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CLEVELAND URBAN NEWS.COM-CLEVELAND, Ohio- Local community activist groups and others, led by the Imperial Women Coalition and Black on Black Crime Inc, want a memorial on 12205 Imperial Avenue on Cleveland's east side in front of the since demolished home of serial killer Anthony Sowell, who murdered 11 Black women in and around the property. CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE FOR THE IMPERIAL AVENUE MURDERS RALLY
The house of horrors has since been demolished.
Activists are demanding a memorial and justice for the victims as well as their families, the discoveries of the dead women made public in 2009 when law enforcement authorities began pulling the first of what would ultimately become 11 bodies from the Imperial Avenue home on the city's largely Black east side in the city's Mount Pleasant neighborhood.
The families of the victims have been fighting for a memorial for nearly a decade and they have pending a lawsuit before Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas Judge Nancy Fuerst regarding police negligence relative to the murders, Fuerst initially dismissing the lawsuit but losing on appeal to the 12-member 8th District Court of Appeals, which is a third Black.
Sowell, 59, was convicted in 2011 by a Cuyahoga County jury on 82 of 83 counts, including 11 counts of aggravated murder of the 11 Black women that he strangled to death at his home, and three counts of rape of three other Black women, also at his home on the now infamous Imperial Avenue.
Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas Judge Dick Ambrose, the trial court judge in the case and a former Cleveland Browns football player, handed the serial killer a death sentence per the recommendation of the 12-member jury, the same jury that issued convictions weeks earlier.
Sowell has lost each and every appeal, and last year the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear his case.
A former U.S. marine, he served 15 years in prison for attempted rape prior to the Imperial Avenue Murders.
Police ignored missing persons reports relative to the murders and even released Sowell from custody in 2008 on a rape complaint, the serial killer, also known as the Cleveland strangler, murdering the last six of his 11 Black, female victims thereafter.
He was arrested again in 2009 on another rape complaint that stuck.
"We call for a moratorium against violence against women and girls, Black women and girls in particular, and at the local, county, state, national and international levels," said Cleveland activist Kathy Wray Coleman, a founding member of the Imperial Women Coalition, the women's rights group derived from the unprecedented tragedy.
Coleman has led every anniversary rally since 2010, except for one, and says greater Cleveland activists, led by Imperialwomencoalition.com, "will continue to fight against violence against women and girls across racial, ethnic and socioeconomic lines."
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