Glenda McQueen revisits son’s death during do-over of 2008 murder trial

When Glenda McQueen worked as a reporter in violence-torn Miami in the 1980s, she sat with grieving relatives of the dead, trying to capture their anguish.

“I was an outsider looking in,” she said.

But in 2006, her son Michael was shot in the head. His roommate was convicted of killing him while he watched television in their Gaithersburg apartment.

“It’s almost cliche. There’s nothing like it. It’s the kind of pain that I feel every day and I know people that have lost children feel every day,” McQueen said. “I look at people who have children, and I feel cheated. I feel that something precious has been taken from me that I’ll never get back.”

McQueen thinks about Michael at least several times a day, every day. Over the past three weeks, she has spent long hours in a Montgomery County courtroom living through a wrenching do-over of the 2008 murder trial.

The conviction in her son’s death was thrown out by an appeals court last year, and a jury is set to hear closing arguments in the retrial Monday.

As the lawyers in the courtroom projected photos of Michael, his bloody head thrown back in his low-slung chair, she looked down, her turquoise painted fingernails pressing hard against her brow. She couldn’t avoid the onslaught of words — gush, spurt, brain matter — but she could avert her eyes.

Even hearing it could sometimes be too much. One afternoon, after days of testimony, she sat in the lobby outside the courtroom doors trying to read “A Streetcar Named Desire,” preparation for her high school English students back home in New Orleans.

Otto, Michael’s brother, has been alongside her. But this time around her husband, Michael Sr., isn’t with them. He was suffering from congestive heart failure during the first trial and has since passed away, leaving her with another void.

“There were days I just wanted to cry, and he’d be so supportive and say, ‘We have to be strong for Michael’s sake and we have to be focused.’ I miss that,” McQueen said.

McQueen thinks back on her son’s life and the fact that he survived deployments to Afghanistan but died in a Gaithersburg apartment.

She and her husband were surprised when Michael decided to join the military shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

“He didn’t have a straight-up-the-line personality,” she said. In boot camp, a sergeant told him he’d never be a Ranger — which is when he decided “that was exactly what he was going to do.”

She said her son was loving and loyal, the kind of teenager who would invite his mother to play Monopoly and Scrabble with him and his friends, and the kind of adult who stayed in touch with an entourage of friends.

“He had the sense and timing of a comedian,” McQueen said.

In the military, that humor could occasionally irk superiors, as when he insisted on attaching a small G.I. Joe to his belt during training.

And he knew how to tell a story, like the one about being with some of America’s elite war fighters in Afghanistan and training a monkey to drink a can of soda.

“He popped it, and then he showed the monkey, and the monkey looked at him. And then he drank it, and then he showed the monkey,” McQueen said. “Then he handed the monkey the can, and the monkey popped it. He just thought that was the funniest thing.”