After Sharon McMahan’s son Juan, 17, was shot in the head at a friend’s birthday party in July 2004, she said, the police at least were honest: Leads would be hard to come by.

“The detective told me I had a better chance of finding out who did it than he did, because he was white,” she says.

McMahan says she hasn’t heard from police in nearly a year.

“They assured me: ‘We’re going to work on this case. We’re going to make sure this case is solved,’ ” McMahan says. “They just lost interest.”

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McMahan has begun to channel her emotion into a positive force for the community. At the Rose Street Community Center in East Baltimore, she counsels teenagers on how to avoid the streets that took her son’s life.

“I would be here thinking about Juan, and I would just burst out crying,” she says. “Juan’s friends used to tell him, ‘I’m gonna ride and die with you.’ Ain’t nobody ‘ride and die’ with him that night but him. None of them called me. I had to ride down there [to the crime scene] on my own.”

Even though police arrested her son dozens of times and convicted him of assault in 2004, he sought a way out of the neighborhood, a search that always ended in frustration.

“It seemed like a lot of times when he tried to do something, he got pushed out,” McMahan says. “He was denied a lot of things. They need more resources for these young people. The whole time that he was getting in trouble, I never received services. He wasn’t a bad kid. I feel like, if there had been some intervention in place, he wouldn’t have taken to the streets.”

If she could confront Juan’s killer? “I would ask him why he did it,” McMahan says. “I forgive him. I just want to know, why?”

Before he was killed, Juan McMahan was an expectant father. Now Sharon doesn’t know what to tell her young grandson about his dad’s fate.

“He’s thinks his daddy is asleep,” she said. “What am I going to tell him when he gets older?”