This month marks the seven-year anniversary of the mysterious death of Baltimore homicide detective Sean Suiter, who, on Nov. 15, 2017, was shot in the head one day before he was scheduled to testify in a grand jury in a case involving the notorious Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF), a squad of criminal Baltimore police officers. Suiter’s case was featured in two HBO productions, a documentary called “The Slow Hustle” and David Simon’s scripted series, “We Own This City.”

According to the Baltimore Police Department (BPD), Suiter’s death is still an open investigation. As such, journalists and the public are restricted from seeing case files. By law, closed investigations are subject to the Maryland Public Information Act. Yet, five years ago, BPD almost closed the Suiter case, following the completion of two outside investigations. The state’s attorney’s office intervened, citing remaining evidence to consider, including unanalyzed DNA on the alleged weapon. BPD’s commissioner then announced that it would close the case after finishing a “small number of tasks to complete.”

There has been no follow-up information about those tasks since 2019 and no evidence that the case is still being investigated. It doesn’t take five years to analyze DNA. In making sense of the Suiter case, the public has been forced to rely mostly on second hand information provided by a police department that, at the time, was being exposed by the federal government for having widespread corruption, including high-ranking commanders protecting criminal officers.

After two years of intense press conferences, investigative reports and media coverage, Detective Suiter’s case was left, in 2019, exactly how it started: divided between people who thought he killed himself and those who thought he was murdered.

“We Own This City,” Simon’s HBO series on the GTTF, ended with an episode dramatizing Suiter taking his own life in a vacant lot, while on duty, and staging it to look like a homicide. Simon drew narratively from a report by an Independent Review Board, a team of police consultants hired in 2018 by the department to look into the case. The report speculated that Suiter was panicked that corruption in his own past might be exposed if he testified.

Meanwhile, the HBO documentary, directed by Sonja Sohn (who played Detective Kima Greggs in Simon’s “The Wire”) didn’t land on a certain conclusion, but the bulk of its interview subjects leaned toward doubting the suicide narrative and believing Suiter was killed, either as a part of routine crime in Baltimore or to prevent him from testifying.

In 2019, Maryland State Police rubber-stamped the IRB’s suicide findings, but the state medical examiner stood by its initial ruling of homicide. So the case has two official diverging findings, all the more reason to let in the sunshine.

BPD has protocols for when a case becomes “officially cold.” BPD’s media liaison shared these with me in an email. They include “when there are no actionable leads to pursue,” when the case is “not being actively investigated,” and when it has been at least three years of inactivity. All of these are seemingly true in the Suiter case.

The policies also cite if the “primary” detective faced “promotion, transfer, or retirement.” The lead detective in the Suiter case, James Lloyd, was indicted for kidnapping and extortion in 2020 and subsequently spent a year in prison. The IRB report thanked Lloyd for his help in navigating the case. (The same consultant team had been hired in the past in Baltimore to exonerate officers in police killings.)

Police haven’t kept all of the Suiter evidence from the public. BPD released a video of the moments before and after the shooting, with obscure blurry figures in the distance, and one dispatch audio call. The IRB report also includes partial photos from the case files. And someone from the department shared partial body camera footage and audio with “The Slow Hustle” producers.

Much of the known evidence is still missing. This includes the autopsy, ballistics and forensics reports, complete audio and video (including from police cameras) and interviews with police and witnesses. This evidence is crucial, given that the public has been told inconsistent stories. For instance, BPD said that Suiter was shot with his own weapon. Police gave inconsistent stories as to how they determined this and as to the trajectory of the bullet. The IRB report alone offers two accounts for the trajectory: initially, it cites “a trajectory of slightly front-to-back and slightly upward”; later, the same report states that Suiter “put the barrel of the gun to the back of his skull and fired a shot.” Different trajectories also appeared in media reports.

The trajectory of the fatal bullet is just one of the many inconsistencies in the storytelling around Suiter’s death that further points to a need for outside eyes. The public deserves answers in such a high-profile case, as do Suiter’s wife and five children. Without more to go on, it seems as if the case is being kept open simply to restrict public access, and that is not a valid or lawful reason.

Justine Barron (X: @jewstein3000) is a writer and investigative journalist. She is the author of “They Killed Freddie Gray: The Anatomy of a Police Brutality Cover-Up” (Arcade, 2023).