Mildred Samy lay down on the spot where her son had died, and she wept.
The day before what would have been Samuel Horne?s 26th birthday, a Harford County jury convicted Sean Nelson Smith of second-degree murder for shooting and killing Horne on Aug. 11. The violence Samy had spent nine years protesting had claimed her youngest child. Saturday, in the middle of the frigid, litter-strewn Brookside Drive parking lot, she was ready to give up.
“Between the verdict, his birthday the next day and just remembering the day that I birthed him, it was just too much to bear,” Samy said.
She was ready to hang up the bullhorn she?d bought to use when she marched through the streets, demanding that good citizens take them back. She had endured seven days of defense attorneys calling her son a stickup boy and a neighborhood bully who had allegedly threatened Smith and left another man paralyzed in an unsolved 2006 shooting.
She thought the jury had given “carte blanche” to violent offenders in Harford County by convicting Smith only of second-degree murder, which could mean parole in 15 years.
Samy knew her son was not perfect, but saw a softer side of him. He protected her from the thugs and the gangs she railed against. He wrote his sister in Iraq and wondered how long it would take society to forgive him.
And as Mildred Samy lay there on the blacktop, thinking of him, she felt like conceding defeat.
“But a neighbor came out, and he picked me up,” Samy said. “I knew then that I had to intensify my fight.”
Samy, 57, had moved to Grempler Way in Edgewood from New York City in 1985, seeking an affordable suburban life for the six children she was raising alone.
“It was ironic that I brought my children here to save them from New York, and then this should happen,” she said.
She had been known as the “Mad Lady of the A-Train” for her pro-public transit advocacy in New York. But seeing Sam drift toward delinquency got her back into the spotlight in Maryland. She borrowed her first bullhorn from the local 4-H Club and took to the streets, at first to call for the expansion of activities for kids at the Edgewood Recreation Center.
In November 2006, fleeing the cold weather that pained her legs every winter, Samy moved to Florida to stay with one of her four daughters. Her retreat ended with her son?s death, and she moved to Joppatowne so she could attend Smith?s trial and return to the community where five of Harford?s seven homicides occurred last year.
When she went to offer condolences and seek comfort with the family of Tyree Brown, who had been shot and killed on Grempler Way on New Years? Eve, one of his relatives told her: “When you left this block, we lost it.”
“Shedidn?t mean it in a bad way, but that just ? it really hurt,” Samy said.
Dion Guthrie, the county councilman representing Edgewood and Joppatowne, said he doubted Samy could resist the pull of fighting for her neighborhood.
“She?s too much of a good activist to give it up,” Guthrie said. “I?m glad she?s back.”
“I have to admire what she does because the complaint from the public arena is always, ?If you want change, you must act,? and she?s out there acting,” said Harford County Sheriff Jesse Bane. “What?s most admirable is that she knows none of this is going to bring her son back, yet she?s out there. We?re very fortunate to have her.”
