FBI agent facing heroin allegations

Even at 19, Matthew Lowry was clean- cut and cautious, unwilling to do anything that might sabotage what he always wanted: a law enforcement career like his father’s.

That’s how Joann Green remembers Lowry, the FBI agent who was found in late September slumped over the wheel of an unmarked FBI vehicle with heroin and guns inside.

Green, whose daughter dated Lowry when he was in college, considered him an ideal boyfriend — handsome, polite and ambitious. She and her daughter were stunned when they learned that Lowry was under investigation for possibly stealing and using heroin seized as evidence — a scandal that has prompted two federal judges to toss out charges against nearly two dozen members of what prosecutors allege were two sophisticated drug rings.

“He was straight-laced, a proper child,” Green said. “How in the world did it get to this?”

The answer to that question is anything but clear. Lowry, 33, has been suspended from his job, said his attorney, Robert Bonsib, but not charged. Bonsib decried some of the aspects of the investigation into Lowry as “grossly overblown.”

Those who knew Lowry growing up in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, are having a hard time reconciling the allegations with the young man they knew.

“He was a typical student with decent grades. There were no major issues,” said George Hornickel, director of Grace Brethren Christian School, a private school in Clinton, Maryland, where Lowry attended high school and graduated in 1999.

From a young age, Lowry wanted to go into law enforcement like his father. William Lowry was a Prince George’s County police officer for 27 years before heading security details for two NFL teams. He is an assistant police chief in Anne Arundel County, Maryland.

Lowry worked several years for the FBI in Washington in a support-personnel position, law enforcement officials said, before becoming an agent about five years ago. He was part of a task force that focuses on crime along the borders between the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia.

Agents said that cases of misconduct on the scale of which Lowry is accused are extremely rare. If charged and convicted, he could face years in prison.