The Rear Alley Behind 600 Edgewood Was in the High Priority Search Area for Hae’s Sentra
In response to yesterday’s post, carnotbrown made another great comment. This one referenced a Progress Report dated February 12, 1999. Here’s is the substance of that report:
We can see the importance of this Progress Report by plotting two points on a map:
The alley behind 600 Edgewood Street/Best Market is tucked right into the Southeast corner of the search area, which was bounded by Edmondson Avenue/Route 40W on the South and Hilton Parkway on the East. That alley is also about 1/1.5 blocks South of Leakin Park and about 2/2.5 blocks West of Leakin Park. This alley was thus part of the “neighborhoods surrounding Leakin Park,” meaning that “[p]articular attention was paid to” it during the eight hour search for Hae’s vehicle by several teams.
Moreover, the area behind 600 Edgewood Street would seem to be a natural place to try to hide a car. A quick visual comparison of it to the other spaces between streets in this Southeast corner above Edmondson Avenue reveals a much bigger gap than the spaces between the more tightly packed streets in most of the rest of the region. Furthermore, satellite imaging of the alley behind 600 Edgewood Street shows cars parked both on the grass of Harlem and Dennison Park (the green area above Best Market in the prior map) and the alley circling it:
As noted yesterday, the relevance of all of this is that the Progress Report on Jenn’s February 27th interview indicates that “[t]he victim’s auto was…parked in the rear alley of 600 Edgewood Street, in Southwest Baltimore.”
Despite this language, of course, the official story is that Hae’s car was found in the grassy/area vacant lot behind 300 Edgewood Street, the same place that Adnan parked it on January 13, 1999. If we take law enforcement at their word, it’s crazy to think how close they could have been to finding Hae’s car on February 12th. If you look back to the first map, you will see that if they had literally just extended their search another three blocks South, there’s a good chance they would have found Hae’s car, especially given the fact that this was still part of the “neighborhoods surrounding Leakin Park.”
Of course, we now have a number of reasons to doubt this official story, including the reasons contained in yesterday’s post. So, what does it all mean? I wish I knew.
At this point, though, I feel comfortable saying that the language used in the Progress Report was not simply a mistake. The “mistake” theory is that the person writing the Progress Report improperly transposed the “600” from 600 Franklintown Road (the fake “trunk pop” location) when writing the location of Hae’s car, which is how we have 600 Edgewood Street in the Report instead of 300 Edgewood Street. This seems, however, to ignore the fact that the Progress Report indicates that “[t]he victim’s auto was…parked in the rear alley of 600 Edgewood Street, in Southwest Baltimore.” The 600 block of Edgewood Street is one of the few blocks in the area that does contain a rear alley suitable for stashing a car, and we know that Hae’s car was not found in a rear alley behind 300 Edgewood Street; instead, it was found in a vacant lot/grassy area.
-CM