The Killing Fields

Whether Cleveland detectives are squeezed tighter than those in other cities is hard to say. Solving about half their cases is in line with the national rate for big cities.

The department has no plans to bolster homicide, according to police spokesman Lt. Thomas Stacho, since current staffing is actually more than the "recommended" level.

Still, that's of little comfort to the men who become strangers to their families after working 15-hour shifts. Or to the hundreds of mothers like Marsha Carter, all waiting for news that never comes.

Dawn Webb knows this frustration intimately. She spent 20 years trying to save a son who refused to be rescued. Since his slaying, her battle has transformed into a fight to find his killer.

Webb is a social worker -- all warmth, flowing fabric, and spangled silver bracelets. The bulletin board in her office is covered in baby pictures along with a note written in crayon: "Love makes the world go round." But love couldn't fix her Devin.

The trouble began as early as first grade, when he couldn't read the books she brought home. In fourth grade, he ran away from Walton Elementary one afternoon, prompting a police search that ended hours later on a playground. When he was 12, Webb complained to police that Devin grabbed her and threw her to the floor. He was well on his way to becoming a kid out of control.

To keep him out of juvie, Webb scraped up thousands of dollars to send him to a boarding school for troubled kids in Kentucky. He lasted a month. When he returned to Cleveland, he promptly ran away.

He later destroyed Webb's apartment, spilling oil and chemicals on the furniture, according to a police report. She finally took him to a doctor, who found a problem the law couldn't fix: schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Medicine helped, but he hated the way it made him fatigued. Weed worked much better.

He would steal from his mom so often that she had to lock her bedroom door, and she told police he regularly assaulted her. When he was 16, Webb called police after Devin shoved her and threatened, "Watch out, bitch -- you don't know what I'm going to do to you."

When the cops arrived, Webb begged them to keep Devin in juvie until his 21st birthday; she was "scared to death" of him. They sent him to Laurelwood, a mental-health hospital in Willoughby, but it didn't help.

By then, he was no longer Devin. Friends called him "Little Hottie," a young man Webb didn't recognize. Before his 20th birthday, he pleaded guilty to burglary, assaulting a girlfriend, and drug possession.

Then, just before 1 a.m. on a July morning last summer, while he was out near West 80th and Detroit, someone wearing a ski mask approached Devin, aimed a TEC-9 at his knee, and pulled the trigger. At least that's what he told police, though he refused to provide more details.

His mother was having stomach pains from the stress. Finally, she appealed to a higher power to care for her son. "I said, 'God, it's in your hands.'" Three weeks later, God's decision arrived. Devin was dead.

Paramedics found him on a warm night in August of last year, bleeding from gunshot wounds to his chest and arm, in the same area where he was attacked weeks before. He died less than an hour later.

In the shock that followed, the fight Webb couldn't win while her son was alive became a crusade to solve his murder. She treated his case like any other battle with a bureaucracy: You need to be a squeaky wheel to get some grease. But it doesn't work that way with homicides.

The month after Devin's murder, she called detectives to follow up. The prognosis wasn't good.

"All those people over there [where he died] are crackheads," she remembers Detective Melvin Smith telling her.

They may never find out who killed him, he told her. Their only chance was if someone with information was picked up for another crime and decided to rat in exchange for leniency, she remembers him saying.

To her, it sounded as if Smith was simply refusing to do his job.

"Of course I'm appalled," Webb says.

Then Smith was out on leave for three months. When Webb called to find out who was working her son's case, the answer was clear: No one.