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He had surrendered to Burns, in 1986, and then became an informant. Donnie Andrews was a walking contradiction: he was a career criminal who nevertheless had a conscience and held to a moral code. Her initial response was, “Fuck you and fuck the person you’re talking about.” But she took his call from prison. In 1993, on a hunch, Burns introduced her to Donnie Andrews, a former addict who was serving a life sentence for killing a drug dealer. “We were different from some of the other kids in the neighborhood, who weren’t taken care of.” After her brother and sister died, Andrews, despite being in the throes of addiction, even took over parenting two nieces and a nephew, and, later, D’Andre’s girlfriend. “No matter with all that was going on, we were always taken good care of,” another of her sons, De’Rodd Hearns, a Baltimore firefighter, said recently. Even so, she made a reach for better outcomes. Andrews, who first tried heroin when she was twenty-three, had stolen money from her family and traded sex for drugs at her lowest moments.

Gary McCollough died of an overdose before “The Corner” was published. The neighborhood around Fayette and Monroe Streets operated as a sort of open-air drug market, and getting “off the corner” was a herculean task. By the time that Simon met her, she had been an addict for fourteen years. As described in “The Corner” (which was later adapted into a miniseries, on HBO), the tribulations of Andrews, her estranged partner, Gary McCullough, and their son D’Andre, all heroin users, seemed intractable.

“If you had asked me then, is Fran going to get off Fayette Street, I would have said no,” he said recently.

According to David Simon, who chronicled her story in “ The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood,” a book that he began writing in the early nineties with Ed Burns, a former homicide detective, she was a “tough bird.” Convinced that Simon was a cop, Fran Boyd, as she was known then, wouldn’t speak to him for more than a month after he first showed up. In the bad old days, Denise Francine (Fran) Boyd Andrews (1956-2022) could be found most of the time rooted on a stoop on Fayette Street, in West Baltimore, fuzzed out on heroin but still as ornery as she could be.