On Feb. 18, Cindy Showalter received an early-morning phone call from her son, Keith, asking for help. The call was short, but she could tell her 25-year-old son was distraught.
“Mom, I broke up with my girlfriend,” he said. “There are police cars in front of my condo.”
Showalter?s girlfriend had come to Keith?s Parkville home to retrieve some small personal items, but Keith wouldn?t let her in. It was 2 a.m., and the girlfriend called Baltimore County police.
In the conversation with her son, Cindy Showalter, who knew Keith could get depressed under stress, told him she would arrive shortly to calm him down.
“Just go in and go to bed,” Showalter recalls telling Keith. “The police can?t come in. I?ll come up and iron it all out.”
But when Cindy Showalter drove to Keith?s home in the 2200 block of Lowells Glen Road, police cars blocked her. The Baltimore County SWAT team already was there.
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“I toldthe police, ?You guys better take all your equipment out of here and leave him alone,? ” Showalter said. “I told them I was going to talk to him. They said, ?Ma?am, you can?t go up there and talk to him.?
“There were SWAT teams pulling up. There were armored cars pulling up. There was a helicopter over his condo. I was a nervous wreck. They said, ?Ma?am, if you get out of your car, we?re going to lock you up. If you use your cell phone, we?re going to lock you up.? I was crying. I said, ?You?re going to talk to me before you do anything, right??
The next thing that happened, a detective came up to me and said, ?I?m sorry, Ms. Showalter, your son is dead.? ”
Cindy?s son, Keith, emerged from his house at 3:30 a.m. County police say he fired a rifle several times at officers, who returned fire and killed him. He is one of five people killed this year after interactions with Baltimore County police.
Police say an officer attempted to call Showalter, but he refused to talk with him.
But Cindy Showalter said her son ? who had spent some time in the Sheppard Pratt Health System as an 11-year-old ? waited for her to arrive and must have panicked at the sight of such overwhelming police presence.
“They were unfair from the very beginning,” she said of the police. “They wanted to kill him. They were like Rambo. They were going full steam ahead.”
To protest her son?s death, Showalter drove around with a piece of paper in the back window of her car saying a particular sergeant from the Parkville precinct should be jailed for life.
Showalter said six Baltimore County police officers stopped her and roughly forced her from her car.
“The officer saw the note in the back of my car, and he screams, ?Lady pull over!? ” Showalter said. “They snatched my pocketbook and bruised my arm. They said, ?You?re resisting arrest.? Four police officers grabbed me by my arms and legs like I was a rag doll, and they handcuffed me.”
Showalter said she was taken to an area hospital and had bruises on her legs, arms and back.
“That matter is under administrative review,” said Baltimore County police spokesman William Toohey, “and we will not be talking about it at this time.”
However, he said that Showalter did have an encounter with police in which she ended up in the hospital.
“I do know there was an emergency evaluation at the hospital,” he said. He declined to elaborate.
“We always left notes,” said Cindy Showalter, of Parkville (above), whose son Keith, 25, was shot to death by Baltimore County police due to a claimed domestic dispute, holds an example of the picture she found in Keith’s room after the incident, when she had talked to him that night and told him to just go to sleep. She believes he was telling her that he was afraid to go to bed for fear of being killed. (Arianne Starnes/ Baltimore Examiner)
Cindy Showalter (below) points to the area where Baltimore Police shot her son Keith, 25, to death out back of his Parkville apartment due to a claimed domestic dispute. (Arianne Starnes/ Baltimore Examiner)
