Afterward, he posed for photos with Hopkins dignitaries, who never suspected that their newly christened role model had a history guaranteed to unsettle them all.
A drug encounter
On a January night in 2006, a man walked up and down the 1700 block of Ellsworth St. He wore a black knit cap and an army-green jacket over a black T-shirt and army pants. He didn't know he was being watched.
The man stopped when approached by several people. They handed him money, and he disappeared down an alley and into the backyard of a vacant building where a green couch lay on its side.
Then, according to the report of the police detective studying him, Aaron McCown reached inside the cushion, pulled out a plastic bag and removed "several small white objects consistent with the way heroin is packaged."
He had $188 on him when he was arrested. He pleaded guilty to possession with intent to distribute and received three years' probation.
It was the latest offense committed by a man with a history of veering into trouble.
McCown was born in East Baltimore but his mother, Sheila Word, a former youth supervisor at the Charles H. Hickey Jr. School, the youth detention center, moved him and his sister several times in search of a school where she thought they'd be happy and safe. McCown didn't meet his father until he was 21.
Sports was his passion. The Sun listed him as one of the top wrestlers at Carver Vo-Tech High School for 1993-1994. He graduated the next year from Joseph C. Briscoe High School, and his mother hung a picture of him in cap and gown on the wall.
But then he and three others were arrested for roughing up and robbing a man on a Harborplace skywalk in September 1996.
McCown spent nearly two years at a Jessup prison. When he got out in 1999, he would pace his mother's living room in circles approximating the size of his cell.
Later that year, he got a job handing out needles and catheters at a Hopkins warehouse. "He was a good guy, and he liked to look out for kids," said James Shannon, his boss.
McCown was living mostly in the basement of his mother's rowhouse on East Lanvale Street. When the weather was warm, neighborhood kids often asked him to toss a football with them or let them play his video games in his room, under the gaze of a Bob Marley poster.
By 2000, he was a Gators coach.
