Justice for Annie

Today marks a cruel anniversary for us.  Family and friends join our son Sam and us in mourning the loss one year ago of our beautiful daughter, Annie.

Since March 20th, we have known that the Baltimore Police Department has concluded, wrongly, that Annie’s death was due to suicide.  They continue to acknowledge that many, many circumstances surrounding her disappearance and death are unanswered. They are convinced, though, that Annie killed herself by drinking from a partially empty container of Bactine, containing a tiny amount, perhaps a thimbleful, of lidocaine.

We can confirm reporting today in The Washington Post that Dr. Michael Baden, one of the world’s pre-eminent forensic pathologists, has effectively ruled out suicide as the cause of Annie’s death.  Dr, Baden adds further, and with inescapable conviction, that it would require several full containers of Bactine to produce the levels of lidocaine found in Annie’s system.  He concludes that Annie almost certainly died as a result of murder, manslaughter, or accident.  “I would have to know more about the circumstances of the lidocaine ingestion,” said Dr. Baden, “but in no way can this be classified a suicide.”

Who should we believe?  Dr, Baden, a world-class expert who has been consulted on autopsies from President Kennedy to Michael Jackson?  Or the State Medical Examiner, who has lost Annie’s internal organs?

We are stunned to learn from the Post that the Baltimore Police Department believed from the onset of its investigation that Annie death’s was a suicide. This completely undermines the fundamental integrity of the entire investigation into Annie’s death, by the only agency to look into it. What leading questions were asked? What clues were missed, ignored, or discarded? 

Has any witness or any evidence been examined with any rigor? Apparently, the Baltimore Police Department has been completely wrong, and completely close-minded, from the very start.
Told loud enough, the story of what happened to Annie in Baltimore, and what has happened to us since, could blow a fair-sized hole in Baltimore’s three billion dollar a year tourism industry.

The story involves still-misplaced organs…a homicide unit being slowly crushed under the weight of accumulating bodies…an autopsy leaked to the press in February, but withheld from the family until June…senior police officials, armed with handguns but no facts, pounding a table and shouting at grieving parents…the Mayor and other city officials taking as long as four months to answer explicit requests for a beautiful girl’s baby blankets and rosary…police officials fabricating non-existent fingerprint evidence, and concocting preposterous alibis for thugs who have already admitted to dumping a body and stealing a car – but maybe, say the police, the dead girl gave them her permission…

We hope soon to be able to tell tourists that a visit to Baltimore does not place them in mortal peril…that if harm does befall them during a visit, the City will respond with professionalism and compassion…that the Police Department and City Hall will not systematically brutalize victims’ families… that if the Baltimore police somehow leap to, and cling to, demonstrably wrong-headed, unfounded, and close-minded conclusions, and are exposed as having done so, that they are capable of admitting grave error, and newly pursuing the truth.