Bobbi McCalla could hear the bumping bass of the car stereos before she rounded the corner of the rundown apartment building, and she knew it signaled the crowd had gathered just a block south of Sullivant Avenue for a vigil to remember her sister.

McCalla was running late, rattled because she had left home without any zip ties. Without them, the bunches of plastic pink and orange flowers that she and others carried would be gone in no time, stolen by thieves who destroy everything here — even the fake carnations wedged into rows of rusting utility meters to serve as a makeshift memorial for a troubled soul so many loved and tried to save.

It is painful for McCalla to visit this Franklinton neighborhood, to mourn at the spot where then-Columbus police vice Officer Andrew Mitchell shot and killed Donna Dalton Castleberry on Aug. 23, 2018.

Jordan Anderson writes on the side of a building after a vigil in Franklinton in August to mark the one-year anniversary of the death of Donna Dalton Castleberry. She was killed by former Columbus police vice officer Andrew K. Mitchell, who has been charged with murder. [Kyle Robertson/Dispatch]

“Everybody knows what happened to Donna wasn’t right,” McCalla told those who gathered in the secluded back lot where Mitchell had parked with Castleberry inside while working on what he later said was a solo undercover prostitution sting without his badge. “We need to make sure police are held accountable. What they did to Donna was wrong.”

But if it wasn’t for what happened in that unmarked police car — its passenger door blocked against a brick wall — a light might never have shone on a neighborhood that is so stricken with ills, one so drowning in vices and addictions and swallowed by urban blight, where some say police officers preyed upon the most vulnerable and no one seemed to care.