Among those joining the conversation was Florence Bray, mother of one of the victims, Crystal Dozier. Bray says after her daughter went missing early in 2007 family members reported it to police three times that year but heard nothing back. Then, Bray says, in February of this year Crystal's oldest daughter went to the police station and asked them to check on the case.
BRAY: They told her there was no use of doing it because she was grown and she would come home when she's ready.
Bray says its really hard for her to understand why the police didn't do more and why Sowell's immediate neighbors didn't notice all these women going into his house and never coming out.
It's stories like these that keep Lawrence Boone up at night. He's pastor of a church in the neighborhood.
BOONE: I do feel a bit of remorse. What could I have done; what could we have done to save some lives.
In a way Pastor Boone's introspection is a bit odd given that for the last ten years his Covenant Community Church hosted monthly meetings between the community and the 4th District Police to try and air out fears and concerns about crime. Unfortunately, says Boone, not a lot of people attended.
Ronnie Dunn, an Urban Studies professor at Cleveland State, says long-standing mistrust of the police by African-Americans is one of several social conditions that made this area ripe for a serial killer to operate in.
DUNN: 36% percent of the residents of that neighborhood are home-owners; 64% are renters. So there's a high mobility rate and transience in that neighborhood. Those long-term residents are elderly; they go in their homes and stay to themselves for fear of retaliation and that is how Anthony Sowell was able to commit these crimes in the prolific manner he did.
Another factor, Dunn says, that's causing a lot of second-guessing is that the area right around Sowell's home was known to be saturated with drug dealings. Several of the women Sowell allegedly preyed on had drug addictions. So, Sound of Ideas host Dan Moulthrop asked Blaine Griffin, Cleveland's Director of Community Relations, why the drug dealing wasn't more aggressively pursued.
GRIFFIN: It's the community's responsibility to make sure they keep government in check and that government is accountable for what goes on and that's the kind of support that we ought to have.
MOULTHROP: Ok. Let me ask you this though. If you have a comunity where you know the culture of that comunity can no longer take care of itself, at what point is it the government's responsibility, the police responsibility to go in there and change the dynamics?
GRIFFIN: The police department will always respond to those types of situations but whenever something goes on on our street the families are out there and visable, and if we have to call the police and deal with them, they respond and the reason is they know in our neighborhood we're not having it.
MOULTHROP: Are you saying if there's a no snitching culture in a neighborhood then it's there own fault if there's drugs and criminal behavior there?
GRIFFIN: I did not say that. What I said is there has to be more street clubs, more cooperation between the citizens, more people attending our police com relations committee.
Griffin promised again that all the police department actions and procedures will be reviewed in the course of the investigation and that there's little doubt "we could have done more." He also pointed out that this part of Cleveland is a "weed and seed area" where federal grants are specifically targeted at weeding out crime and funding social service programs to help prevent crime and the conditions that cause it. David Molpus, 90.3