Associated Press
CLEVELAND, Ohio — A Cleveland city councilman is calling for an investigation into whether police and health inspectors missed any signs that could have tipped them off to a house where the bodies of six women were found.
Neighbors had complained for years about a foul smell coming from the area near the house.
Councilman Zack Reed says Tuesday that he called health inspectors more than once about the odor. He says he can’t imagine how police officers and sheriff’s deputies didn’t notice the smell when they were called to the home over the years to check in on convicted rapist Anthony Sowell.
Reed says it’s clear to him that someone “dropped the ball.”
Police discovered the bodies Thursday after a woman reported being raped at Sowell’s home.
Sowell is in jail but hasn’t been charged.
*** THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE
C1’s earlier story is below ****
David G. Savage
Orlando Sentinel
CLEVELAND, Ohio — In this Cleveland neighborhood, where gunfire and drug use are common, there are no strangers to tragedy.
But what police found is horrific even for here: The bodies of six women in the home of a convicted rapist. On Sunday, a day after police arrested Anthony Sowell, 50, the Cuyahoga County coroner declared what most people had surmised: All six were homicide victims. None had been identified, and Sowell had not been charged.
But the community grappled with self-recrimination. “One of my neighbors has been missing since May, and now I wonder if she was in there,” said Teresa Brown, 54, an usher at nearby Perfect Peace Baptist Church.
“If I’d done something, called someone, would it have made a difference?”
The fact that Cleveland police found the bodies was, in some ways, an accident. Officers arrived at the property on Thursday to arrest Sowell on a separate rape charge. He wasn’t there, but the smell of decay was so thick that officers headed upstairs.
They found two bodies on the living room floor. As the days passed, investigators found another body in a freshly dug grave underneath a set of stairs in the backyard, authorities said. Two more were crammed into a crawl space inside the house. The sixth was buried in a shallow grave in the basement.
“The stench of decay was overwhelming,” said Lt. Thomas Stacho, spokesman for the Police Department. “The closest I got was 15 feet from an open door, and it was more than bad enough. I can’t figure out how the neighbors didn’t know something was wrong.”
They did.
For months, they said, they gagged whenever they walked past the wood framed house. Some even recalled that Sowell’s clothing smelled so bad, it made their eyes water.
“He came into my store last week and reeked so bad, I had to open the front and back doors,” said Eli Tayeh, who owns the Amira Imperial Beverage convenience store across the street. “I asked why he stunk. He shrugged, bought his beer and walked out.”
But they blamed the smell on mundane reasons: body odor, the garbage he picked through for scrap metal. No one called the authorities.
No one in this neighborhood, where the streets were covered in the orange foliage of fall and the windows were boarded up with plywood, called the authorities.
No one, they said, even thought to do so. After all, in Cleveland these days, help can be hard to find.
The city has been reeling from the foreclosure crisis for several years. Its unemployment rate was 10.3 percent in September, and it has one of the nation’s highest poverty rates. Hard hit by the collapse of the steel and auto industries, Cleveland’s population has fallen by half since 1960.
On Sunday, as police guarded the property, locals and the morbidly curious walked past the house and took pictures. Some prayed for the dead. They stared at the upper floors, where investigators had left the windows and porch door open.
Standing across the street, Tamica Pierceton wrinkled her nose in disgust.
“We kept away from him and he kept away from us,” said Pierceton, 26. “We should have said something to someone. I wish I had.”
Copyright 2009 Sentinel Communications Co.