Anthony Dozier, 25, admits that he goes overboard with affection for his daughter, Aniya, 3. It’s because of the neglect he endured growing up without a dad and with an addicted mom, victim Crystal Dozier. “I never, ever want her to be hungry,” Dozier said of his daughter. “Because, as a kid, sometimes there just wasn’t nothing to eat.”
Margaret Bernstein and Stan Donaldson / Plain Dealer Reporters
CLEVELAND, Ohio — Anthony Dozier knows how drugs can destroy families. Crack cocaine ripped through his, bringing a gruesome end to his addicted and abused mother’s life. Her body was found at the Imperial Avenue home of Anthony Sowell last year.
Dozier couldn’t save his mom, Crystal Dozier. But at age 25, the clean-cut ex-Marine is determined to become a cop and protect his community, especially his 3-year-old daughter.
Dozier grew up neglected by his mom. He barely knew his dad. He has promised himself that his daughter’s life will be different.
“If I go out there . . . and take criminals off the street and try to make it a safer place, maybe it will be a little easier for her generation,” said Dozier, who has completed police training and is waiting to land a job with the Cleveland force.
He is one of four men, all sons of Imperial Avenue victims, who voiced nearly the same feelings and experiences during interviews with The Plain Dealer. They spoke of learning to cope with fragmented families, including addicted mothers who careened in and out of their lives. They grew up often fending for themselves.
All four say the cycle of neglect will stop with them.
“That’s why I work so hard, spending time with my daughter. I never want her to feel the neglect I did,” Dozier said.
Local social workers say the neglect the men faced in childhood is a familiar tale threading through Cleveland’s poor areas. Their families’ stories made headlines when investigators discovered the remains of 11 women last fall at the house where Sowell lived.
The 50-year-old Cleveland man is scheduled to go on trial in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court in September. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty. Investigators say Sowell sometimes used drugs to lure women to his house, then strangled them.
Stories of drugs destroying lives and ravaging families are common in Cleveland and other urban areas. Many social-service agencies tailor programs to help addicts get clean, learn to be good parents and rebuild their families. Still, the impact on the children — a generational unraveling of society’s fabric — will be hard to repair.
Children who grow up in these types of environments often are on a search to find out who they are, said E. Ethelbert Miller, who directs the African American Resource Center at Howard University in Washington, D.C. That quest can lead to depression — a plight not often addressed in urban communities.
Our community suffers because we don’t engage ourselves as citizens,” Miller said. “Here you have a serial killer, but then you have drug deals, domestic violence and other abuses right down the street. Everyone has a story. After a while, the community becomes numb to death and dying, and the only way you can live is by blocking it out.”
“It takes a tremendous amount of courage” to break free of patterns set by one’s parents — a big reason why addiction, domestic violence and fatherlessness have taken root in poor areas, said Judy Smith, a Texas-based crisis counselor who has studied the influence of family on personal behavior.
It is role models like these four men — joined by grisly crimes — who hold a key to reversing the fatherless trend in poor communities, said Steve Killpack, coordinator of the Healthy Fathering Collaborative, which offers parenting classes, job training and legal help to Cleveland-area fathers.
Killpack complimented the men for making a conscious decision not to pass their childhood pain on to their children.
That’s the mindset it’s going to take to move forward, experts say.
Story Compliments Of The Plain Dealer
