Baltimore resident Freddie Gray died in April 2015 as a result of injuries sustained while being improperly restrained in a police van. Protests over his death turned violent, and in the middle of the unrest, Marilyn Mosby, the Baltimore City state’s attorney, stood on the stairs of the War Memorial in downtown Maryland to announce that she would be filing criminal charges against six police officers over Gray’s death.
That proclamation made Mosby something of a hero to a nation of people who had suffered through one too many failed prosecutions of police across the country, including the officers involved in the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner in Staten Island, N.Y.
Fast-forward 18 months, and Mosby not only failed to convict any of the officers involved in Gray’s death but also is now being sued for defamation by five of the six officers she indicted, it was announced in July.
Mosby’s husband, Nick Mosby, sits on the City Council, representing the district where Gray was arrested. He, too, was thought to be going places politically, but an abandoned campaign for mayor of Baltimore, as well as his imminent departure from the City Council, has led to wide criticism of both him and his wife. A Baltimore weekly paper recently declared them the “Best Failed Political Dynasty.”
A recent in-depth profile in the New York Times Magazine examines the rise and fall of Marilyn Mosby, discussing everything from her childhood to her rise to the state’s attorney’s office, and continuing through her ascension into the national spotlight.
Mosby discusses her reasons for taking on the case against the police officers involved in Gray’s death and the frustrations she experienced during the failed prosecutions.
In the end, Mosby appears to be the only public official who paid for Gray’s death, when all she was trying to do was get justice for him.
Read more at the New York Times.