I call them ghost hunters, people searching for a long-lost someone - a parent who gave them up for adoption, an uncle who disappeared over the Himalayas, a son declared MIA near the Xe Pon River in Laos.
A few times each year, I get a phone call or a letter asking for help in settling a mystery or making a connection. One time, it was the mayor of a French village seeking the Baltimore relatives of an American soldier who had been killed in its liberation in 1944. Sometimes, there's a crime involved, real or suspected - a daughter believed to have been abducted, or a son stabbed to death on his way home from a barroom, his killer still at large.
Many people live with ghosts and questions.
This time, we have the tragic matter of Avonn T. Cooper, a Baltimore soldier whose death in 1941 at Fort Meade always troubled his family. There isn't much to offer here in the way of heroics. This is not the story of an Army private at long last honored for valorous service. Cooper was a prisoner at Fort Meade at the time he was shot to death, and he was shot to death trying to escape.
Sixty-seven years later, his brother, David Manning of Towson, and his sister, Flora Fitzgerald of Perry Hall, still have questions about how and why Avonn Cooper died.
Fitzgerald was just a little girl at the time.
Manning wasn't even born. He didn't get the details until he was a teenager and about to go into the military himself. He spotted his mother, Roxie, crying one day, asked why and got as much of the story as she knew or was willing to tell.
"This was always a difficult thing for the whole family to talk about," Manning said this week. "Extremely painful for my mother."
Cooper was the son of Manning's mother and her first husband. Cooper enlisted in the Army in the fall of 1939, when he would have been 19 years old. He was assigned to Fort Bragg, N.C., but left the base in August 1940 and returned to his hometown. He supposedly deserted because he had been denied permission to visit his mother, who was ill at the time. That's what Fitzgerald was always told.
According to a report in The Sun, Cooper went AWOL, stayed in Baltimore and had a job here for several months. At his mother's behest, he surrendered to the Army in May 1941. He was sentenced to a year in prison and confined to Fort Meade, The Sun reported, though "the sentence had not been approved by higher Army authorities."
