Sad story, but all too familiar

She was somebody’s child of God.

But maybe God was looking the other way when her body was left under the back porch of a grubby backyard early Friday morning.

So ends one of the saddest stories of our time, and one of the most familiar.

As police commissioner, Hamm’s job was to protect a city’s children from the drug traffickers.

As stepfather, this decent and honorable man could not even protect his own child.

Three years after a New York Times front-page story revealed her long midnight battle with drugs, Sesker is described as a homicide victim in a dreary ending that was simply waiting to happen.

She was out there too long, in too tough a crowd, to survive indefinitely.

Hamm knew it.

He knew it from growing up in tough Cherry Hill, and from decades on the police department, and he knew it through the agonizing years of watching his daughter the way so many parents have watched their children go astray.

And, like other parents, he did not know how to change his child’s life.

Such endings are with us all the time now, and life goes on.

On the morning after Sesker’s body was discovered, it was the usual on Garrison Boulevard.

There was Larry Johnson, 55, who described himself as homeless and drug-addicted.

He wore an Orioles baseball shirt and had one tooth in his mouth.

He had a friend with him, who staggered back and forth and talked into a cell phone.

Johnson said he’s been on the street for four years.

He stood between two castlelike churches, Adams Chapel Methodist and St. Mark’s Methodist Church, built in 1903 and abandoned a few years ago, the windows of the big complex now boarded up and trash gathering in its stairwells.

“Up there,” Johnson said, pointing up Garrison Boulevard.

“There’s a porch with a chair on it. Sometimes that’s where I sleep at night. And there’s a second floor of an abandoned house I use sometimes.”

“What about the neighborhood?” he was asked.

“The neighborhood?” he replied.

“There’s nothing but drugs around here. It’s a good neighborhood, but for certain hours. The commissioner’s daughter, she must have been out at the wrong time, that’s all.”

This used to be a neighborhood where all hours were the good ones.

There were churches with stained glass windows instead of rotting boards, and synagogues, and Garrison Junior High School that turned out generations of bright kids who never imagined their lives ending, at 38, under a porch in somebody’s grubby backyard.

About a block from Sesker’s killing, there’s Liberty Heights Avenue, where the Baltimore Colts’ Jim Parker held court in his package goods store for a few decades.

Read’s Drug Store was there, and Knocko’s Pool Hall, and the Forest Theater, which is now Muhammad Mosque Number Six, where a young man hawked copies of The Final Call newspaper Saturday morning.

Sesker was a star high school athlete who started snorting cocaine at 17.

In the last years of her life, she prowled the city’s streets offering her body for drug money.

“When she gets sick and tired of being sick and tired,” Hamm told The Times, “I’ll be there for her. She’s not there yet.”

His stepdaughter agreed with him.

She wasn’t ready to come in from the cold.

“It’s the old story,” Johnson said.

“I been doing heroin since 1966. Get some money by helping people pump gas down at the gas station. Or go down the alley looking for stuff to sell. You can talk to me all day, and it don’t matter. We listen, and then we go on and do our own thing. Wasn’t no way nobody could have talked to that girl. That’s just the way it is, don’t matter how dangerous.

“Like last night,” he said. “Was a shootout on that corner over there. Two bullets went past my head.”

He thought about it for a moment. “Wish one of ’em had hit me,” he said softly.

“You don’t mean that.”

“It’s a miserable life,” he said.

“All you live for is that next hit. And ain’t nobody can talk you out of it. Nobody.”

He and his friend shuffled their way up Garrison Boulevard then, in the shadow of two churches and a mosque, in a neighborhood where once Nicole Sesker was a child of God.