Nicole Sesker would have turned 38 on Friday; instead, Baltimore City police found the body of former Commissioner Leonard Hamm?s stepdaughter under a porch, the victim of an apparent strangling.
Now homicide detectives are scrambling to solve a crime in a neighborhood where residents said drugs are plentiful, prostitutes ply the streets and life is cheap for women trapped in the deadly cycle of addiction.
“This isn?t the first time this has happened,” said Elizabeth Eddins, who lives a few doors down from where Sesker?s body was found on the 3500 block of Garrison Avenue.
“There was another woman found dead buried under some mulch on Beaufort [Avenue]. We have a lot of prostitution in this neighborhood. Bad things happen.”
“I heard she used to hang up around on Belvedere,” said Michael Debose, another neighbor who saw police remove Sesker?s body.
“But she wasn?t from around here.”
Some said they thought it was suspicious that Sesker?s body was spotted behind the only unoccupied house on the block.
“The person who lived in that house is in a convalescent home; she moved there after her husband died,” said next-door neighbor Margaret Jefferson.
People who knew Sesker said she stood out as a remarkably warm spirit in a neighborhood considered one of the roughest in the Northeast corner of the city.
“She called me Ma, and I called her my goddaughter,” said Lynette Harris, standing on the corner of West Belvedere Avenue and Reisterstown Road under the scorching afternoon sun Saturday.
“She was family to me.”
For nearly nine years, Harris said, she lived with Sesker under the porch of an abandoned house on Cordelia Avenue, around the corner from West Belvedere Avenue.
“She had it all made up nice with pillows and bedsheets. It was like home,” Harris said.
A copper ring given to her by Sesker as a gift just two weeks ago is now a painful reminder of their friendship.
“She was as sweet as anyone could be out here,” she said, her eyes tearing.
