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Zack Reed Wants Investigation Into System That Failed to Catch Killer

Councilman Zack Reed says he deserves criticism just like everyone else for missing some of the clues that a mass murder was happening in his ward. Now, he’s calling for an investigation into why no one looked deeper into the home of Anthony Sowell, despite persistent complaints for years of a horrible odor that we now know to be that of dead bodies.

REED: Is our system so broken that the health department could go out there and smell the stench… get a local owner try to clean it up. You have a sherrif’s office who goes. You have a police department. You have people that continue to tell you about this stench. Is the system so broken that we just say, callous, it’s just a stench…

And there’s another problem with the system, says Judy Martin, founder of Survivors/Victims of Tragedy. All the different police districts are so busy, she says, they can’t always coordinate with other departments to track missing persons.

MARTIN: We need a centralized missing persons department so that there are three or four, even five, detectives dedicated to working with families of missing persons.

Many on the show raised questions about of double standards. Did police pay enough attention to this community and the issues on this street? Caller Elizabeth from Lakewood wondered if the response would be different in the suburbs.

ELIZABETH: What would happen if three women went missing from the community that I live in of Lakewood or a near suburb like Westlake or Rocky River? And, I was just astounded because this would never happen. This wouldn’t have happened this way if it was another community.

West Side resident Mike thinks it’s more about what’s expected in an area.

MIKE: People shouldn’t make such a race and class issue out of it, which I believe is a misconception. I think it’s more a high crime vs low crime areas. When they talk, if it happens in Westlake, well of course it’ll be more news in Westlake because there’s not as much crime.

TOBIN: This is not a horrible area.

That’s Plain Dealer metro editor Mike Tobin, who says there’s a misconception about the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood where Sowell lived.

TOBIN: This is not the poorest area in Cleveland. It’s working class, but it has homes, it has people, it has families. This home has been in the Sowell family for decades.

And there were businesses in the area, including the now-famous Ray’s Sausage, which many people assumed was the source of those horrible smells. Councilman Reed says after the news came out about Sowell, he went to apologize.

REED: Before I could get another word out, he knew exactly what I was apologizing for. Because he knows for two years, I’ve been on his back to clean up this stench. If you go out there now, there’s a hole in the sidewalk that’s been there for two years. And he said, councilman, I’ve spent over $10,000 on new sewers, new pipes, bleach, to get this out. And it wasn’t him.

Now, that we know the truth about what happened on Imperial Ave in Cleveland, Tobin thinks this story says a lot about our communities.

TOBIN: To just look at it as a police response issue narrows it far too much. This is about the breakdown of families. This is about the breakdown of services. This is about the relationship between the police and the community.