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| Stephan Cowans walked out of Suffolk Superior Court with his cousins Melinda (front) and Rakisha Mitchell in 2004. (WENDY MAEDA/GLOBE STAFF/File) |
David
Abel | GLOBE STAFF | March 3, 2008
Before the joy
turned into rage, before the drugs and souped-up cars, the former prisoner had
modest ambitions. He talked about opening a hair salon, maybe an auto shop.
A father of two,
Stephan Cowans told friends and family he would make up for the lost years,
that he would earn their pride, and he hatched plans about moving with his
relatives out West or down South.
Then the money
came, a sum he could hardly imagine in his days as a petty thief in Roxbury,
and the euphoria subsided into paranoia, the excitement of being back on the
streets was lost to bouts of depression and an unpredictable fury, which
surfaced whenever relatives suggested he get help.
Four years ago,
Cowans walked out of state prison in Shirley a free
man, cleared by DNA evidence after being convicted of shooting a Boston police
officer and spending 6 1/2 years behind bars. It was an unlikely victory, one
neither he nor his relatives expected, and within two years the city and state
wrote him checks for a total of $3.7 million as compensation for his wrongful
conviction.
Cowans had little
more than a year to enjoy the money. Last October, at age 37, police found him
shot to death in his new home in Randolph, which he bought several months
before in an effort to escape the increasingly consuming fear he felt in
Boston. Authorities have yet to find the killer.
"When he got
out, he was the happiest man in the world," said his grandmother, Laura
Lenard, who spent her savings trying to free him from prison. "But it didn't
stay that way, and the money didn't help."
Relatives, friends,
and lawyers who represented Cowans say the money took a toll, and some blame
his sudden wealth for his death.
Near the end of his
life, Cowans was telling them he wished he never received the money.
"Despite the
best of intentions, money doesn't always make things better, and a lot of times
it complicates things, and I think it did complicate things for Stephan,"
said David Hosp, an attorney who helped Cowans win a $3.2 million settlement
from the city of Boston. "He definitely expressed to me a number of times
a feeling of never knowing what people wanted from him, after he had enormous
financial resources. I think it did make him a little less trusting, and I
don't know that that helped the issues of him coming out of prison."
Since 1989, at
least 213 inmates in the United States have been exonerated as a result of DNA
evidence, but for many of them, the years in prison, the guilt by
association, and the task of trying to piece together a future out of a broken
past is overwhelming, according to the Life After Exoneration Program in Berkeley,
Calif. A study by the program of 60 such freed prisoners in 2003 found nearly
half suffer from depression or anxiety disorder, and about one-third have
experienced post-traumatic stress disorder.
Adding a large sum
of money to the already freighted equation can add to their troubles.
"Without the
right support, giving an exoneree an immense amount of money is a recipe for
disaster," said Heather Weigand, director of Life After Exoneration
Program. "Any normal person who comes into a lot of money has to deal with
new pressures from family and friends, and it takes a toll on those with the
best mental health. When you're talking about exonerees, whose trust systems
are broken and who haven't had the ability to make decisions, it makes their
lives a lot more complicated. It can bring huge confusion and an overwhelming
sense of desperation."
Cowans' odyssey
began in 1997, when he was arrested in the shooting of Sergeant Gregory
Gallagher in a Roxbury backyard. Police linked his fingerprint to evidence from
the crime scene, and Cowans was eventually convicted of armed assault with
intent to murder and sentenced to up to 50 years in prison. He was freed in
January 2004 after the New England Innocence Project urged investigators to
test DNA evidence from the crime scene. The DNA did not match Cowans', and when
authorities reexamined the fingerprint from the scene, they found that did not
match either.
On the day Cowans
was released, his attorneys and family threw parties for him. It was sweet
vindication, and he soaked up the freedom in a double-breasted suit and
silver-striped tie. "He was laughing and joking and eating," his
grandmother said. "The only thing they didn't have that he wanted was a
lobster. He was as happy as I'd ever seen him."
But there was also a
deep, underlying sadness, which did not take long to surface. Three months
before he was freed from jail, his mother died, and it hurt that she never
learned the truth.
Then there were his
children, Thomas and Atara, who were ages 3 and 8 when he went to jail and 10
and 15 by the time he got out.
"Out of the
blue, he would just start to cry," said Cortney Cowans, one of his nieces.
"He missed so much."
At first, he had
trouble sleeping. He often got up before dawn, as was the routine in prison, but he didn't know
what to do with himself. He had enough of TV while behind bars, and he did not
like being alone.
"He had an
attention span of a ferret on crystal meth," said Sonya Cowans, his
sister. "He was never like that before. He couldn't sit still."
He eventually got a
job preparing food on the Spirit of Boston, a local pleasure cruise, but that
did not last long. "He wouldn't listen to anybody who told him what to
do," his sister said. "He had a problem with authority."
He began spending a
lot of time with Zolie Bonner, a girlfriend, but things soured as he started
using drugs. A year after his release, she said, he was taking crack multiple
times a day. "It got so bad. That's what he did all the time," Bonner
said. "Every time he went outside or stopped by the store, he was using.
It was one of the only things that gave him a release."
The substance abuse
led to physical abuse. Two years after he was freed from prison, Cowans was arrested
on charges he gave Bonner a black eye by beating her with a boot and breaking
windows and other property in her apartment.
He would be
arrested three more times, twice for possessing crack and once for driving with
a suspended license.
When the money came
in 2006, he would go on shopping sprees for expensive clothes, shoes, hats,
even top-of-the-line cars, sometimes taking along the girlfriends of other men.
He favored Gucci and Prada, leather and suede coats, and bought more than 100
pairs of sneakers. He treated himself to a Mercedes CL500 and a BMW 745, which
he had detailed and repainted, and paid more than $500,000 in cash for his
four-bedroom, two-story Colonial-style house on a leafy cul-de-sac in Randolph,
which he never furnished.
"He liked
being the local celebrity," said Tanasia White, another niece. "But
he started to get paranoid. Everyone was asking him for money. They knew what
he had, and they wanted a piece."
The paranoia often
emerged when he found himself near police, who had convinced him before he was
freed that he shot Gallagher while sleepwalking.
He was afraid
police were following him, that they wanted to frame him, plant evidence on
him. His addictions fueled his fears. Any car that rolled by, any sound, he
thought it was the police, Cortney Cowans said. "When the trees blew, he
thought it was the police."
If he was driving
and he saw a Ford Crown Victoria, the make of many of the city's police
cruisers, he would floor his car to escape. "It was like NASCAR,"
Cortney Cowans said. "He would drive 120 mph. You could see the fear in
his face. There wasn't any laughing. He was dead serious."
When relatives
suggested he get help, he would explode. Once, when his niece suggested while
driving with him that he consider therapy, Cowans slammed on the brakes. He
threw cab money at her and told her to get out of his car.
"It went from
little breakdowns to rage," Cortney Cowans said. "He would say, `I'm
leaving, because you're going on fussing.' He didn't want to talk about
anything that had to do with his sanity. If he thought you weren't on his side
all the time, you were his enemy."
Last year, after
the drug arrests and the other run-ins with the law, the team of lawyers from
the New England Innocence Project who helped win his freedom finally persuaded
Cowans to attend a treatment program in Arizona.
David Hosp took him
to the airport, and the two had a long talk. "I said to him that if he
took this chance to address the issues, he had the possibility of having a
really rewarding life," Hosp said. "If he decided not to, I told him
he wouldn't last very long. I said having a lot of money and a substance-abuse
problem was not a good combination. He agreed. He understood."
That was the last
time Hosp would see him.
Four months after
Cowans started the program, he was kicked out for fighting with another client.
After coming home,
he seemed increasingly remote to friends and family. They had a hard time
reaching him, because he kept changing the number of his cellphone. He didn't
want people tracking him.
People from all
over the old neighborhood were hounding him for money.
"Kids who knew
him from the second grade would come out of nowhere and ask him to borrow
$50,000," his sister said. "There were drug dealers, murderers, and
rapists after him for money. When he didn't give it to them, they were his
enemies."
The day someone
shot him in the head, he spent time teasing his girlfriend, picked up his BMW
at an auto shop, and bought two pairs of sneakers at a store in Randolph. The
killer either followed him or knew where he lived.
In a telephone
interview, Norfolk District Attorney William R. Keating declined to comment on
whether investigators have made progress in the case.
"There's still
a great deal of activity surrounding the investigation," he said.
"I'm optimistic we'll find out who did this."
His friends and
relatives insist they know what happened. There's a clear motive of the crime,
they said: money.
"It was a
robbery gone bad," his sister said. "They probably thought he had a
big safe in the house."
In the end, to
those closest to him, his death seemed inevitable.
"I wish he
never received that money," his girlfriend said. "He was never the
same afterward. He would have been here today if it wasn't for that."
