Central figure in ‘The Corner’ emerged from world of crime

Denise Francine Boyd Andrews, a central figure portrayed in the HBO miniseries “The Corner” who emerged from the underworld of drugs and crime depicted in the show to become an addiction counselor in Baltimore and a role model with a story of personal redemption, died May 3 at her home in Parkville, Md. She was 65.

Her brother, Stanley Boyd, confirmed her death and said he did not know the cause.

Andrews, known to friends as Fran, devoted years of her life to the rehabilitation of people often cast aside as hopeless “junkies.” David Simon, an executive producer of “The Corner,” which aired on HBO in 2000, once told the New York Times that he did not “have many heroes left” but Andrews was one of them, and her life was a testament to the truth that “everybody gets to write their endings.”

Simon, a former journalist who is also the creator of the acclaimed HBO drama “The Wire,” met Andrews when he was reporting for the book “The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood” (1997) with former homicide detective Edward Burns. The book became the basis of the 2000 HBO miniseries.

The “corner” of the show’s title referred to the drug market around the intersection of Fayette and Monroe streets in West Baltimore. When Simon and Andrews first encountered each other in that neighborhood, Simon told the New Yorker magazine, she refused to speak him, assuming him to be an undercover police officer.

But over time, Andrews opened up about her life and addiction, offering a window into the destruction that drugs had wreaked on her life, her family and the families around them.

By her own account, the Baltimore Sun reported, Andrews first tried heroin when she was 23, the night of her sister’s funeral. She descended into a yearslong dependence and into a state, she told the Times, in which “all your worst nevers come true.”

Her son De’Andre L. McCullough began selling drugs in his teens, and his father, Gary McCullough, died of an overdose in 1996. Their struggles became the focus of the book by Simon and Burns as well as the HBO miniseries, which won three Emmy Awards, including the prize for outstanding miniseries.

Andrews, who was portrayed on-screen by Khandi Alexander, described the show as “good, on target,” even if it “brought back a lot of memories that I really didn’t want to go through again.”