"I grabbed him and hugged him. I said, 'It's happened, hasn't it?'" she said in an interview in February.
Yesterday, she expressed nothing but disappointment.
"We're really, really, really not pleased with the decision to dismiss the case," she said. "I think the judicial system let us down - not the Police Department - but I think that there is more that could be done."
Referring to the accomplishments detailed on Weaver's resume and included in news reports about his arrest, Brenda Baskin said, "I'm not going to discredit that he was trying to be a good kid. But we had a good kid, too. He had no criminal record. He didn't get a chance to develop his resume."
Mead said the Weaver family could not have been more understanding of the Baskins' sorrow. Their own son - Christopher B. Weaver, the older brother of Nicholas Weaver - was killed in 2004 when an intruder entered his apartment in Hampton, Va., and opened fire with a handgun. The 22-year-old was a senior business major at Hampton University.
"She had the greatest empathy for the victim's family," the defense attorney said of Weaver's mother, Alice Pinderhughes. "I think this was a situation where a young man had died and people wanted somebody to be held accountable for it. But there was an inadequate and incomplete investigation into the whole matter."
Nicholas Weaver now intends to return to college to finish his degree - albeit a semester behind schedule, Mead said.
"His goal is to become an attorney," she added. "He can pursue his career in the legal profession and have a much more in-depth perspective on it."
Baltimore Sun reporter Brent Jones contributed to this article.
