“Tony likes to strangle, women,” Carr said to the jury as she used a law clerk to demonstrate how Sowell cruelly chocked the life out of his victims.
The 19th century poet William Cullen Bryant’s most notable work is “Thanatopsis.” It deals with death.
Since 2009, when 11 Black females were found in and around the Imperial Avenue home of now convicted serial killer Anthony Sowell, there has been a pall of death permeating this town, its neighborhoods and the families of those brutally slain women.
And now, justice will be served to Anthony Sowell.
It wouldn’t have been possible without the doggedness and tenacity of Cuyahoga County assistant prosecutor Pinky Carr. To be sure, Carr was assisted in the prosecution of Sowell by her colleague Richard Bombik. But in the end, it was Pinky Carr who humanized to the jury the fleeting last moments of the women Sowell lured to his home and then dispatched them to undignified resting places in and around his abode.
“Tony likes to strangle, women,” Carr said to the jury as she used a law clerk to demonstrate how Sowell cruelly chocked the life out of his victims.
It was such brilliant legal theatrics that caught the jury’s attention and caused them, in large measure, to bring back the guilty verdict that Sowell so richly deserves.
We should all be proud of Pinky Carr and her contributions to the justice system that serves us all.
She has come along way since graduating from Cleveland’s John F. Kennedy High School, Baldwin-Wallace College and the Cleveland Marshall School of Law.
There is a bright future for Ms. Carr in the legal profession. She has shown acumen at its finest.
In the Anthony Sowell case, she spoke for the voiceless.
As William Cullen Bryant’s poem reminds us, “Yet not to thine eternal resting place shalt thou retire alone.”
Pinky Carr made sure of that for the Imperial Avenue 11.
