Dean Marlowe was in his makeshift fourth-grade classroom, a double-wide trailer just outside New York City’s Public School 38, when he glanced out the window and saw his stepfather walking up the trailer’s ramp.
Marlowe’s mother was a police officer in Harlem at the time, his stepfather a police sergeant across town in east Brooklyn, and when his stepdad opened the door and told his teacher he was there to pick up Dean, Marlowe knew immediately something was wrong.
“I started getting nervous,” Marlowe, now a backup safety with the Detroit Lions, recalled in a Zoom interview with the Free Press last week.