Baltimore pays respects to ‘Big Sam’ after deadly police encounter

Samuel “Big Sam” Elsworth Brown Jr. was the plug.

He was the man who sold you a car, helped you apply for your first credit card, brought over pool floaties and toys for your kids.

He was the man who always picked up the phone. The 56-year-old was calm, reliable, and if he didn’t have the answer to a pressing problem, he sure as hell knew someone who did.

“He became, what I describe, as the ‘go-to guy,’” said his longtime friend and collaborator, Roberto “DJ Quicksilva” Silva.

Simply put, he was the man whose prayer card reads: “I’m On It.”

He was also the man who died Friday after sustaining permanent brain damage following an encounter with a Baltimore County Police officer last month. The Maryland Office of the Attorney General is investigating the use-of-force incident but has not yet released the police body camera footage.

The juxtaposition between how Brown lived his life and how his life ended is devastating to parts of Baltimore’s Black community, hundreds of whom showed up to Brown’s funeral Tuesday.

“This destroys credibility with law enforcement,” said James Carlos Pearson, who grew up with Brown in West Baltimore’s George B. Murphy Homes.

“I don’t know if we ever recover, but my prayer is that it brings everyone in the community closer,” Pearson added. “That it brings awareness and justice is served.”

‘Neighborhood philanthropist’

Silva remembers the first day he met Brown.

Now a noted disc jockey who has toured with Jay Z, 50 Cent and Mary J. Blige, back then Silva was just a 14-year-old kid with a dream to entertain.

He had his first gig at Club Indigo, a popular West Baltimore nightclub owned by Brown’s family that hosted hip hop sets.

Silva’s father dropped him off and Brown assured him Silva would be safe.

“That first day Big Sam met me at the door and told my dad, ‘I got him. I won’t let anything happen to him that won’t happen to me first,’” Silva recalled. “It’s been that my entire life, my entire career from 1994 to 2026 ... my protector, friend, a brother, mentor in the business.”

Most recently, Brown has served as Silva’s road manager.

“He’s been my everything,” said the 45-year-old DJ, who also has a morning show on 92Q.

It sounds like a cliché, Silva acknowledged, but Brown was nearly everything to everyone.

Pearson remembers tagging along with his older brother and Brown in the projects where they grew up, often in awe of how smooth his brother’s friend was.

“They came to all my football games,” he said with a smile inside the packed Wylie Funeral Home in Harlem Park during Brown’s public visitation. “Big Sam was always pushing me to evolve, to be a better version of myself.”

Another friend, Tiara Brown, who was not related to Big Sam, remembered the first time she met him.

“He said, ‘Oh, you got the Brown name? We family now,’” she said.

Tonya Kosh remembers Brown as a “jack of all trades.” He was a car salesman — one of the first guys in West Baltimore to open a tag and title shop, she said — worked at the airport and was a fixture in the music scene.

“I always called him the neighborhood philanthropist,” Pearson said.

Deadly wellness check

Around 3:20 a.m. on Feb. 16, Baltimore County Police received a call reporting a man parked for a long time at a stoplight near a busy Woodlawn.

The responding officer, Derek Hadel, found Brown asleep at the wheel, according to a partial copy of the police report provided by Billy Murphy, his family’s attorney. After ordering Brown to exit his vehicle, Hadel moved his arm to distance himself from Brown.

Brown hit Hadel in the arm twice and the officer responded by punching him twice in the face, causing Brown to fall and hit the back of his head on the ground, according to the incident report.

Hadel’s punches broke Brown’s nose, multiple other bones in his face and caused him to fall to the ground and fracture his skull in two places, Murphy said.

Even though Brown was drunk — his blood alcohol content level was 0.26, or three times the legal limit, Murphy said — his actions did not warrant a death sentence.

“The perfect wellness check should end with you getting a traffic ticket, or at the worst you should get locked up for drunk driving,” Silva said. “A wellness check should never give you grounds to get killed by a police officer.”

Silva said he initially heard that Brown landed in Sinai Hospital after falling on ice. It was only after a nurse told him that the family needed to hire an attorney that Silva realized the gravity of the situation.

“From that moment on, we have kept asking what happened,” he said. “Release us the tapes so we can find out what happened.”

Where’s the video?

Typically, the Independent Investigations Division — the unit in the attorney general’s office that reviews use-of-force incidents — releases body or dashboard camera footage within 20 business days after a deadly incident, according to its protocols.

Baltimore County Police spokesperson Joy Lepola-Stewart told The Banner that the department is cooperating with the attorney general’s office but declined to comment further, citing the ongoing investigation.

She said that Hadel has been reassigned to administrative duties.

The attorney general’s office acknowledged Brown’s death in a news release Monday without naming him or Hadel.

Pearson, who works in corrections at the Department of Juvenile Services in the city, cannot fathom why Hadel chose to punch his friend.

“It’s just unreal,” he said. “Working in law enforcement, you understand what training looks like and you know when it’s wrong ... they don’t teach knockout techniques during training.”

But Pearson stressed that the last thing Brown would have wanted is to incite more violence and chaos.

“We don’t want revenge,” he said. “We want accountability so the family can have closure.”