Open Wounds

Joyce Lollar copes as best she can. She asks her young grandchildren to pretend their oldest brother, Richard, is still in Atlanta, where he moved three years ago.

“That way, you won’t think about him being dead,” she told them.

Ray Lewis is also living out a fantasy.

“This is like no fairy tale ever told, me going through a murder trial then being up for MVP,” the Baltimore Raven linebacker said in a recent first-person story in ESPN the Magazine.

Gladys Robinson has no time for make-believe. Her grandson, Jacinth Baker, was killed. She is raising Baker’s five younger brothers and sisters because both parents died in the last two years.

“I don’t understand how people can get away with murder,” she said.

Lewis has no such concerns. He is moving forward, getting ready to play in Super Bowl XXXV. He wants us to move forward too.

“What happened in my life happened in my life,” he said. “I don’t worry about it anymore. It’s a done deal. It’s not even an issue. Closed chapter.”

Kellye Smith wants to get ahead, but it’s difficult to hold down a job and raise a 10-month-old daughter alone in Decatur, Ga. Richard Lollar was her fiance and is India’s father.

“I just got switched from night shift to day shift, so now I have to find a baby-sitter,” Smith said.

Lollar, 24, and Baker, 21, were fatally stabbed during a late-night street fight Jan. 31 outside a fashionable Atlanta club hours after last year’s Super Bowl. Lewis and two associates were charged in the double murder.

Lewis was partying with 12 friends in Buckhead, Atlanta’s trendiest district. They took a 40-foot limo to the Cobalt lounge, where the cover charge was $100, drinks were $10 and hip-hop music blared.

There were fights inside and the club closed at 3:30 a.m. Everyone spilled onto the street. Words and blows were exchanged between Lewis’ group and a handful of pals with Akron roots.

Witnesses said as many as six men attacked Baker, a 5-foot-2, 135-pound aspiring artist, and Lollar, a 6-foot, 170-pound barber. After the stabbings, Lewis and his friends piled into the limo and sped off while one of the victims’ friends fired shots at the tires. The incident was hazy to the participants and witnesses, many of whom had been drinking.

Lewis was uncooperative in an interview with police and was charged the next day. His attorneys demanded a speedy trial and the proceedings soon became as blurred as the events outside the Cobalt.

By all accounts, prosecutors blundered. Witnesses melted on the stand. And as relatives of Lollar and Baker watched in disbelief, Lewis pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice midway through the trial and testified against co-defendants Reginald Oakley and Joseph Sweeting, both of whom have extensive criminal records. Neither was convicted.

Lewis spent 15 nights in jail and received 12 months’ probation. The NFL fined him $250,000.

“This mess cost me my good name, cost me months of my life in jail and on trial, cost me faith in the judicial system and in the media,” he said. “It’s been almost a year and I’m still angry.”

The victims’ families struggle to raise children and make ends meet in this frigid industrial town 40 miles south of Cleveland. They too feel anger. Also frustration, despair and a certain resignation that there are winners and losers in this world.

They know Ray Lewis is a winner. It’s all over the TV.

*

A year after the murders, Richard Lollar’s mother and oldest brother are still numb with grief. Mention his name and they break down.

Cindy Lollar-Owens, the aunt who helped raise him, is a different breed. She flew to Atlanta for the trial. She drove to Cleveland the day the Ravens played the Browns and staged a protest. And she returned to Atlanta this week, trying to persuade the district attorney to file charges against other men in the limo the night of the murders.

“They don’t seem to be in a hurry to meet with me,” she said.

Everywhere she goes, Lollar-Owens, 41, carries an ornate eight-foot wood easel plastered with photos of Richard. As a Boy Scout. On a Little League team. Dressed for church. Kicking it with friends. The centerpiece is a portrait of Kellye and India.

When Lollar-Owens is at home, the collage leans between two decorated Christmas trees in a darkened living room. The light fixture is broken and the floorboards in the old two-story house creak. Several of her seven children and five grandchildren live with her and the phone rings incessantly. The ground outside is thick with snow. But Richard is not forgotten.

“These people did such a hideous crime, it has just shattered so many of us in this family,” she said. “But I can’t let his memory die. He was the best of our family. He had so much promise.”

Richard Lollar was a barber in Decatur, a working-class Atlanta suburb 15 miles southeast of Buckhead. He began cutting hair at 10, sitting clients in a chair in his grandmother’s Akron basement.

“He had a knack for art and a head of hair was his canvas,” Joyce Lollar said. “He could cut names and numbers or any sort of design. People all over the neighborhood would come, even bring their kids. They stood in line outside our door.”

Richard moved to Atlanta and dreamed of owning his own business. He met Smith and shared his dream.

“The first time we met that’s all he talked about,” said Smith, who delivered India two months after Lollar died. “He wanted to open a salon. He said a salon made more money than a barbershop.”

Richard’s grandmother and aunt check on Smith every week over the phone. India has six teeth and can stand on wobbly feet.

“She looks just like Richard,” Smith said. “That’s his baby. She has his color, his eyes, his hair.”

Lewis has four children, including a 5-year-old son who saw him on television in handcuffs and orange jail garb.

“Ray-Ray asked me why I was in chains, and how the hell do you explain what I went through to a 5-year-old when you can’t explain it to adults?” Lewis said.

India will learn what her father went through. Smith videotaped the trial.

“When she gets older, she can see it for herself,” she said.

*

Baker’s friends called him “Shorty” because Jacinth (Jay-SEE-nith) is hard to pronounce. In Decatur he often stayed with Paul and Shirley Stroud, who met him at the barbershop where Lollar worked.

“He was like a son to us,” Paul Stroud said. “My wife was real attached to him. He was just so short and cute.”

Robinson was happy for her grandson when he and childhood friend Lollar decided to move to Atlanta. Both had scrapes with the law in Akron on minor drug violations and wanted a fresh start.

“Jacinth was a good boy,” she said. “He was good to his sisters and brothers and he was good to me. He sent us Christmas presents a month before he died.”

That was a better Christmas than in 1998. Baker’s father, Ralph Baker Jr., died that December of a heart attack. Two months later, Baker’s mother, Susan Ann Wilson, died of a brain tumor.

Defense attorneys portrayed Baker as a small-time drug dealer. Several bags of marijuana were in his pockets when he died.

“Jacinth was a very good artist, he wasn’t what they said he was in Atlanta,” Robinson said. “He drew anything you put in front of him. He wanted to go to art school in California.”

Robinson coughs hard. She is fighting off bronchitis as well as misery. “Ray Lewis might not have done it, but he knows who did it,” she said. “My grandson was a small boy. He didn’t have a chance against those big men.

“Somebody in that limo committed murder and they are all free. Is that justice? If that’s justice, I don’t want no part of it.”

*

Lollar and Baker are buried at Glendale cemetery in Akron. Their headstones are plain, their graves buried under a blanket of snow.

Fifteen miles south in Canton is the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Each inductee is honored by a bronze bust.

Lewis, the NFL’s top linebacker, is rapidly building Hall of Fame credentials. Only 25, he led the Ravens in tackles in each of his five seasons and is the centerpiece of a defense that in 2000 allowed fewer points and rushing yards than any team in NFL history.

“With the national spotlight on me, I feel like I’m the best defensive player in the league, at the middle of the best defense ever,” he said.

The glare followed him off the field.

Lewis was charged with assault Nov. 30, 1999, by two women who accused him of striking them in a Baltimore club. Criminal charges were dropped, but he faces an $8-million civil suit. While a student at Miami, Lewis twice was investigated by police after allegations of battery involving women pregnant with his children. Neither investigation resulted in charges.

Shortly before the murders, Raven officials were concerned about Lewis’ late-night activities and questionable friends. They planned to meet with him when he returned from the Pro Bowl, but Lewis was arrested the day he was scheduled to leave for Hawaii.

His Atlanta ordeal served as a more forceful eye-opener than any verbal warning.

“I’m more careful than I used to be,” he said. “When I walked down those courtroom steps free, I told my mama, ‘You have a changed man.’ ”

Lewis showed up unannounced at the NFL’s annual rookie symposium two weeks after the trial ended in June to warn the league’s newest crop of players of that ever-present spotlight.

“I had a problem saying no to friends,” he told the rookies. “Understand saying no to a lot of people is very important. Be firm when you say no.”

*

The Cobalt shut down soon after the murders, yet booze bottles still litter the bar and a clipboard holding a VIP list scribbled on a yellow pad lies on the floor inside the door.

A block away is ESPN Sports Zone, a restaurant-bar billed as the ideal place to watch a game. The waiting list was long during the NFL playoffs and dozens of patrons milled around the merchandise store near the entry. Racks displayed neat rows of ESPN the Magazine issues. The menacing face of Ray Lewis stared back from the covers.

Atlanta’s self-conscious attempt to land a high-profile conviction backfired. Mayor Bill Campbell was embarrassed. The only positive outcome is that the City Council is reducing the number of clubs and bars in Buckhead through attrition and imposing parking restrictions on existing businesses.

All the way from Akron, Joyce Lollar sees the squirming in the big city.

“The mayor called me twice at the beginning, saying, ‘Money is not going to get Ray Lewis out of this,’ ” she said. “He won’t get on the phone with us now. I feel they don’t want to mess up Atlanta’s name.”

Lollar is stoic. The woman called Nana by 25 grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren rises at 4 a.m. for work. Her husband has throat cancer. Yet she made time to note every line of testimony and every piece of evidence.

Her conclusion: Lewis did not wield a knife. But he knows who did.

“We aren’t sitting here crazy,” she said. “Nobody jumped out of the sky and killed those two guys.

“Anybody who lied or refused to tell what they knew, I hope it haunts them the rest of their lives.”

Robinson, Baker’s grandmother, is forgiving of Lewis.

“You see, I’m a Christian and I don’t wish nobody no bad luck,” she said.

Lollar-Owens’ husband was murdered eight years ago and she says she harbors no ill feelings toward his killer. She grieves now the way she grieved then--by staying active.

She is raising funds to stage a protest at the Super Bowl in Tampa, Fla. She badgers the Atlanta district attorney. She is exploring a wrongful-death suit. And she is writing a book about the murders.

“This isn’t about revenge,” she said. “If we don’t fight to keep the memories alive, Ray Lewis and the rest of them would make it disappear.”