Leon Faruq, the director of Safe Streets for Living Classrooms who spent 27 years in prison for a murder he didn't commit, died Wednesday at Sinai Hospital, where he was being treated for kidney disease. He was 58.
Mr. Faruq - who was Leon Awkard Jr. until his conversion to Islam - was born in Olney and raised in Northeast Washington, the eldest of five children.
His run-ins with the law began early.
He was 13 when he started breaking into cars, houses and stores, which resulted in his being sent away by his family to a juvenile institution.
He was 16 when he dropped out of high school and he celebrated his 18th birthday in a juvenile detention center.
After one prospective employer told him that he thought blacks were fit only for menial labor, Mr. Faruq made a decision to make a living holding up drug dealers with the help of his younger brother, George "Punchy" Awkard.
"That's the last time I tried to get a job," he told Baltimore Magazine's John Lewis in a 2003 profile.
By 1971, Mr. Faruq was doing time in the Lorton Correctional Facility in Virginia for assaulting a police officer and found himself face to face with some of the drug dealers he had robbed.
Out on the streets again, Mr. Faruq helped "Punchy," who was being held on a manslaughter charge, and seven other inmates, escape from the D.C. jail in a 1972 breakout. The next year, Mr. Faruq landed in the Maryland House of Correction in Jessup after being found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.
For the first two years of his term, Mr. Faruq, who had always been a reader, was locked in his cell 23 hours a day.
He turned to books and read incessantly. His topics were history, the classics, mythology, science, mathematics and religion.
By the time he left prison in 2000 after convincing the Circuit Court of Prince George's County that he had been wrongly sentenced, Mr. Faruq had earned two bachelor's degrees from Coppin State University - one in business administration and the other in sociology - and a master's degree in business administration from Vermont College.
He had met and fallen in love with Noni Ford, a librarian, who worked in the library at the Baltimore City Correctional Center, where Mr. Faruq had been held for a time. They were married at the jail in 1994.
"I was there the day he walked out of Jessup with utter dignity and grace. When he walked out, I never got the sense that he was angry at all. He was a person who was always looking forward," Mr. Lewis recalled Thursday.
