On a humid mid-July afternoon in northeast Baltimore, some 400 family, friends, neighbors, teammates, coaches and other mourners gathered in the Church of the Redeemed of the Lord to say goodbye to 17-year-old John Crowder. Not among them, however, were his AAU basketball teammates. They had a game scheduled that day in Augusta, Ga., at the Nike Peach States tournament.
Many of Crowder's AAU teammates and the mourners in the church (several wore T-shirts and headbands bearing his photo) has just seen him at Baltimore's Inner Harbor the previous Sunday night, where they had gathered to celebrate the Fourth of July weekend and take a break before the summer travel schedule picked up. They woke up the next morning, July 5, to calls and texts bearing the horrible news: their 6-foot-8 friend, their budding star, the one they called "Big John'' and who Corbett described as "a big baby,'' had been shot down in a grassy area near his grandmother's home in east Baltimore.
As much as it hurt his teammates and coaches to miss his funeral, it hurt them more to see Crowder miss his chance to escape for good the hard life he had experienced for so long -- and the lure that he seemed never to fully resist. With an opportunity to stay in the same school for two straight years, to build on basketball ability that was drawing college interest, he still ended up losing his life in the same manner so many young males in the city already had. Overcoming not only growing up without either parent, but also a history of encounters with the police -- including one shortly before his slaying, according to sources with knowledge of his record -- was in sight.
Nobody worked harder toward that than Crowder's older cousin, Brodie Crowder, like John also a grandchild of Addie Brice, who took care of John after her daughter Aletha, John's mother, died of cancer when he was 2 years old. John's father, Carlton Crowder, had long ago left the family. Before John had reached high school, a cousin and a close friend had already been killed in the neighborhood, and his two older brothers, James and Tayvon, also had been shot.
"I understood the severity of the road he was going down,'' Brodie Crowder said after his cousin's funeral. "It was a short period of time, but I want people to realize, it doesn't take long. He was on the right road a long time, but in a few weeks, he went down the wrong path, and now we're here at the funeral.''
At the funeral, Crowder, 30, pleaded with the young people to listen to the warnings of their parents, guardians and elders about the street: "If John had listened, he would still be here today.''
Brodie Crowder took his cousin in to live with him for two years in Owings Mills, an upper-middle class suburb north of Baltimore. John had already gotten into trouble with the police, including a drug charge as an eighth-grader in which the court had recommended that he attend boarding school out of state.
Crowder spent a year at a private school in Dallas, playing basketball but returning home before the school year was over. Brodie took him in and enrolled him in Towson Catholic, not only a well-regarded academic school but one with a storied basketball history, with Carmelo Anthony among its products.