BALTIMORE — It was a marijuana sale turned deadly drug robbery. The victim shot to death wasn’t even involved in the deal.
Michael McCoy was at the Lochearn home of two men prosecutors say were selling marijuana to use a recording studio in their basement. He was waiting for a ride when an altercation with one of the robbers took place, leaving him dead.
Five men have been convicted and sentenced to prison for their roles in the 2019 homicide. But the two men prosecutors say were selling pot never faced charges, and prosecutors say they won’t — despite their testimony at one defendant’s trial that they took the drugs from the scene and tried to destroy surveillance footage.
A grieving mother and the NAACP’s Baltimore County branch are asking: Why?
To Sierra Nicole McCoy justice hasn’t been fully served.
“My son wasn’t in that lifestyle. That wasn’t him,” she said. “He got involved [in the incident] because they put him in a situation that led to that.”
McCoy and the NAACP want to know whether the fact that the men are white, while Michael McCoy and the five defendants are Black, had anything to do with their not facing charges.
Baltimore County State’s Attorney Scott Shellenberger told The Baltimore Sun his office was going after the most violent offenders, putting together the best court case possible. Race, he said, had nothing to do with it.
If you’ve got a choice between finding a “cold-blooded killer and his four buddies,” versus picking up two men for “some marijuana in a basement,” it’s a “no-brainer,” Shellenberger said.
Prosecutors have broad discretion around charging decisions, and some experts say it’s unsurprising one would go after the more serious offenses of murder and home invasion, rather than pursuing low-level drug charges.
The president of the NAACP branch sent a letter in January to Shellenberger’s office raising concerns about its decision-making in this case and others.
The NAACP declined to share a copy of the letter with The Sun, but, according to a committee chair with the group, it asked Shellenberger “disprove” the allegation of race-based decision-making by charging the two men, Christian Steinbach and Ryan Wade.
“These young men testified to breaking the law, in one or two or three areas, and they just waltzed in and waltzed out,” said Roland Patterson, chair of the chapter’s legal redress committee.
The NAACP has since asked the Maryland State Prosecutor’s Office to review the matter. State Prosecutor Charlton Howard III declined to confirm any investigation, citing office policy.
Sierra Nicole McCoy also filed a complaint with the state attorney grievance commission, but received a letter from the commission in November saying it closed the matter without taking action.
She said it’s not right that the only consequence for Wade and Steinbach was talking with police and testifying at a trial.
“Two people were invited to their home for the purpose of selling drugs,” she said. “So what they did was, their actions created the undue risk that led to my son’s death. ... Had they not done what they did, my son would still be here.”
Neither Wade nor Steinbach responded to requests for comment left by voicemail.
At Nasir George’s 2021 trial on murder charges, Wade and Steinbach told jurors Steinbach arranged the marijuana sale by Snapchat — 1 pound for $2,000.
The two acknowledged in testimony that they removed marijuana from the home after Michael McCoy was shot. Steinbach left with the drugs, which were not recovered by police, and Wade tried to damage a DVR with surveillance footage, they testified.
Neither Steinbach nor Wade identified George as the alleged shooter during the trial, despite Steinbach describing McCoy held at gunpoint and an ensuing struggle. Shellenberger said they weren’t asked to identify the shooter during the trial because they didn’t know George beforehand.
Instead, co-defendant Taikee Carter identified George as the shooter, testifying that the plan was to go to the house and “take the weed.” While Carter didn’t see the shooting, he said he ran into the house immediately afterward and later talked with George about it.
George was convicted of murder, but acquitted on charges of that included assaulting Steinbach. He has appealed.
The NAACP’s Patterson, who reviewed trial transcripts, said he saw Wade and Steinbach’s testimony as “prosecutorially neutral” and not advancing the state’s case, as they didn’t identify the shooter or contribute substantially to the prosecution’s narrative.
Shellenberger, however, said the two men’s testimony was needed because it provided context for the crimes and there needed to be an “entire story told about what was going on.” Most juries, he added, don’t want to rely solely on a co-defendant’s testimony.
“While they weren’t the best witnesses, they did offer sufficient corroboration of what the co-defendant said, to allow the jury to get to the place where they needed to go,” Shellenberger said.
Before Wade and Steinbach’s testimony, both men waived their Fifth Amendment right not to testify. No deal with prosecutors about charging decisions in exchange for testimony was disclosed; the judge said in court that he understood “there have been no promises made to you one way or the other.”
Shellenberger told The Sun the prosecutor on the case, Bill Bickel, “promised nothing” and decided not to bring charges after the two men’s trial testimony.
Sierra Nicole McCoy and her attorney, Loyd Byron Hopkins, question prosecutors’ assertion that they made no deal with the witnesses in exchange for their testimony.
“It is clear to me, based upon my experience, that the state struck a deal with [them], who became state witnesses,” Hopkins said.
Shellenberger acknowledged there was a “delay” in informing McCoy about his office’s decision to not bring charges. He said he had “corrected” that and people involved “now understand” the importance of communicating those decisions quickly.
University of Baltimore law professor David Jaros said prosecutors enjoy “immense discretion” on whether to charge, describing it as both core to their function and something not generally subject to direct oversight. He added that it’s unsurprising a prosecutor would forgo charging a witness they believe they need for proof beyond a reasonable doubt on a murder charge.
“The racial makeup of the defendants and dealers here don’t look good, but I would have expected this as the outcome if you hadn’t told me what the racial makeup was,” Jaros said.
Joe Murtha, a defense attorney and former prosecutor who represented George at trial, said he wasn’t surprised the two men were not charged criminally and he doesn’t believe there was any race-based decision-making. They described the circumstances of what happened before the shooting, Murtha said, and the state needed them to establish what they were describing as a robbery.
While the decision “may not have been an easy one,” it appeared to Murtha that the priority for the state was to seek a murder conviction, rather than to prosecute everyone possible, he said.
“When you step back and look at the big picture, despite these two individuals being despicable and their behavior being pathetic, based on their being friends with Mr. McCoy, the prosecution kept the focus on seeking justice for the murder of Mr. McCoy, and that’s what they pursued,” Murtha said.
Murtha suggested that any potential case against the two men could have been “hobbled” based on the available evidence, as police never seized the drugs.
Shellenberger, however, said his office “probably had enough” to bring charges.
Sierra Nicole McCoy’s attorney, Hopkins, called Wade and Steinbach’s testimony “helpful, but not necessary.”
He said he wasn’t surprised by the lack of charges because of police and prosecutors’ discretion. But, Hopkins added, if the men selling the marijuana had been Black, regardless of the shooting victim’s race, he believes they would have been arrested and charged.
McCoy said she would have understood if the men had been charged and then given some kind of plea deal. Without that, she said, prosecutors “failed to do what their oath required.”
“I even said to Shellenberger, ‘You state that no crime in Baltimore County will go unpunished. You said that you were an advocate for the victim,’” she said. “And I said, ‘Where’s my advocacy? Where’s my help?’”
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