The Role of Her Life

By night, neon blue lights tacked high atop streetlamps flash on, off, on, to schizoid strobe effect, recording the good and the bad, the legal and the illegal, the malignant and the benign. Big Brother staking out his piece of the corner, just like everyone else here.

"If all the dead people [killed] on Oliver Street could stand up," Burns says, "there wouldn't be room for them."

Here, Snoop sold drugs, hustling out a living, a comfortable living, sure, but a living spent constantly watching her back. It was, she says, a life of "live or be killed." She prided herself on being a little roughneck, all bluster and long, thick braids, hanging with 'bangers, the only girl surfing a sea of testosterone.

She liked it like that. Never was one for the girlie things in life. And school? Forget about it.

Back then, says her godmother, Denise Robbins, 35, Snoop was "a big ol' agitator. She was rough, like rough. One of those little bad kids. But I always saw something different in her."

She had a lot to overcome, starting out as a three-pound preemie riddled with health problems, thanks to nine months of drugs served up in the womb. Both her parents were addicts. She never met her father; doesn't remember her mother. They're both dead.

When she was a baby, she became the foster child of an older couple, Levi and Cora Pearson, who later adopted her. Levi was an electrician; Cora, who worked in the city's foster care division, had a habit of bringing home leftovers from a broken system.

Snoop played sports with Levi, whom she called her granddad. Levi and Cora raised her old-school style, showering her with love, and relying on both the belt and the Bible.

But things changed the year Snoop turned 12. Levi died of cancer at 81. Snoop started running the streets, and she went from being a student who excelled in school to a student bringing home a steady parade of D's on her report card -- and one who was suspended twice for fighting.

In the 1993-94 school year, according to court records, Snoop missed 115 days. School officials reported that "Felicia could be pleasant and cooperative or belligerent and uncooperative." Cora told court officials after the killing that while Snoop was a well-mannered child who helped out around the house and always came home before her 10 p.m. curfew, her grandmother didn't have a clue who her friends were.

Robbins, the godmother, knew full well whom Snoop was running with. And she didn't like it. Some of east Baltimore's biggest drug runners, she says, had adopted Snoop as their mascot. For a young kid who'd never met her biological family, a girl who was struggling with her attraction to other girls, her crew provided a sense of home.

"They offered this thing to Snoop, like, 'We're your family. We got your back,' " Robbins says. "But I knew them 20-hundred years before she knew them. I knew what they were about."