After ‘The Wire’ ended, actress Sonja Sohn couldn’t leave Baltimore’s troubled streets behind

Prompted by other episodes and other exercises in the ensuing weeks, they began sharing stories of fractured home lives, friends who had died, close calls and run-ins with the police. They talked about morality, cause and effect, decisions and consequences. Sohn never dismissed their responsibility, but she knew these were people shaped by events that unfolded over generations, people who developed skills they needed to survive, destructive though they may have been. Daniels, for instance, had been in foster care his entire life, moving from home to home, with no money, no real sense of security. “Tyrea has no family,” Hawkins says with astonishment. “I’ve never met anyone who says, ‘I have no family,’ and they really mean it.

“I went out there to hustle because I wanted to, because I felt like doing it. He hustles because he has to. He robs because he has to.”

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Daniels himself recalls being urged to stay in school, but school was just another place he had to protect himself. “When I go to school, I got to watch my back,” he says. And after school, “when I walk the streets, I got to watch my back.”

The group dwindled from 20 to 15, then 10. Those who stayed, though, grew more engaged. They knew that Carpenter, Sutton and, especially, Sohn didn’t have to be there. Hawkins says a measure of trust developed. Toward the end of the session, Sohn and Carpenter led a field trip to North Carolina, stopping on the way in Newport News. “She showed us the project she came from, the school she went to,” Daniels recalls. He says it was like she was telling them: “I went through this, I got my [expletive] together,” and they could, too.

The group became its own support network. When Cornish saw her uncle get shot and killed at a barbecue, and when Hawkins’s younger stepbrother and another good friend were murdered while sitting on an East Baltimore stoop, they could reach out to others who understood what they were going through. In times past, Hawkins would have sought revenge, but he had taken to heart the lesson that “the choices you make lead to consequences.” (He says the killer was later killed in prison.)

This wasn’t Hawkins’s last challenge, though. Sohn nominated him for a mayoral anti-gang violence initiative, so he’d be receiving an award at City Hall. On the day of the ceremony, while waiting for Sutton to give him a ride, Hawkins got a call telling him that some guys had gone to his mother’s house looking for his twin sister’s boyfriend. Hawkins didn’t know the whole story, but “my twin sister, that’s everything to me,” he says, the anger rising in his voice as he remembers. “When she calls, I come running, because she doesn’t call me for something small.”

Sutton, an imposing man known as “Crazy Ted” in his gangster days, had gone through something similar when he was getting out of the game. On the eve of his college graduation, his crew wanted him to help take care of a rival. He said no, and the next day got his degree. He channeled that experience to counsel Hawkins, who Sutton could see was enraged and thinking about violence. As Sutton recalls: “I was like, ‘Look, this is that fork in the road right now. You can already play this whole scenario out in your mind like a chess game.’ ” There’d be a confrontation, retribution, and someone would end up dead or in prison.

“The 15 bus is right there,” Sutton told him, pointing down the street. “You can go to your mother’s house. Or you can get in this car with me.” At the end of the day, “you can be looking at your award at home and happy, or you can be down at central booking.”

Sutton’s words pierced Hawkins’s rage. “I looked, and I thought, and I went on and did what I was supposed to do, because any setback would not take me forward in life,” he says. “That would have taken me 10 steps back.”

“The possibility of a different way of doing things — that’s the key piece.” Sutton says. “A lot of them, they don’t even see another way.”

***

The second group skewed older and had different needs. Nikita Brady was exhausted from years spent on the corners, dealing, fighting, stealing. Her closest friend had been shot and killed. She had been told she could play basketball in college if she could get in, but “I didn’t have that extra push, that motivation, until I met with Sonja,” she says.

“We started to see,” Sohn said, “that although the program is very useful, if you don’t have your GED, and you don’t have a job, and you’re 19 years old, and you’re quitting drug dealing….” She paused. “If in this very moment, you can’t earn money to help yourself, the rest is a moot point.” The participants needed practical life skills they could not learn watching “The Wire” — résumé writing, opening a bank account, handling job interviews, dealing with legal issues.

So Sohn put the third session on hold and started adapting the original vision. But a new opportunity arose. Maj. Melvin Russell, commander of Baltimore’s Eastern District and an early backer, put Sohn in touch with Pastor Marshall Prentice of Zion Baptist Church in East Baltimore. Prentice said Sohn could use a house the church owned farther up East Lanvale Street if she fixed it up. It stood across from two vacant houses, near known drug corners, and it was yet another project to add to her to-do list. But she had long imagined having a house for the program to serve as an anchor in the community ReWired was trying to engage.

Three months later, a large banner hung from the building, welcoming one and all to a free barbecue at the “Village House.” The interior, once dingy and rundown, was now clean, airy and pleasant. Several dozen people gathered out front, and Sohn, in a burgundy dress, buzzed around shaking hands, dispensing hugs, telling people to get something to eat. Sutton was there — when a well-dressed lady said she had come from a funeral, he asked, “Young or old?” Hawkins was there, too. He had found work with a landscaping company but was hoping to find something that paid better. His wife, Shakiara, was about to start a short prison stint for fraud, so it was on him to care for the kids.

Sohn soon started a new gig, too, as Det. Samantha Baker on ABC’s “Body of Proof,” a crime drama filming in Providence. It was a supporting role on a traditional cop show, but it was also a way to keep working and help fund ReWired. She was driving up and down Interstate 95 on a weekly basis, doing her scenes, then heading back to Baltimore. She sounded and looked tired.

Late in 2010 and into 2011, the third session remained on hold, and she was struggling to find the right people to manage ReWired and the Village House. Early in 2011, Daniels got arrested because he had held up an older couple at a bus stop after his foster mother had thrown him out and he had been homeless for several weeks. Sohn was heartened that he called her and said he knew he had done the wrong thing. It showed reflection and accountability, she thought, part of what she had been trying to instill. The group rallied around him, writing to him in jail, sending money, doing whatever they could — while also stressing that he had to make better choices.

One night in March, Daniels, wearing a black Adidas tracksuit, arrived at the Village House for a ReWired meeting. He wouldn’t be sentenced until the summer, but the weeks since he had gotten out of jail had been dispiriting. He was trying to look after his daughter, but job interviews kept stalling when his record came up. Plus, his sentencing judge had earlier said she’d give him 19 years if she saw him again.

Brady was there. She had stepped up efforts to earn her GED because she had been told it would help her get a scholarship at a community college. Hawkins arrived with his son, still trying to find something better than his $7.50-an-hour landscaping gig. His wife was getting out of Jessup soon, but for the time being, “I’m a 24-hour pop!” he said. “It’s nerve -racking. And a lot of brothers can’t do it, and I lost a lot of friends because people would say the stupidest thing to me, like, ‘Why don’t you just give ’em to your mother, and you get out there and get yours?’ ” The answer was simple: “My father wasn’t there for me, and he coulda been. There’s nothing on this earth that could keep me from my son. And to know that everything I do for him and my family makes me a better person. And this program has made me see that there’s another way.”

***

In July, the ReWired crew gathered again at the Village House for a good-bye of sorts. “Body of Proof” was moving to Los Angeles — and Sohn with it.

The gathering was orchestrated by Koli Tengalla, a veteran community activist and a fellow at the Open Society Institute whom Sohn hired to direct the Village House. The program was always designed to function without her. After she left, however, Hawkins, Brady and others asked for more responsibility and set up a snowball stand to raise funds to pay for GED tutoring for their classmates and school supplies for younger kids.

After leaving prison, Shakiara Hawkins started interning at the Village House and was later hired as a part-time assistant. Sean Hawkins got a better paying job, too, in the warehouse of an event production company run by a man who met Sohn at her favorite Baltimore pub and offered his help. Brady was not only working; she had also enrolled at Baltimore County community college and was on the basketball team. Even Daniels had good news: He was sentenced to 61 days after the judge who said she’d give him 19 years was apparently swayed by his story, his pledge to honor his commitment to the court and his ReWired classmates, several of whom attended the sentencing.

Even with the full schedule in California, and a rash of health issues that plagued her last fall, including a burst blood vessel in her colon that landed her in intensive care, Sohn is working closely with Tengalla to plan the next steps for the Village House, trying to develop a mental health piece for the program and trying to connect people like Hawkins and Brady with services ReWired can’t provide, such as job counseling. She’s also searching out new sources of funding and talking up the program in venues such as panel discussions at Harvard and Attorney General Eric Holder’s “Defending Childhood” task force, chaired by former baseball manager Joe Torre.

In December, soon after getting out of the hospital, she flew to Baltimore to testify at the task force’s first hearing. Her voice shaky, she told her tale of transformation, stressing that she had done it, and that there are many kids in Baltimore and elsewhere who can do it — if they get the right help.

It won’t work every time, but “I know what is possible,” she concluded.

Former foreign correspondent Phil Zabriskie is now a writer based in New York. He can be reached at wpmagazine@washpost.com.