From:washingtonpost.com
Man's Life, Faith Shattered: Family of Suspect in Shooting Says Church Failed to Listen
By Maureen O'Hagan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 16, 2002; Page A14
In 1976, the Rev. Maurice Blackwell took holy water and poured it over the forehead of the infant Dontee Stokes, baptizing him into the Catholic Church just like every one of Dontee's 46 Stokes cousins.
Now Blackwell lies at Maryland Shock Trauma Center in fair condition with three gunshot wounds allegedly inflicted by Stokes. Stokes is in jail, where guards are watching to make sure he doesn't commit suicide. His family's beliefs have been broken and its strength tested in unimaginable ways.
Yesterday, relatives said none of this would have happened if church officials had listened years ago when Stokes told them that Blackwell had molested him.
"The church didn't want to help," said Stokes's uncle, Charles Stokes Jr. "The church didn't want to believe."
The church was the Baltimore Archdiocese and West Baltimore's St. Edward parish, where Blackwell was pastor and where Stokes's relatives were stalwart members.
His grandfather, Charles Stokes, taught Sunday school and served as a parish corporator, one of just two laypersons whose name was placed on the title of the St. Bernadine Roman Catholic Church property, where Blackwell was first assigned.
Charles Stokes said: "That man could preach. Sitting there, you would think you were listening to Martin Luther King."
Charles Stokes raised his 12 children to be good Catholics, and they, in turn, raised their children the same way. Charles Stokes Jr. considered becoming a priest himself, and a cousin works for the archdiocese.
Dontee Stokes attended Sunday school, and as a teenager was appointed youth group president. After youth meetings, Blackwell often called the young man up to his office for "discussions."
That set Stokes on a devastating course, Tamara Stokes, his mother, said yesterday.
When Dontee was about 14, she said, he began acting differently. She had no idea why. He skipped school and his grades dropped; she put him in the St. Francis Academy, "where the nuns could look out for him."
But Stokes seemed to have the same problems there. He finally told a psychologist that he had been molested, Tamara Stokes said. In 1993, police and the city's Department of Social Services investigated, and Dontee Stokes ultimately took two polygraph tests. The results were deemed credible.
Yet church officials -- the people Stokes had been raised to trust completely -- decided that his allegations were not credible and dismissed them. The effect was devastating.
"The issue was, nobody believed him," even some family members, said Charles Stokes.
"When I told my sister, she broke down and cried," he recalled. "I thought she was crying for Dontee. She was crying for the priest."
The priest was welcomed back to the pulpit warmly; Dontee Stokes and his mother left the church.
So did other family members, their devotion to Catholicism now shattered. "I've now got more Baptists in my family than Catholics," Charles Stokes said of his 70-member clan.
Dontee Stokes began to question his most fundamental beliefs.
"He would go in and out of depressed moods," sometimes refusing to come up out of the basement, Tamara Stokes said.
Once he attempted suicide by swallowing pills. He dropped out of high school. He had trouble holding jobs. He began drinking "to erase what had happened," according to his uncle.
And he became obsessed.
Dontee began collecting clippings of newspaper stories about priests who molested children, his mother said, and he would flip through them constantly. Once, she took them away, and he "tore the house up" looking for them.
Tamara Stokes, a postal worker and real estate broker, decided that her son needed a good job, so she put him through barber school.
For the past five years, Dontee Stokes cut hair at Superman's Barber Shop on Baltimore's west side. There, in recent months, as more and more reports of priests molesting young parishioners blared from the television set, co-workers said Stokes took an ever-increasing interest.
One day, Stokes saw Cardinal William H. Keeler -- who had overseen the investigation of his allegations -- announce that there had been no incidents in the Baltimore Archdiocese since 1980. To Stokes, it was yet another confirmation that his cries had not been heard.
"That was devastating to him," Tamara Stokes said.
On Monday night, Dontee Stokes was leaving his home on Mount Royal Terrace when he saw Blackwell, who had lived around the corner for several years. Stokes asked Blackwell for an apology, but, his grandfather said, the priest just laughed.
And then Stokes, who has no criminal record, did something he's never done before -- he allegedly pulled out a .357 magnum and fired three shots at Blackwell. Then he went down the street, and did something he's been doing all his life. He entered a church and prayed.
"It was a church where he'd never been before," said his attorney, Thomas McNicholas. "They were having some sort of revival. At the end, he asked for the minister's blessing. And then he promptly turned himself in."
Staff writer Hamil R. Harris and Metro researcher Bobbye Pratt contributed to this report.
© 2002 The Washington Post Company