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is never ready? Many inner-city neighborhoods have no community. The institutions that once held them together—the churches, the associations, the businesses—are shells of what they were, if they exist at all.
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    F OR D OWERY, the mistrial was unnerving. Yet in some ways it was better than a guilty verdict. He was still planning to testify for the federal government against Love, Parker, and Dinkins. This would further postpone his gun case. In addition, as a federal witness, he began receiving some token financial assistance from the FBI.
    Dowery’s family would visit him in the suburbs. Still, he missed them, and he missed his friends. So he occasionally sneaked back to the old neighborhood for a day or two, usually staying with his mother and trying to keep a low profile. In the spring, he proudly watched his two eldest sons graduate from high school. And he didn’t want to skip Thanksgiving at his aunt’s house, on Bartlett Avenue. “He was tired of hiding out,” his aunt, Joyce Garner, told me.
    On Thanksgiving night, more than 20 members of Dowery’s family gathered for a feast. Dowery was in a good mood, reminiscing about old times. Garner remembers that he came to talk to her as she was cooking. She asked if he was worried aboutbeing back in the neighborhood. “He just talked about the Lord to us and gave us a big hug and said, ‘God’s got it,’” she recalled. Toward the end of dinner, Dowery excused himself. He wanted to run across the street to buy a pack of cigarettes and have a beer.
    The sign over its beige stucco facade calls the Kozy Korner a “Cut-Rate & Lounge.” Two doors separate the bar from the street. The first opens onto a grungy vestibule where a cashier sells beer and liquor from behind a bulletproof window. The second is locked; customers must be buzzed through. Once inside, they are greeted by a dark, narrow room. A Baltimore Ravens poster is affixed to one wall. A rendering of the Last Supper, with a black Jesus and black disciples, decorates the other. Three video gambling machines flash and hum.
    When Dowery arrived, a dozen other patrons were packed into the space. He recognized one of them: a former girlfriend called Toot. They chatted inside the doorway while he smoked and sipped a beer. Just after 10 o’clock, the door opened, and two men entered. This time Dowery’s sixth sense—the feeling that had told him to turn around on his porch that morning a year earlier—failed him. One of the men drew a gun, pointed it at Dowery’s head, and fired. Then the other did the same. This time, the doctors couldn’t save him.
    And although the bar was crowded, no one has come forward to say they saw a thing. It’s just another homicide in inner-city America, with no suspects, and no witnesses.
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    J EREMY K AHN is an independent journalist whose work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Newsweek, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, The Guardian, Fortune, The New Republic, Smithsonian, Foreign Policy, and Slate. Previously, he served as managing editor of The New Republic and was a staff writer at Fortune. He recently moved from Washington, D.C. to New Delhi, India.
    Coda
    As a writer, you want all your stories to matter—you want them to be read, to have an impact. But in this case, that desire was particularly strong. I desperately wanted to wake people up, to make them think about the way in which witness intimidation reinforced the inequality of the American justice system—the way it put whole inner-city neighborhoods essentially beyond the reach of the law. I hoped that out of the tragedy of John Dowery’s death, some good might come. But I have enough experience to know that merely exposing a wrong rarely rights it—that places like East Baltimore would not be the way they are if it were so easy to bring about change.
    Since this story was first published in The Atlantic Monthly ,