actually, it was when the State Police report was returned to the Baltimore Police Department, if you recall, Commissioner Michael Harrison of the Baltimore Police Department had indicated he really wanted to close the case.

But then there was pressure. I believe there was a prosecutor at the time that was trying to run out a lead, said, no, no, there’s still leads to be run out. There was a lot of pressure from the family not to close the case with these lingering questions. So the case remained open and then the commissioner made a statement that it does remain open. It is a good question. What do you do with it? Where do we go with a case like this that has this very divided opinion on what happened? And with all of the information in front of us, it doesn’t revolve the question.

Taya Graham:  So it seems to me that in this analysis we’re getting information that I haven’t noticed was reported in the media previously, and that is some of the specifics surrounding Suiter’s death. The position of the gun, where the bullet was found, I believe, this report says that the bullet was found in the ground and that the gunshot residue on the hand suggests that Suiter may have shot himself on the right side, had fallen down to his left side, and that two shots were fired from his gun earlier, and that there was no evidence of a second gun present. What are some of the details that you found around Suiter’s death that were surprising to you here or that you hadn’t seen reported before?

Jayne Miller:  I think the one thing in this summary of the investigation that is done by the State Police is that they are saying that he was probably already on the ground when the gun was fired. And the independent review board investigation found that the bullet was found in the ground, like buried several inches into the ground. So a gunshot went in the right side of his head. They are surmising, in their review of the case, that he was laying on his left side when the gun was fired.

Taya Graham:  So Jayne, thank you so much for that clarification. Stephen, I want you to jump in here. You’ve taken a look at this analysis. What stands out to you?

Stephen Janis:  We were all talking about this before was – And Jayne can probably elaborate on this, but besides the fact that they recounted some of the evidence about his contact with members of the Gun Trace Task Force via texts, which were later erased in his phone. And the fact that Jayne and I were talking about before, that his phone was actually in his desk when he was shot. But also, Jayne, and I don’t know what you think about this, but the life insurance which is mentioned, just prior… Well, it’s not clear when the life insurance was purchased, but there is a very cryptic reference to life insurance which was partially blacked out. Jayne, what does that say to you, that they actually thought it was worthwhile to mention the life insurance? Because life insurance can sometimes be indicative of other plans or other things occurring behind the scenes in a murder investigation. What does that mean to you?

Jayne Miller:  Well, this report is the first confirmation of a life insurance policy that had been purchased and paid out. There’s a paragraph that has redactions in it, in the report that says that examination of Detective Suiter’s financials revealed the existence. The policy was paid out on December 15, 2017. That is one month after his death. And it goes on to say, “While the specific clauses issue date changes made to the policy, any other relevant information regarding the life insurance policy is currently not known.” And this is coming from the report. “It is understood that most life insurance policies have clauses to prevent payment for deaths resulting from suicide.”

What is the significance of this? The significance is just what the paragraph says, but also it is the first time that there’s been this confirmation that there was a life insurance policy in place at the time of his death. The city, in 2020, made a $900,000 worker’s comp payment to his estate. So this would’ve been in addition to that and also preceded it. Taya, I think you made the point when we were talking about this, that this was paid out before, well before the independent review board investigation, which obviously had the conclusion of a self-inflicted gunshot.

Stephen Janis:  There’s one thing I want to ask you, Jayne, just from your experience in investigating these kinds of things, and I’ll turn the mic over to Taya, was that how could the State Police not have access to the actual details of the life insurance policy? I mean, wouldn’t they be able to issue a subpoena and get it? I mean, I think that should have been clearer, but they seem to make it… I don’t know what your interpretation of the language is, but it seems to me that they’re saying, we couldn’t get all the information about his life insurance policy. And that strikes me as kind of odd.

Jayne Miller:  That’s a good question. I don’t know, because really what they were tasked with doing was to really review the investigation.

Stephen Janis:  So technically, maybe they weren’t issuing their own subpoenas and conducting it as if they were the primary investigators is what you’re saying? Possibly surmising from that.

Jayne Miller:  That is correct. I mean, they, in their report, do disclose information that had not been disclosed before.

Stephen Janis:  Absolutely.

Jayne Miller:  This being one of them. But their task was to look at the investigation that had already been conducted and to summarize their findings, do their own analysis of the evidence in the case, and to reach their own conclusions, which they did.

Stephen Janis:  And there were some interesting numbers in there about that inventory they did, right? About terms of… Search warrants.

Taya Graham:  Something Stephen alluded to was the number of investigations and interviews and tips that the Baltimore Police Department explored when they were doing the homicide investigation. So the review shows us that the BPT investigators conducted 123 interviews, they followed up on 54 tips, and they executed 12 search and seizure warrants with no credible suspect ever being identified.

So essentially that’s 123 interviews. Imagine being taken down to a police station, put into an interrogation room, and asked if you had anything to do with the murder of a police officer. These search and seizure warrants, of course, would be incredibly disruptive to someone’s life. And then on top of that, Harlem Park was cordoned off for six days, and essentially the Constitution was suspended for those residents. So reading this disruption that was caused in our community, how do you respond to that? How do you respond to finding out that essentially they shook the community to try to find answers, and they still didn’t get any?

Jayne Miller:  You raise a really good point about… Yes, search warrants, execution of search warrants is very disruptive. Being hauled in for interviews about the death of a police officer is very disruptive. Tips! What were the tips?

Stephen Janis:  That’s a great question.

Jayne Miller:  What were the tips? 50? Was it 54 tips? What were they and where did they come from? Who was providing some information that probably resulted in interviews and search warrants, et cetera. Those kinds of details do raise… You kind of pile on the questions. There have been a lot of questions raised about the investigation of this case, keeping the crime scene secure, or keeping the scene of the shooting secure. All of that was raised before, and now we have these numbers attached to what was done in the investigation, it does raise questions about the disruption that this caused and who were the people that were so affected by it.

Stephen Janis:  Well, Jayne, just so people remember, because you were covering this pretty extensively, for the first six or seven days before you started asking questions about Suiter’s pending testimony before a federal grand jury, the police department was really putting out the idea that this was a murder by someone from the community, and they were going pretty heavy leaning in on that, which is kind of unusual for commanders or police. Most homicide detectives will say don’t say anything until you know, but they were leading really hard, right? From your recollection –

Jayne Miller:  Oh, absolutely.

Stephen Janis:  Of the fact.

Jayne Miller:  Absolutely.

Stephen Janis:  Can you talk about that a little bit?

Jayne Miller:  Well, and the independent review board investigation really found fault with this, is the public information, the communications that was coming from the police department was what they described, really, as misleading. As we look back on it now, it was clear, and if you talk to some of the detectives that were involved at that time, they knew it was clear that there were questions about whether this was a self-inflicted gunshot wound. But clearly, the message that was coming from the police commissioner and the spokespeople for the police department was this was homicide. They kept talking about this mysterious man with a black jacket. I know I interviewed people in West Baltimore, young Black men in West Baltimore, they’re getting pulled up because of that description that circulated. And to this day, we don’t know where that description came from. To this day.

Stephen Janis:  Actually, I asked the current commissioner, Darryl De Sousa, at a press conference that question specifically. I said, where did it come from? Because I wrote a story about this for the AFRO, and he had no answer. He said he’d get back to me and I’m still waiting. So no, they could not or never were able to identify, even if it came from Bomenka, they weren’t sure. No one was ever able to answer that question, where that story came from, why it was circulated. I know Davis was the one who said it, but no one could tell me where Davis actually got that.

Taya Graham:  Something that’s been brought up in this report that I think about often is that Detective Suiter’s role with the GTTF. In this report here, it says, “In January of 2018, an ATF agent identified only as JW met with Sergeant Lloyd of the BPD Homicide. The agent informed Sergeant Lloyd that he had pertinent information regarding the federal Broken Boundaries investigation. The ATF agent indicated that the FBI had not accurately informed the BPD regarding the extent of Detective Suiter’s criminal activity uncovered during their investigation. The ATF agent specifically referenced Detective Suiter’s involvement in a 2010 incident during which Detective Suiter recovered drugs from a vehicle that were illegally planted by Sergeant Jenkins.

“The incident followed a vehicle pursuit which resulted in a fatal accident. The agent indicated that federal investigators knew that Detective Suiter was aware that the drugs had been planted in the vehicle when he recovered them and criminally charged the operator of the vehicle. The conviction was later overturned and Sergeant Jenkins was indicted for a second time following Detective Suiter’s death for crimes relating to this incident.”

So Stephen, how do you respond to this information and documentation of Suiter’s wrongdoings?

Stephen Janis:  Well, I don’t know how Jayne feels about this, but what’s stunning to me is this is almost a year after the initial investigation. So the FBI is supposedly relaying everything to then-commissioner Kevin Davis. And then a year later, an ATF agent wanders into homicide and says, hey, you guys have not been properly or correctly informed about detective Suiter’s criminality. I’m just quoting the report. I’m not making any suggestions about his criminality. But to me, it’s stunning that another branch of federal law enforcement walks in and says, you guys don’t really know what’s going on here. The FBI has been… I mean, Jayne, does it seem like he’s saying the FBI’s been misleading or just –

Jayne Miller:  I thought actually, if I recall correctly, that was a concern raised during the GTTF case, during the Suiter case, et cetera, is that there wasn’t a lot of sharing of information going on.

Stephen Janis:  Which is just astounding to me, given that one of the main problems the community has said about Suiter and about the whole GTTF is that the investigation stopped at a certain level and never went up. And why wasn’t anyone held accountable, and how can we trust this department? And that’s why there’s been so much distrust of the conclusions about Suiter. So now we know that in 2018, another branch of the federal law enforcement walks in, wanders into homicide and says, hey guys, BTW, the FBI’s not been telling you the truth. Or, not not telling you the truth, but not giving you the full extent… Let’s put it in the language that they use: The full extent of Suiter’s criminality. I mean, Jayne, what do you think?

Jayne Miller:  Well, the reason this is significant is because the theory of suicide very much involves his testimony and his role in the GTTF case. The Maryland State Police report mentions that Suiter had not told his family about his pending grand jury testimony. So clearly there were things really weighing on Detective Suiter at this particular time because of that grand jury testimony.

Stephen Janis:  And he didn’t know what they did or did not know about what he had done.

Jayne Miller:  And that, I think, is what is the important point, is he didn’t know what they knew –

Stephen Janis:  Exactly.

Jayne Miller:  And what that part of this newly disclosed report tells you reinforces that. He didn’t know what they knew.

Stephen Janis:  And the point being that if he went in front of a grand jury and they knew he’d done something and he lies about it, then he’s in big trouble, because they could just charge him with perjury.

Jayne Miller:  Correct.

Stephen Janis:  Or lying. But I think what I find astounding, though, is that there is obviously a part of the federal law enforcement complex or whatever that was watching this and yet not saying anything, or not communicating. I find that to be, in a case this explosive, I find that to be very strange, and I think something that certainly justifies the community’s lack of trust in some of the conclusions. Of course, it has nothing to do with the suicide, just the way the GTTF case went down and the idea amongst a lot of people that there were higher-ups who might have been involved or at least had knowledge of it. So that just shows you that law enforcement is not always transparent with each other, obviously.

Jayne Miller:  And that was definitely, I think, a concern that I heard during that time. And this does get to the whole issue of transparency and trust, and the trust that you’re getting the straight story from a police department. The relationship between the feds and the police department during the Suiter case was clearly strained, I would call it.

Stephen Janis:  Right. Yes.

Jayne Miller:  You have Kevin Davis ask for the FBI to look at the case –

Stephen Janis:  And they say no.

Jayne Miller:  They said no. Right. 

Stephen Janis:  And then didn’t they intimate that they had told Davis the day after the shooting that he was in front of a grand jury and then Davis waited six or seven days and there was some controversy about that?

Jayne Miller:  Yes.

Stephen Janis:  So there’s a whole bunch of stuff going on behind the scenes in this particular case. But I just think that that part of the report really struck me because, as we talked about, and we’re not making any assumptions here, but Suiter was given a hero’s funeral. The Baltimore Police Department played up the funeral, and I remember TJ Smith, the spokesperson, tweeting out the procession up 83. And there was a lot of hand wringing about how the community had murdered Suiter and that this is an example of the community turning on the police department.

And I think seeing these revelations come out later simply makes me question how police communicate with the community on things like this and why weren’t more cautious about making any grandiose statements. But more importantly, why no one’s really been held accountable for making those statements, which I think we’re misleading at best, but also indicting the entire Harlem Park community and the people who live there. Am I getting this wrong?

Jayne Miller:  No, that was obviously very much a part of the controversy about this case was the reaction to it, from locking down the neighborhood for the time that it was locked down. 123 interviews, 12 search warrants, and no credible suspect. If 54 tips, who were they? There’s never been an accounting of this, I might add. This is the first time we’ve seen numbers attached to this kind of thing in this investigation, but we’ve never really had a full accounting of what went on in that first week of the investigation as it pertained to people in the community.

Taya Graham:  So Jayne, there’s this really interesting reference to a meeting. Let me read this to you. “Detective Suiter was scheduled to attend a meeting with the US attorneys prosecuting the corrupt BPD officers involved in the Broken Boundaries federal investigation on November 16, 2017 at 1100 hours. Following the meeting, Detective Suiter was under subpoena to testify before a federal grand jury at 1300 hours.” So this meeting, Jayne, how do you react to that?

Jayne Miller:  Well, that’s when he was going to meet with the federal prosecutors to go over his testimony. And that next line in that paragraph is “Detective Suiter had not informed his coworkers or his family of the November 16, 2017 meeting or subsequent grand jury testimony,” which certainly is an interesting piece of information. And, again, indicates, would get to his state of mind and the very deep concern he had about what he was about to have to do.

Stephen Janis:  Well, also, so they were going to meet with him first and then he was going to testify, which says that either he was not in a hostile position with the government. That’s what’s confusing about this and why I thought it was worth bringing up, because he’s going to meet with them and then they’re going to subpoena him, or he’s going to be under subpoena. That sounds very interesting to me. Maybe they were going to say, do you want to cooperate or we’re going to indict you? That has all sorts of implications, which I think are interesting and could suggest a multitude of things that might have happened to him at that point. But obviously, as you point out, Jayne, the bottom line is it was a jackpot for him, really.

Jayne Miller:  Well, that’s what I mean. He clearly was in some very difficult circumstances.

Taya Graham:  We see here in this report that Detective Suiter’s phone had deleted contacts, calls, and text logs, which revealed text messages between him and other officers of the Gun Trace Task Force who were later indicted: Officer Gondo and Officer Ward. And these were all deleted prior to their arrest. Now these officers, Gondo and Ward, ultimately entered guilty pleas, and they offered testimony in the trials of Officer Hersl and Officer Taylor, who were also convicted by a federal jury. One thing that came out during the Hersl and Taylor trial is that Gondo testified that he began stealing while assigned to the VCID unit.

He testified that his squad consisted of Suiter, Ward, Ivory, and Edwards. And he testified that the detectives would routinely steal money and split it amongst themselves. And I can definitely see how this behavior would put one in a state of mind of fear for their career, fear of this coming out to the public, fear of how this would impact their family.

So Jayne, you know a lot about this VCID unit that I have been referencing. Can you talk a little bit about what they are and what they do and the type of impact that they’ve had on our community?

Jayne Miller:  Well, I think all you need to know about VCID is that in the Department of Justice report on the Baltimore Police Department and its discriminatory practices, et cetera that was issued in 2016, VCID is frequently featured. And really, the behavior of that unit was frequently cited as it’s a very aggressive, abusive unit that was mostly focused on guns and drugs. It’s kind of morphed. The GTTF was very much patterned after that very aggressive policing. Jump out boys, as they call themselves.

And what’s interesting here is that what Gondo testified to about the stealing, this was not the 2010 case of planting drugs. This was an additional allegation involving Suiter’s activities as a police officer. So again, it just gets to the point of he would not have known what they were going to talk to him about until he went to that meeting and until he was subpoenaed, et cetera. So there was no way for him, I think, to know at that point on November 15, prior to the November 16 meeting, there was probably no way for him to know what was going to be talked about.

Stephen Janis:  But I wonder if he was communicating with people from VCID, if they were exchanging information about what they were hearing about the investigation or what they were thinking they might encounter, because his testimony was going to come after Gondo had already been… Well, wait. At that point… I’m trying to think. Yeah, Gondo had actually been… They had all been charged in March of 2017.

Jayne Miller:  Correct. And they had testified in other cases. They obviously testified about this in 2018, but this was in 2017.

Stephen Janis:  Correct. So he might not have known exactly what they knew about him, but he did know that people he used to run around with were actually sitting in a jail cell.

Jayne Miller:  Correct.

Stephen Janis:  So probably he had some sense of this was not going to… Well, we can’t say it wasn’t going to go well for him, but certainly it was something of tremendous concern about… And just a couple thoughts about VCID, because I covered them a lot. And they were an aggressive police unit that basically had the power to go anywhere in the city. Now usually, the city’s divided up into police districts. And if you have a unit going into a district you’re supposed to notify the commander. Well, these guys operated as a citywide unit that could go wherever there was violence or whatever. And pretty much… I mean, I covered some arrests where they would just pull people out and do whatever they wanted with them.

And they were extremely… To say they were aggressive is an understatement. I once interviewed a guy who wanted to join VCID. He was a former Marine. He said that’s where the action is. What he meant was that it was very aggressive military-style tactics. And to a certain extent, as you can see the genesis of probably the idea of the GTTF, along with not just the aggressive tactics but the let’s help ourselves to the drug bounty as well. So it’s a pretty interesting intersection of all these people, learning some really bad policing skills, I guess you could say.

Taya Graham:  So let me just read you an excerpt from the summary in this report. “Based on our review of the investigative materials provided, the Maryland State Police Homicide Unit investigators believe that the gunshot wound sustained by Detective Sean Suiter on November 15, 2017 was self-inflicted. Investigators believe that the first two gunshots discharged from Detective Suiter’s weapon were fired in an attempt to create an illusion of confrontation to conceal the suicide.”

So once you hear that review summary, I’m very curious as to if this has altered the way you look at the case or has it just confirmed what you knew all along?

Jayne Miller:  Well, one thing it confirms is what the internal… When the independent review board, which also found, concluded that it was self-inflicted. So there’s nothing that Maryland State Police investigators looked at that caused them to think differently. We are obviously, none of us is privy to everything that’s in the investigative file of the Baltimore Police Department about this case. I mean, obviously, we were denied a request to see that. So we are relying on information that was gathered mostly by the independent review board in 2018, because they had body-worn camera video. They had forensic test information. And so we’re relying on the conclusions that are drawn by these other entities that investigated the case.

But the bottom line is we are now five years away from Sean Suiter’s death, and we still have this very divided… I don’t want to call it a conclusion, because there is no conclusion, but very divided view about whether this was a homicide or a suicide. And we’ve had the police commissioner at the time who has moved on, we’ve had different mayors. We’re going to have a new state’s attorney in this. So a lot of things have changed, but the status of this case and the posture of this case hasn’t.

Stephen Janis:  Jayne, one thing that I think when I read this is that, in a way, Suiter was a missing connection between what many people thought might have been a Gun Trace Task Force case. It could have been quite a bit larger. I feel like the unexplored aspects of his case are why the community doesn’t trust the conclusion that he committed suicide, simply because he could have been a link between the past and the present in the Gun Trace Task Force, and perhaps a broader look at the way Baltimore Police function and the way they do not hold their own officers accountable. Or, if there were people who really knew and encouraged these kinds of tactics and should have been held accountable. How do you feel about that idea? Because I just look at him and say, wow, if he had testified or they had done a more thorough investigation of him, they might have been able to connect some more dots. Or maybe there was something purposeful there.

Jayne Miller:  This is the bottom line of this whole… That’s right. We don’t know what Sean Suiter knew. We don’t know what he may have said, what he may have testified to. We don’t know. And you are absolutely right that it could have taken this investigation to a whole new level. It could have taken this investigation to additional directions, but we don’t know what he knew.

Stephen Janis:  And therein lies why many people I spoke to while I was reporting on this thought that he was killed because they feel like, okay, here’s a witness and he ends up dead. How convenient is that? Now we looked at the evidence and the evidence seems very strong that there’s no suspect, whatever. I’m not suggesting that. I’m only saying I think that’s why people have a lack of trust in the findings, not that it’s justified by the evidence, but it is somewhat, I think, rationalized by the fact that he could have been a critical missing witness in what went down with this horrible scandal.

Taya Graham:  Stephen, that’s an excellent point, that the community understandably still has questions. Not only were many people’s lives ripped apart and disrupted during the investigation for the killer of Sean Suiter, but, of course, the medical examiner’s office has still ruled it a homicide. And then he died right before he was going to testify, and who knows what he could have said, how many other officers he might have exposed to further investigation. So I think it’s very understandable that the community has trust issues with the Baltimore Police Department for this reason, as well as a few others.

So I just want to thank both you and Jayne for joining me during this podcast. And thank you so much for getting this important review and summary from the Maryland State Police department. We really appreciate it and we appreciate your analysis on it. Thank you, Jayne, and thank you, Stephen.

And thank you for joining us for The Land of the Unsolved and our latest update on the mysterious and controversial death of Sean Suiter. I’d like to thank my co-hosts, Stephen Janis and Jayne Miller, for joining me today.

And if you’d like to support our podcast, consider buying one of our books on Amazon on crime and policing. Why Do We Kill? The Pathology of Murder in Baltimore and You Can’t Stop Murder: Truths about Policing in Baltimore and Beyond. And remember, if you have a case you want us to investigate, please send tips to landoftheunsolved@gmail.com. My name is Taya Graham, and I want to thank you for joining us for another episode of The Land of the Unsolved.