In broad daylight in East Cleveland, an ordinary day was about to be shattered by something far outside the ordinary. On October 20th, 2009, a 911 dispatcher received a frantic call from a man who had just witnessed something terrifying. A woman had come flying out of a second-story window, landing hard on the ground below.
The caller was beside himself, struggling to convey the horror unfolding before his eyes.
The dispatcher tried to calm him, asking if the woman was alive, if she was breathing. The caller confirmed she was on the ground, barely conscious, going in and out. She had just come flying out of that window, and he had no idea if she had been thrown, if she had jumped, or if she had fallen.
All he knew was that something was deeply, profoundly wrong inside that house.
Inside that house was a man named Anthony Sowell. When police arrived, he told them a simple story: they were just using drugs together, and she accidentally fell out of the window. But the truth was far more sinister.
Sowell had already enticed eleven women to use drugs inside 12205 Imperial Avenue. He had selected his victims from a community that would be hesitant to step forward and become witnesses, a community where women living on the margins were easy prey and their disappearances were often ignored.
Detectives began to gather evidence, piecing together a picture of a suspect. Which piece of the puzzle would reveal Anthony Sowell as guilty of murder? What would be the killer’s mistake?
Nobody should die that way. I’ve never seen anything that horrific. One of the duties of a pathologist is to determine the cause of death, and in this case, the cause would be a monster hiding in plain sight.
There is a gap between buildings in East Cleveland where once stood number 12205 Imperial Avenue. As long as Anthony Sowell could hide what was inside that house, he would remain a free man. Inside, he was hiding grim secrets.
In one room, the decomposing bodies of two women. In another, a further three. And outside, in his yard, yet more.
What is known about the man who had frightened a woman so much that she threw herself from the second story of 12205 Imperial rather than stay a second longer? A man who would spend hours being interrogated by police and who seemed at ease throughout, proudly discussing his four grandchildren. He was asked if they called him Papa or Grandpa, and he smiled, saying everybody called him that.
He seemed happy in police company, happy in the company of everyone.
Many times when somebody is arrested, you hear their neighbors say they were so quiet, they never knew there was anything wrong. They couldn’t believe that their neighbor was capable of such a crime. That’s what makes them so effective, is that they can blend in.
Sowell had this outward appearance to the neighborhood where he would hold barbecues and chat with people. They didn’t really suspect him of doing anything like this. But he could snap.
People had seen him lose his temper. It was these two personalities that people would describe seeing.
He had at least one or two girlfriends at the time who talked about the long conversations they would have and how kind and introspective he could be. But then he could also be very violent if someone disagreed with him or didn’t say the right things. But a killer, not Tony Sowell, the party guy?
There is no neon sign on anybody that says I’m a serial killer. There is no sign at the intersection that you often see people holding that says I will work for food. They’re not holding signs that say I will ππΎππ for pleasure.
Anthony Sowell’s killing story begins to be uncovered with that 911 call. The caller described the woman as looking around 40 years old. She was awake but couldn’t get up.
He had given her his t-shirt. She was going in and out of consciousness. The dispatcher asked which window she fell out of, the first or the second.
The caller confirmed it was the second, more than six feet. The call had been made in a neighborhood of East Cleveland where violence was not uncommon.
In fact, a year earlier, another woman had fled from 12205. In December 2008, a woman in the neighborhood named Gladis Wade frantically flagged down a police car. She told the officers that she had been attacked.
She had scratches on her neck and a deep gash in her right thumb. She said that Anthony Sowell had asked her if she wanted to go drink beers with him, and when she said no, he punched her in the face, knocked her out, and dragged her into his house. There, he proceeded to choke her and tried to rip off her clothes.
She said he had just this evil look on his face, like the eyes of the devil were glowing. She fought back and tried to scratch his eyeballs out.
Police visited the owner of 12205 Imperial, where the attack had taken place, and heard a different story from Anthony Sowell. Gladis had hit him, he said. The officers decided this was a domestic dispute.
They didn’t want to get involved, and they wanted to quickly get out of the house. It was littered with trash and smelled very badly. They smelled this horrible stench, but they saw trash everywhere.
It was just a pit. They wanted to get away from the neighborhood too.
Mount Pleasant. The name at that time was almost cruelly ironic because the neighborhood by then had really hit the skids. There was a lot of poverty.
One in five houses was up for foreclosure. There was a lot of crime. This was a rough neighborhood.
A lot of the residents had fallen victim to the crack epidemic of the time, and a lot of those people were women. They would roam the streets searching for their next hit, and that made them easy prey for ruthless predators like Anthony Sowell.
Not that he was considered a predator. As likable as he appeared to be to some, not many did actually know much about Anthony Sowell. He wasn’t a person that everybody immediately had a specific memory of, but he was kind of always in the background, maybe a little bit socially awkward.
Sowell was an ex-serviceman. He had been a model Marine. Maybe the stringent rules in the military were good for him for a while.
He was able to cope in the military, do his job, listen, follow orders and directions, and never really got in a lot of trouble. He would later tell probing detectives of his pride at his record. He served a seven-year tour of duty, and from everything that we know, he did well.
He was a good serviceman.
In 1989, four years after leaving the military, it all begins to go wrong. When he gets out, he starts having problems. He breaks up with his girlfriend, he stops going to work, and he loses his job.
Then he turns to drinking pretty heavily. He’s pretty much drinking all day. Beer was his vice, and things are kind of falling apart for Anthony Sowell.
The drunk Sowell would target vulnerable women and entice them back to his place, and then things would get ugly. It wasn’t long that he was home before he was actually accused of harming several women. In close proximity, there were two women, both of whom were pregnant, but also either abusing drugs or hanging out with people who were drinking.
Anthony Sowell was accused of raping his accuser. A pregnant woman claimed that he wouldn’t let her go after she agreed to spend time with him. Another woman went to police and told them that Anthony Sowell attacked her inside his home, that he bound and gagged her and raped her.
Sowell avoided jail, but not for long. He was never prosecuted for that case because he was actually arrested for another rape within the same year. He was prosecuted in that case, and he ended up pleading guilty to attempted rape and was given a sentence of up to 15 years in prison.
Sowell refused to plead deal to contest what had happened, and he declined the chance of early release by admitting his guilt. His parole was repeatedly denied.
When he got out, because he served his entire sentence, he’s not on parole, so he’s not under police supervision. As a πππ offender, he has to register and police have to verify his address, but that’s pretty much it. He’s pretty much free and clear.
In 2005, Anthony Sowell is released after a long prison stretch during which time he’d been a model prisoner. He’s back at 12205 Imperial Avenue, where police in the East Cleveland neighborhood are dealing with a drugs epidemic. Because of his offense, he’s on the πππ register and dutifully attends the sheriff’s office every 90 days as ordered.
He was not someone they considered a problem. He was Tony, the party guy from Imperial.
Serial killers also tend to be very smart, almost sociopathic. Some of them can be, and your sociopaths can also be very charming. When somebody is charming, people like them.
They have relationships, they build families and friends, and so therefore people aren’t going to question them. They would never imagine that Anthony Sowell or other serial killers out there could do the evil that they do.
By 2007, Tony Sowell was living alone at 12205 Imperial, his parents having passed away. Drugs had flooded the Mount Pleasant neighborhood. The city was kind of getting poorer.
The crack epidemic was really starting to affect the streets. There were a lot of mothers and fathers starting to use those drugs.
Sowell set about preying on the women made vulnerable by their dependence on drugs. His own days were dominated by booze. He was really the kind of guy that was doing a lot of drinking.
He’d go to the corner store in the morning and get a beer and just kind of continue that throughout the day.
A pattern was set. The drunk Sowell would home in on vulnerable women and entice them back to his place. 12205 Imperial Avenue became quite the party venue.
He would say, hey, do you want to come in and have a drink? His house was a place where he would let people crash if they were using drugs and didn’t want to go home. The house, you could tell, was definitely used as a place where people could just crash and could just party.
There were beer bottles and beer cans all around.
The rundown quarter of East Cleveland offered perfect conditions for the predator. Sowell had drugs, confused women, a place of his own to take them, and a meeting venue where he could also get beers. There was a little corner store right there that was kind of the hub of activity on Imperial Avenue.
They were really familiar with Anthony Sowell there. He would come in and buy tall beers, King Cobra beers, which he would drink often. People would come over to the store when they would come to his house, buy beer, party, kind of back and forth.
When partying with Sowell, the menu was easy to predict. He might help cook up some drugs, and he might follow it up with a six-pack of beers. Then it would be time for πππ, whether the women wanted it or not.
Every female that you have brought to the house, have each and every one of them use drugs, like crack or whatever. Is that one of the reasons why they come to your house, so they can smoke? He admitted he used to, but didn’t do that anymore.
On May 17th, 2007, Crystal Dozier was wandering the streets of Mount Pleasant. She was spotted by Tony Sowell. She fit a then all-too-familiar East Cleveland profile.
The type of women that come to your house are πΉπππ users first, outright πΉπππ use.
Crystal Dozier was the mother of seven children. Her own family remembers that when Crystal was a little girl, she was the responsible one. She’s the one you could always count on.
She loved helping around the house and learning how to cook, and she really liked pretending she was a grown-up. She loved getting dressed up. But drugs changed everything.
By the time she was in her early teens, her life was just basically spinning out of control. She never shook her πΉπππ habit. They all had these vulnerabilities that Anthony Sowell appeared to hone in on.
Sowell later described seeing her, saying she looked so sad and pitiful, like she just had a rough, rough time. He offered her a beer, and when she asked how she was going to get one, he said the store was close, they were open. He told her to come on with him, she could get all the beers she wanted.
Sowell invited her into 12205. He had raped before, but he had never killed. Nothing would be heard about Crystal for two and a half years.
Her anguished family was unable to find her. She had been raped, then strangled. The most personal way to ππΎππ somebody is to strangle them.
In Anthony’s case, it was personal and close, and he was able to watch, literally watch the breath of life come out of that person.
Her killer buried Crystal by the backyard fence of 12205. She had become victim number one of Anthony Sowell. There was no reported sighting of Crystal before her murder.
Possibly she had been whisked into 12205 in darkness. Possibly detectives were not getting all of the information they could from a community at times at odds with the police. He selected his victims from a group of people in a community that would be hesitant to step forward and be witnesses.
Other πΉπππ-addicted women were lured into 12205 around the same time. Those women had gone to Anthony Sowell’s house, maybe to use drugs or drink or just hang out with him, and had never left the home. As for Sowell, he was not suspected of any involvement in the disappearance of Crystal Dozier.
There’s even a suggestion that he may have tried to mend his ways. He participated in Alcoholics Anonymous, so he was aware that he had an alcohol problem. But AA did not work.
There is no indication that Sowell took a day off from his heavy drinking.
When he was drunk, he would want to have πππ. He would head out looking for a πππ worker, one like Tonia Culver, who went missing in June 2008. A young woman drifting in and out of family life, Tonia Culver had tried to get clean.
It just never took. The pull of the drugs was just too strong. But she had once had hopes and dreams.
She had gotten her cosmetology license. She’d even trained to be a medical assistant. But drugs basically consumed her life.
She was 33 years old and had six children. Her family was slow to report her missing because she disappeared so often.
She was dead within two hours of entering 12205. His killing method of choice was his bare hands. Sowell had perfected strangling by now.
Killers learn, they’ll do everything the same, but this time they’ll bring a gun. It also is a learned behavior. They learn from their mistakes, and so throughout the years, Anthony learned from his mistakes and kept on trying to protect his craft.
He didn’t start out killing. He learned and progressed to that point. As he was successful with his first rape, he would do the next one and the next one and try new things.
Ultimately, as a serial killer, he got the thrill from watching his victims die.
When asked what would cause him to choke them, he said it was about his girl. He said he was the punisher. He couldn’t explain it.
As for the residents of Mount Pleasant, all they knew for sure was that something bad was coming from somewhere in the neighborhood. Before long, people in the area start complaining about this horrible smell. It is just a rotten stench.
At least one neighbor calls the city and says you got to do something about this, this is just horrendous, it smells like something died. Something or someone. But it kind of gets waved off by the authorities.
Right next to the house where Anthony Sowell lived on Imperial Avenue was a place called Ray’s Sausage. For years, when there had been foul odors that the neighbors noticed, they would call the city or call the health department. When people would come out, they would always attribute the smells to Ray’s Sausage.
In fact, the people that owned this very small family-owned sausage company redid their entire sewer system, thinking that somehow the smell was being attributed to them, their sausage making, their dumpsters. They only realized later that it was probably Anthony Sowell. In fact, the owner said at one point that they believed that he may have dumped some bodies in their dumpsters.
The upshot after the complaint was that an opportunity to stop a killer was ignored. The smell remains, and it just hangs over this neighborhood, this rotten stench. The house where Anthony Sowell is living is just filthy, full of garbage, and definitely there’s this horrible smell coming from there.
But nobody ever does anything.
No mistake yet big enough for cops to stop Sowell, who carries on picking up πππ workers when drunk and attacking them. Not always successful in his attempts to ππΎππ them. There were a number of women who actually made it out of Anthony Sowell’s house, and each of them also described either being choked or strangled by him quite aggressively, sometimes with like a cord or a strap, other times with his hands.
He was the punisher.
Those who had escaped Sowell’s punishment had not told police of their ordeal, fearful that they may be arrested for πΉπππ use and prostitution themselves. One woman would not reveal what she had seen inside 12205 until Sowell was safely locked up. She caught a glimpse of one of the decomposing bodies, which frightened her and just made her realize, I have got to get out of here.
So what went on behind the door of 12205 Imperial remained undetected, uninvestigated. Sowell’s good fortune and the fact that he was yet to make the mistake of attracting the police to his door meant that he was still free.
Between 2007 and 2008, women continued to go missing from Mount Pleasant. Their loved ones would call after a day or two, but they would always come back. They would never miss important events like birthdays or Christmas.
So when they went missing for a longer period of time, it didn’t show up. A lot of them contacted the police and said, you know, this is different, and were basically told, hey, they’ll come back when they’re done using drugs.
After all, who cares about women who often go missing for a living? One minute on the streets, the next selling πππ in a location nobody knows of. πππ workers make perfect targets for serial killers.
The police were dismissive of these women for the same reason that Anthony Sowell likely targeted them. Anthony picked his victims because they were vulnerable. All his targets were black, πΉπππ-addicted, and desperate for cash.
Choosing the same profile of victim is familiar territory for serial killers and rapists too. The very first time that they’re successful, they will continue to do the crime the same way every single time. Rapists are no different.
If they were successful with a brunette living in an apartment, all their victims will be brunettes living in an apartment. He probably knew that people weren’t going to come beating down his door looking for these women, and so the killing went on.
Le’Aisha Long’s life had never been easy. Le’Aisha Long was the youngest of Anthony Sowell’s victims. She was only 25.
Le’Aisha’s mom had been a crack addict, her dad had been an alcoholic, and Le’Aisha’s life pretty much fell into that pattern. It was only a matter of time before Sowell would find her. She was simply not able to defend herself, her life sorted by drugs and bad choices.
Le’Aisha had her first child when she was just a child herself, at 14 years old. At 17, she had three children and she’d lost custody of all of them.
Sowell hated the fact that they used drugs and would even say things to them about it. He wanted to help them, but then he would also do it himself. He definitely had this strange relationship where he would meet women who had πΉπππ problems, he would kind of entice them into his home with the idea of drinking or using drugs, but then he would also try to be very caring.
Well, let me get you some clothes, let me feed you, you look like you need to eat. One thing that always made him mad was that they had kids and they was out on the street. That was a big thing.
Le’Aisha’s fate was to be a gruesome one. The only thing they really recovered of her body was her head, and it was in a bucket in the basement, which was very difficult for her family. They didn’t even have a body to bury.
Sowell would describe his victim as pitiful, but he himself took no pity on them.
The next woman to be enticed inside 12205 was Tishana Culver. Tishana Culver vanished in November of 2008. She was 33 years old.
She was a πΉπππ addict, but she hadn’t always been. She was once the protective mother who would chase away the πΉπππ dealers from her doorstep because she didn’t want them to influence her children. But eventually she fell into drugs.
Her life kind of intersected with Sowell’s early on. They both grew up on Page Avenue. She knew him probably tangentially, the families kind of knew each other.
The addiction had led her to crime, to prison, away from her children, and eventually into the hands of a serial killer. She went looking for a hit and a bed for the night and chose 12205. She was not long for this world after taking that decision.
When she initially went missing, her family went to police and they were asking for help to find her, and the police said, you know, we know she has a πΉπππ problem, she’ll come home when she’s done using drugs. When Tishana went missing, her family says they went to police right away. The police told them just wait.
This family really put up flyers, they were really searching for her, especially her daughter Denita Culver, who really cared for her mom deeply and was searching for her. This was really difficult for her. She would never see her mom alive again.
One day Sowell would describe her fate and that of others. His favorite method of murder was to use an electric cord or any cable nearby before pinning his victims to the ground. He would act quickly, subduing in seconds, showing no mercy.
In 2018, an investigation would begin about why detectives had failed to arrest Sowell before he was eventually hauled in for questioning. His killing was relentless.
Next to enter the foul stench of his crack den was Michelle Mason. Michelle Mason was finally getting the life she’d always wanted. She had spent so many years in a haze of drugs, hooked on heroin and crack.
But by 2001, she was really starting to get things turned around. Her family remembers this was really the happiest time of her life. She was living on her own, she had friends, real friends, and she had kicked her πΉπππ habit.
She was clean and sober.
But one day in 2008, she seems to have come across Anthony Sowell. On an October morning in 2008, Michelle left the house and said she’d be back, and she never came back. Her family knew something was wrong.
They filed a missing person’s report, they put out flyers all over the neighborhood.
Fifteen months after claiming his first victim, Anthony Sowell had killed again, for the fifth time. On October 29th, 2009, some Cleveland police officers, some detectives actually, went to Anthony Sowell’s home on Imperial Avenue and they were looking to arrest him. A woman had accused him of rape.
When they went to the house, he was not there. So they went away, figuring the overwhelming smell which they could not miss was from Ray’s Sausage store next door.
How many more women would Anthony Sowell attract to 12205? What mistakes would he make before police would finally arrest him?
It was October 20th, 2009, when a man walking on Imperial saw a woman falling from an upstairs window of 12205. He didn’t know her, but it was obvious something very bad had been going on. At 12205 Imperial, he’d got away with so many rapes and murders.
Sowell set about trying to get away with this latest attack. A week later, she does talk. She goes to police and she tells them what happened.
The Cleveland Police, who had known about complaints related to the man who lived inside 12205, knew about his past as a convicted rapist. They only now decided to go inside and take a good look around. October 29th, police go to Anthony Sowell’s home with a search warrant and an arrest warrant.
Sowell isn’t there. They go inside. The place is just unbelievable.
It’s trash everywhere, clothes strewn around, it smells unbelievable.
They entered the home and they found the bodies of two women who were basically sitting out in the open, decomposing. They’re just lying there rotting, and they’re next to a shovel. The police don’t know what they have on their hands here, but they know they need help, so they call in other officers.
Once they found that, they called in a lot more police and some crime scene investigators. Over the course of maybe a week or more, they found many more bodies.
There was no immediate sign of Anthony Sowell, but it wouldn’t be long before he reappeared in the neighborhood. On October 31st, police find Anthony Sowell walking down the street about a mile from the house. They arrest him.
They charge him with five counts of murder. But the bodies keep turning up. Detectives are staggered to learn that Sowell does not know how many bodies he had hidden around his property.
They cordon off the house, they cordon off the yard. They find three more bodies in the house, two in a crawl space. It turns out that there were 11 women total who had gone missing since about 2007.
Eleven women, all of them black, missing since 2007, all dead, all here at the house at 12205 Imperial Avenue.
The identifications of the women begin. Crystal Dozier, Tonia Culver, Tishana Culver, Le’Aisha Long, Michelle Mason. They hear the stories of others like Kim Smith.
Kim Smith loved her father. She and her father took care of each other. He had a spinal injury and had trouble getting around, so Kim looked after him.
She would get him to his doctor’s appointments, she would cook for him. But Kim was hanging out with the wrong crowd and she was smoking a lot of crack, and she was little by little not showing up as often. When she disappeared, her family didn’t report her missing.
Next was Nancy Cobbs. In April of 2009, Nancy went missing. Her family filed a missing person report, they put up flyers all over the neighborhood, at the local businesses, on telephone poles everywhere.
They were frantic to find her. They never did.
They identify a woman known as Amelda Hunter. Amy Hunter adored books. When she was a little girl, her family called her a bookworm, and they said that she really loved reading the classics.
But Amy’s life would not have a storybook ending. By the time she was 14, she was pregnant, raped by a teacher who got her drunk at a party. Her baby was born with cerebral palsy, and Amy was devastated.
Her friends said that she turned to crack cocaine as a sort of comfort, and it really took over her life. A life which ended inside the Sowell house of horrors.
Sowell, under interrogation, affects madness. It was all a dream, he says. He did not know real from unreal.
They asked him about another woman, identified her name, Janice Webb. Janice Webb always loved her East Cleveland neighborhood where she grew up. It was home to her, and she loved her family.
But unfortunately she fell into the same trap that so many people in the neighborhood had fallen into, and that was the drugs.
This would make her most likely the last one. Not the last one. Tishana Culver was Sowell’s tenth victim, a mother of three whose πΉπππ problems meant that her children had been taken away from her.
Her remains were found buried in the garden. In early June of 2009, Tishana dropped by her adoptive mom’s house to bring her some groceries and then she left, saying she’d be back, and she never came back. Her adopted mom reported her missing.
Diane Turner, a mother of six, was victim number 11. Her body remained unclaimed, unrecognized in the city morgue for nearly a year. She had been sober for almost two full years.
Unfortunately, she never really learned how to be a good mom, and so the authorities said that she was a danger to her child. They took her baby away when her baby was just four days old, and it devastated her. Pretty much then is when her family and friends say that Diane just gave up.
Her body was found in a third-floor bedroom of Anthony Sowell’s home at 12205 Imperial Avenue.
The interrogation was not a difficult one if the target was to get a confession. Sowell could hardly deny his guilt, and any pretense of insanity soon disappears. For interrogators, the priority was to get the truth out of Anthony Sowell, not to show how they were feeling.
Shock at hearing of how a serial killer had behaved quite so monstrously. As detectives, you have to remove the emotional side as far as getting looking at that person’s life. It’s important to know facts and who that person is, who your victims are.
Sometimes you get to know the families very well, and you feel it’s a calling, it’s a mission to be able to provide answers to what happened to their child or their loved one.
Sowell had appeared as a party guy with a warm welcome to the women of Mount Pleasant whose lives had taken a terrible turn for the worse, and they had trusted him. The mistake Sowell had made in order for detectives to be led to a much more sinister address at 12205 was simple. He allowed one victim too many to escape.
That was Anthony Sowell’s killer’s mistake. He let one of his victims get too close to a window, and she did what she had to to save her life. She jumped out that second-story window.
She’s the one who got away. And that’s what it took to get Anthony Sowell finally arrested, finally stopped from his killing spree.
Campaigners argued in 2018 that it was a killing spree which could and should have been stopped after the first report of a woman who had gone missing, and again after women had lived to tell the tale of torture inside 12205. It was a sobering moment for Cleveland to realize that 11 citizens could go missing and nobody could make the connection that they were all in the same place, had all been killed by the same man.
For a while, the house was left standing, a reminder of Sowell’s crimes, where artifacts of the women had been abandoned, clothing and jewelry left behind in the upstairs apartment of his home. The decision was taken in 2010 to pull down 12205. People moved quickly to get control of the house so that they could knock it down.
Within the year, the house was bulldozed and made into an empty lot. There have been plans in the works for almost five years now to put some kind of memorial at that site.
I think it left the whole community numb. How could we let this happen? How could we let this happen?
How indeed. Sowell had killed and raped, raped and killed over a three-year period, at the end of which time his mistake was to run out of luck when a survivor convinced police to look under the trash inside 12205. Essentially, people like Anthony Sowell and other serial rapists that have since been discovered, they were smarter than the police, they were smarter than the community.
They knew that these women, and the women probably knew in some ways too, that nobody would care.
Police had been warned about Sowell on a number of occasions and even had the right to ask to go inside the home of the registered πππ offender, but they did not dig too deeply into a man who lived in a neighborhood that officers did not like to frequent. Sheriff’s deputies visited his house and he had to check in regularly as a πππ offender. The same week these bodies were discovered, they had checked in on him at his home, and they had just never entered his home because that wasn’t part of what they did.
If they did, they probably would have noticed something amiss or smelled the foul odor that neighbors had been complaining about for years but couldn’t really pinpoint where it was coming from.
The detective story which led police to the house of a serial killer does not reflect well on the Cleveland police force. That they got the final piece of the puzzle into the disappearance of women in Mount Pleasant was more about luck than judgment. Kidnap women too often, and eventually one will escape to raise an alarm that will finally be heard.
She fell out the window upstairs on the second floor.
Sowell was given the death penalty in 2011. The sentence was never to be carried out. He died of natural causes in 2021.
