Nearly 15 years after his mother died in the custody of the Baltimore County Police Department, Tim Croker received a phone call Thursday morning from a Maryland prosecutor about an event that fractured his life.

The death of his 41-year-old mother, Mary Beth Croker, in July 2010 should have been ruled a homicide, he was told.

The phone call was just one family’s story amid the statewide fallout from a groundbreaking audit that concluded the deaths of dozens of people who had been in police custody in Maryland were wrongfully classified as either accidental or “undetermined” instead of homicides. Independent reviewers described the findings by the office under former Chief Medical Examiner Dr. David Fowler as misguided and likely skewed in part by racial or pro-police bias in medical examiner investigations.

Many family members told The Baltimore Banner on Thursday that the findings confirmed what they always knew: Their loved ones didn’t just die — they were killed. Several wondered aloud if real justice was possible.

Tim Croker described his mother as a loving person, the type to take his friends in off the street. So he said in an interview that he never believed the police department’s narrative of her death: that she had attacked an officer with a pen and tried to unholster his weapon.

“My whole family has been destroyed,” said Croker, 35, who now lives east of Orlando, Florida. “Literally none of us talk to each other anymore, because my mom was one of the staples that kept us together.”

Police reports uploaded to the nonprofit collaborative news website MuckRock alleged that Mary Beth Croker was attempting to fight an officer and two bystanders who came to assist. That’s when more officers arrived and got Croker into handcuffs. But she became “dead weight” while police tried to take her to a patrol vehicle, so they “helped her to the ground.”

“While on the ground they noticed she stopped thrashing about,” the report stated, adding only then did a responding officer note that Croker was no longer breathing.

Police reports indicated the state’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner advised that Croker had a “significant amount of cocaine in her system” and attributed her death to “cocaine induced excited delirium complicated by aortic incompetence in the setting of police restraint.”

That phrase — “excited delirium” — represents a now-discredited theory about a potentially fatal state of agitation that had taken root in the medical examiner’s office despite the fact that it had “never been accepted in the broader medical community,” according to the audit.

Instead of ruling Croker’s death a homicide, the medical examiner labeled it as undetermined.

Baltimore County Police declined to comment on the case, saying only that the agency is “aware of the audit findings and awaits the review of these cases to be conducted by the Attorney General and State’s Attorney.”

If the pathway for greater justice now, maybe even a civil judgment, were to open in the wake of the audit, Croker said, he would be interested.

Of the audit’s 36 wrongfully classified deaths, five were linked to Baltimore County, including Croker’s.

Thomas Rawls, who died in March 2006, was another one of those cases. His brother, Chad, said he thinks of him often, though he never got much information about what happened.

Police reports uploaded to MuckRock describe officers struggling to arrest Rawls, 32, handcuffing and placing him on his stomach, then reporting he had stopped breathing. Rawls was found to have cocaine in his system.

“They tried to make it sound like it was an accident,” Chad Rawls said. “It does come up in my mind. Did he get his justice? He was no innocent person, but it still felt like he didn’t deserve to die in police custody.”

Though the audit focused on 36 deaths, its broader critiques of the criminal justice system could have wide-ranging implications throughout the state.

Several state’s attorneys declined to discuss the possibility of charges stemming from the cases. Instead, the Maryland State’s Attorneys’ Association released a statement that it was “not in a position to support or oppose the analysis or conclusions” in the audit because it needed to review its findings.

Maryland Fraternal Order of Police President Clyde Boatwright spoke out Friday, saying the cases had already been reviewed at the time by law enforcement and prosecutors. The suggestion by the audit that the cases should be ruled homicides, he said, “would have no bearing on the facts of the cases.”

“They can’t produce new facts,” he added.

Boatwright said police training and policies, such as those regarding chokeholds, have evolved over the years. If old cases are examined, he said it must be considered whether the officers’ actions were justified at that time, he said.

And he bemoaned that Thursday’s report would be a setback for law enforcement’s relationship with the community.

“We’ve come a long way...” Boatwright said. “We’ve changed our thinking, we’ve changed our training, we’re doing all we can to have better police and community relations.”

Family members of those whose deaths were apparently wrongfully classified, meanwhile, grappled with painful memories and new uncertainty. Civil rights attorneys and justice reform advocates said lawmakers must ensure families have a chance to revisit their cases.

“Many families whose sons and daughters were killed by police likely did not seek out a lawyer or had lawyers or courts reject their cases because of the false findings of Maryland’s medical examiner,” said attorney Cary Hansel, who frequently handles wrongful death lawsuits. “Without legislative action, cases which were already dismissed based on these false findings cannot be brought again.”

Hansel added that a “clear path to justice” would involve notifying family members that they may have a claim and waiving the statute of limitations. He also said lawmakers should move to allow dismissed cases containing the medical examiners’ questionable findings to have a chance to be revived.

Ahead of the public announcement, the Maryland Office of the Attorney General reported it had reached more than half of the affected families. Loved ones can call a new hotline at 833-282-0961 or email OCMEAuditHotline@oag.state.md.us.

Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown said at a press conference that his team tried to “manage those expectations that a homicide determination by the OCME or by this audit team does not mean criminal liability or culpability.”

“What we assured them of is that we will look at these cases to ensure justice is done,” Brown said. “And that we will certainly report back to them and the public on our findings.”

Banner reporters Justin Fenton, Cody Boteler, Meredith Cohn and Maya Lora contributed to this story.