Grieving Milwaukee families call him in their worst moment. Who is the man at the other end of the line?

Tory Lowe sat at the head of a dining room table in an ornate house in Milwaukee’s Sherman Park neighborhood, his eyes red from cat allergies.

The simmer of shrimp creole mixed with the sounds of people crying and children playing. An orange tabby cat named Cheddar roamed nearby.

Honey Lewis, the mother of 19-year-old Morgan Huennekens, focused on Lowe as reporters knocked at her door.

You don’t have to answer it, he told her.

Lewis felt relief. Her daughter had been raped, stabbed and beaten. The dead body had been wrapped in a blanket inside a shed. Lewis did not want to talk about it.

“For the first time, I felt like a human being, that somebody actually cared enough to sit in my house,” Lewis said.

As the weeks passed, Lowe stayed in touch. He went to court dates and checked in by phone every few days. When others let her down — the prosecutor who forgot her daughter’s name in court, the victim advocate she couldn’t reach — Lowe was there.

Lowe, 42, is seemingly everywhere in Milwaukee, whether he’s leading marches against police misconduct, connecting evicted renters with housing, helping families track down their missing teens or protesting lead levels in school drinking fountains.

Nearly every day, Lowe posts tributes to homicide victims on his Facebook page, which has more than 50,000 followers. He calls for justice and raises money for families. Driven to help others, Lowe said his role comes without a paycheck. He doesn't have a traditional job.

He stays afloat using money he received from a lawsuit settlement, as well as money earned from speaking engagements and production work. He recently was a producer on the film "53206: Milwaukee," a film that explores gun violence in the ZIP code, known for high rates of poverty and incarceration.

“He doesn’t get the recognition or the accolades that he deserves, but Tory Lowe truly is a voice for the community,” said Lurlean Hodges, whose daughter was shot and killed in 2014.

In 2016, when a distraught mother came to Lowe, he went with her to Chicago to search for her missing daughter, 16-year-old Armoni Chambers. The two scoured the city's west side, handing out flyers and streaming their efforts live on Facebook. The community was quickly engaged and Chambers — who had been lured to Chicago and trafficked by several men —  was located.

Despite his high-profile activism, Lowe rarely talks about his own story and what drives him to do this work. His life has been shaped by experiences across the Midwest — from college in Iowa to racist attacks in Minnesota — but he always has been rooted in Milwaukee.

“You want the truth?” Lowe said at the start of a recent interview.

“I came out of nowhere.”

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A Milwaukee beginning

There was a moment when Lowe considered stopping before he ever really started.

Then in eighth grade, he grabbed a fistful of his grandmother’s pills from the medicine cabinet. He planned to swallow them all and never wake up.

Lowe was a poor, misfit teenager in Milwaukee’s Bronzeville neighborhood. Raised by his grandparents, he roamed free most of the time. His grandmother, a churchgoing woman, had already raised 12 children and her health was failing.

Lowe got his allowance in food stamps; he often went without new clothes or haircuts. He dropped out of school after enduring incessant bullying.

His friends joined gangs, but Lowe shunned the scene after a close friend was shot. His older brother, his most reliable friend and provider, got kicked out of the house. Lowe’s brother would purchase clothes and shoes for him with money from drug dealing. When his brother eventually got arrested, Lowe had nowhere else to turn.

As he held the pills, he heard a knock on the door. He tucked them behind a pillow.

“That was the changing moment in my life,” Lowe said.

Lowe had never seen this man, a local minister named Tim Rogers, before. He had heard the man had tried to help his brother, but to Lowe, he was a stranger. Now, here he was telling Lowe that God had called him to serve as Lowe’s father.

“He came and took me to school every day until I graduated,” Lowe said. “He made sure I had clothes, he made sure that I had support, he made sure that if I called him, he came.”

When Lowe ran into trouble in high school, the man took Lowe to church. One Sunday, Lowe heard someone say, “Stand up.” Instinctively, he did.

“I never had contact with nothing like that,” Lowe said. “When he touched me, I just knew that it was God.”

‘Made in Minnesota’

Bam. Tory Lowe hit hard on the football field and everybody knew it.

Football became his way out of Milwaukee. After re-enrolling in school, a counselor at North Division High School cut a highlight reel of Lowe, the school’s starting running back, and sent it to colleges in the Midwest.

Lowe landed at Iowa Lakes Community College in Estherville in 1995. He loved the state. His friends’ families welcomed him into their farmhouses and treated him as one of their own.

“I thought racism didn’t exist after I was in Iowa,” Lowe said.

A series of relationships after college took him from Iowa to Madison, then back to Milwaukee and Iowa. He then landed in Worthington, Minnesota., in 2003.

Lowe struggled to adjust to his new, rural home where he lived with his girlfriend and their two daughters.

“You could go in a circle and that’s the whole town,” he said.

Swift Pork Co., which operated a processing plant, was the main employer. Lowe applied and was hired, becoming the plant’s second black manager and the first in the maintenance department.

VIDEO:Tory Lowe on seeing gang violence firsthand

VIDEO:Tory Lowe on growing up in Milwaukee

He had been on the job for three weeks when a co-worker first used the N-word.

Lowe waited for someone at the lunch table to speak up. No one did.

When his shift ended, Lowe went to Walmart, bought a tape recorder and began documenting the slurs.

One late November night, Lowe was given an unusual order: to go to the plant’s back patio. He cautiously made his way outside, where a group of people was waiting to jump him. He barely got away.

“I think whoever I was that day died,” Lowe said.

Lowe filed a discrimination lawsuit against the company. His secret recordings became evidence.

During his time at the plant, Lowe reported discriminatory behavior to his supervisor, but nothing was done. He was told to ignore the treatment and give co-workers time to get used to him, according to court records.

The records show that he was repeatedly taunted with threatening references to the Ku Klux Klan, with co-workers claiming to be part of the group.

Then, in October 2005, Lowe found a noose at his desk.

All of it was reported to management, but nothing was done. Lowe was fired in late November 2005.

The company settled in May 2007, giving Lowe an undisclosed amount of money. Lowe said he spent much of it trying to gain sole custody of his children; he continues to use the remaining money for basic expenses.

“I’m only helping victims,” Lowe said. “Because I was a victim and nobody helped me.”

Tackling homicides in his hometown

When Lowe came back to Milwaukee in 2011, he saw his hometown differently. He noticed the disinvestment in the central city. He saw racism festering in one of the most segregated cities in the country. He thought the politicians did nothing.

His experiences elsewhere in the Midwest led him to believe things could be different. He started small, picking up trash and litter on the block around his grandmother’s house — the same one he grew up in. That year, 23-year-old Derek Williams died gasping for air in the back of a Milwaukee police squad car.

Lowe led marches and protests, seeking justice for Williams. He also spoke out for James Perry, a man who was epileptic and died on the floor of the county jail.

“Derek Williams had a real street movement,” Lowe said.

Williams’ family received a $2 million settlement in early May following a yearslong civil rights lawsuit against the city.

Several years after Williams’ death, Lowe noticed how the almost routine daily grind of killings did not generate the same movement and calls for accountability as police-related deaths.

He started posting to his Facebook page about homicides, featuring a picture of the victim and highlighting ways for people to donate to the funeral. He organized vigils where he passed around a bucket to collect donations for the family.

“I don’t knock no hustle,” Lowe said, referring to drug dealing. “But if you mess around and take somebody’s life with that hustle, it’s over. Me and you gonna have a problem straight up. A real serious problem. I’m gonna put you under the jail.” 

Not everyone has trusted Lowe’s motives. Nishia Cotto, the mother of 15-year-old Josue Gold who was shot and killed, remains skeptical.

Her son’s shooting happened after an argument ensued over a pair of glasses that had been listed for sale on Facebook Marketplace. Gold met up with the seller, who tried to provide him with a knockoff pair of glasses.

Cotto met Lowe once at her son’s vigil.

“I can’t really say that his actions are in the right place,” Cotto said. “He’s always posting, ‘Please donate $5 to me.’ ”

Still, Lowe’s Facebook post about her son’s death and the vigil went viral, which she said comforted her. He got tips about her son’s killer. He gave them to Cotto, who then worked with police.

“He just took the time to share our story and our hurt and our pain,” Cotto said. “No one really cared or even paid attention except for him.”

Carrie Scott-Haney, whose daughter, 28-year-old Audrey Scott was missing for more than a month before she was found shot and killed, said she provided food and Gatorade for all volunteers, including Lowe, who helped her search for her daughter.

“I’ve even offered to give him gas money,” Scott-Haney said. “He will not accept any money.”

Taking back the story

When families lose a loved one to homicide, their stories play out in the media, sometimes in graphic detail, sometimes with inaccuracies.

When Lewis sat down with Lowe in her dining room, it was the first step in taking back her daughter’s story.

News stories had highlighted the suspect’s account of paying her daughter for sex before killing her.

“So many people made her out to be whatever, and he made her a human again,” Lewis said of Lowe.

Tita Rodriguez, a former Milwaukee activist now based in Texas, said if it wasn’t for Lowe, many families would be lost. Lowe knows how to use social media, navigate the criminal justice system and amplify their cries for justice, she said.

“A lot of people wouldn’t know where to go and what to do,” Rodriguez said.

Sometimes, Lowe asks social media followers for leads to find homicide suspects and often he uses that information to seek suspects out himself. He knows the dangers he faces: His truck has the bullet holes to prove it.

Lowe is constantly on his cellphone. He used to average about 15 calls a day from people asking for help. Now it’s about 30. With the increased volume, he’s trying to guide families over the phone. He worries about not having enough time to spend with his own children, who range in age from 5 to 21.

“We are his personal life — I mean, the city of Milwaukee,” Rodriguez said. “We are Tory and Tory is us, so I don’t think Tory’s ever going to sit down until he feels that his mission is complete.”

About this story

Sydney Czyzon is a Marquette University student who has been working with Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Ashley Luthern, who spent the 2018-19 academic year on campus as an O'Brien Fellow in Public Service Journalism.

During her nine-month fellowship, Luthern examined homicide clearance rates and the impact of policing strategies in Milwaukee. The stories explore what it means to get justice after a homicide and what leads to deadly violence in Milwaukee.

Other stories in the series can be found at jsonline.com/MKEviolence.

Marquette University and administrators of the program played no role in the reporting, editing or presentation of this project.

How to help

Activist Tory Lowe does annual walks between Chicago and Milwaukee to raise awareness about gun violence. He is launching this year's effort Saturdaywith a softball game in Chicago. The walk itself will take place July 1-4. Anyone interested in sponsoring the walk can contact Lowe at torylowe.com/contact.

Lowe recently launched a civil and human rights advocacy group called Justice Wisconsin. For more information, go to justicewisconsin.com.