During those years, he used cocaine and did some work for drug dealers, but he kept that a secret from his family.
Through mutual acquaintances, he met Michael A. Gomez, a convict with drug and weapons charges dating back at least 20 years. The sheriff’s office knew Gomez had ties to the Latin Kings and the Mexican Mafia Gang.
While Rowan was ferrying drugs in Three Rivers in 2010, before he began cage fighting, he claimed to have lost Gomez’s shipment, maybe worth as much as $80,000. As Rowan told it, a group of thieves jumped him, cracked his ribs, and stole the drugs.
Now, Rowan owed money to impatient people. He tried to lie low, but in January, a group of men beat him up behind Shopko, leaving him with two black eyes, broken ribs, and blood on his baseball cap, he told friends at the time.
Rowan was desperate. Then, while he was watching TV at his girlfriend’s house, a show caught his attention. It was on the Investigation Discovery channel, something about a guy who staged his own death so he could start his life anew.
A Way Out
Rowan had felt as if he were drowning for a while now. He owed money to drug dealers. He couldn’t keep a job. His hobby was getting beaten up in public. Now this fake-death scheme landed like a life preserver.
If people thought he was dead, he and his girlfriend, Rosa Martinez, could move far from Michigan. Maybe New Mexico. They could begin again.
“I wanted a fresh start,” he said in one of a series of interviews conducted both in person and over the phone. “To pick up and start someplace new where no one knew us.”
The phone calls were the first step—Rowan said he was there when Martinez called DiPonio, the fight promoter, to announce the car crash. She later called his mother. Rowan said it broke his heart to think of his mother picturing him dead, but he saw no other way. He could hear Martinez as she made the calls, and he said that first step of the hoax “almost killed me.”
When Martinez called back two days later to say Rowan was dead, he said, he choked up and had to leave the room.
In Memory of Charlie
The mourners gathered at Martinez’s home to remember Charles H. Rowan, father, son, friend, and cage fighter. The guests walked up a wooden ramp leading to the front door, past a sprinkling of cigarette butts that dotted the yard’s patchy snow.
Inside the small living room, lined with brown carpet and wood-paneled walls, sat two young children, along with Rowan’s mother, who was sobbing.
Martinez looked grief-stricken. She brushed off questions about funeral arrangements and other practical matters, making clear she was not yet ready.
As the group sat quietly in the living room, she stepped away to collect a bag that she said had been retrieved from the accident.
She pulled out a white baseball cap that was stained with blood. A young boy began to cry.
They mourned Rowan as a lost soul gone too soon. But he had not gone anywhere. Rowan was upstairs throughout the memorial, he said, hiding in a child’s bedroom until the guests left. While his mother cried and his girlfriend accepted condolences, Rowan worked hard not to make a sound.
He said he thought about walking downstairs to interrupt the grieving, ending the ruse right there. But he decided not to.
From upstairs, he said, he could hear the sobs coming from the living room, sounds that took him by surprise. “For people to care about me,” he said, “it meant something.”
But now, he needed to play dead, which meant he needed to block all that out. He looked out the bedroom’s small window, past the lawn and out toward the Rite Aid. He tried not to break his gaze.
Trapped
If this was the afterlife, Rowan didn’t much care for it.
He spent most of the next six weeks hiding out in his girlfriend’s home, watching TV and working out in a small makeshift gym. He said he closed his bank account and disabled his Facebook page. He made late-night trips to Rite Aid and even kept Martinez company for a meeting at her children’s school. The couple said they were possibly moving to New Mexico, a school official later told the police.
“I went stir-crazy,” Rowan said. “I couldn’t call any of my friends; I couldn’t go anywhere. I love Rosa more than life itself, but it’s just too much to be around the same person all of the time.”
Despite his efforts, the hoax began to fray. Skeptics took to Facebook, where they peppered the fight promoters with questions about death certificates and obituaries.
The promoters took offense. “I said: ‘How dare you question this? The dude is dead! Have some respect,’” the promoter Joe Shaw said.
Rowan’s family wanted to know what happened to his body. Scott Gardner, his stepfather, called local hospitals but didn’t find anyone who could help. “We felt like we didn’t have any facts,” Gardner said. Sympathy cards began to arrive, some of them with checks included, but the family set them aside.