Anthony Sowell, a former sex offender who spent 15 years in jail for raping a pregnant woman, is now back behind bars. Earlier this week officers found 11 bodies in Sowell’s Cleveland home. All of the women appeared to be African American. Police say some of these women could have been missing for as long as five years. The cause of death was strangulation, some manual and some by ligature.
Seven of the bodies still had something tied around their necks when police discovered them. A couple of the bodies found in the house were too badly decomposed to tell what the cause of death was. People in the community complained about an awful smell that permeated the neighborhood for years. Many thought the smell was coming from the sausage packing company that Sowell lived next to. In actuality the community was smelling the six corpses rotting inside of Sowell’s home and the five bodies outside his home, including a skull wrapped in a paper bag and stuffed into a bucket in his basement. Police say they had no information about the smell in the neighborhood.
Which leads me to ask the following questions:
If Sowell was a sex offender the police had to come and visit him just to keep tabs on his residence. How could they have not smelled death coming from his home?
Second, I want to ask why did the police not notice a pattern of missing black women in the area near Sowell? Is it because the system doesn’t care if black women are missing? Feel free to leave a comment or email me.
