Several days before he was found dead in his Baltimore office, Robert Lee Clay hastily moved from parked car to parked car, slipping leaflets beneath windshield wipers outside the Marriott Courtyard in Greenbelt where state Democrats held a rally in the spring of 2005.
The bright green leaflets had Baltimore Mayor Martin O?Malley?s name written in large, bold letters running diagonally. The duplicates were so seemingly authentic that at first glance, one would think they were left by an O?Malley supporter.
They were not.
With the gubernatorial election nearly 18 months away, Clay, 59, launched a counter-campaign that challenged O?Malley?s record on minority contracts. In the leaflets, and in a phone interview with The Examiner, Clay reiterated much of what he had said in the piece of paper left on so many windshields.
“O?Malley?s minority business administration only helps shell companies,” he said. He insisted that the minority businesses that received city grants and appeared to have flourished under the O?Malley administration were actually run by white-owned companies that employed the minimum number of blacks necessary to qualify for funding. Clay claimed his colleagues in the Maryland Minority Business Association, “a nongovernmental group of businessmen and women,” were not seeing opportunities that they should have under the program guidelines.
After several conversations with The Examiner, Clay finally agreed to a sit-down interview in mid-May. He was ready for an all-out assault. “Right now, I am leaning toward supporting Montgomery County Executive Doug Duncan” in the gubernatorial race, he told The Examiner in the last phone interview he would ever give. He promised to elaborate a few days later in an exclusive interview. The sit-down, face-to-face meeting never happened.
On May 16, 2005, Clay was found in his Baltimore office on Brookfield Street with a gunshot wound in the left side of his head that caused severe brain stem damage and led to instant death.
The Baltimore medical examiner ruled that Clay shot himself, most likely with his left hand with a stolen gun.
Police said it was suicide, plain and simple.
He was right-handed.
Case closed.
