On Monday — a day when hundreds of people gathered at a D.C. church to mourn Harris’s death — police announced that they had obtained a warrant charging Tyrone Lewis, 26, with murder, alleging that he shot Harris. Police had already charged two other men — Linwood Johnson, 49, and Ivan Newman, 20 — in connection with Harris’s death. Police said their search for those involved in the killing is over.
The mystery of Harris’s disappearance vexed detectives in two states for months — and captured the D.C. region’s attention. Detectives now think the crime was as simple as it was senseless: a thuggish crew allegedly set out to rob a man who would probably have given them what little he had.
“Robbery is clearly the motive,” said Maj. Michael Straughan, who commands the criminal investigations division for the Prince George’s County police department. “He’s a public figure. He’s known in the community.”
Deborah Harris, 56, the wife of the Alexandria activist, said her husband had little to take and that the family was facing foreclosure from their Del Ray home.
“It’s surreal,” she said. “These people don’t really know who they hurt.”
Deborah Harris said that Sept. 21 began like any other day for her husband: He had oatmeal for breakfast and gave her a kiss as he walked out the door. About 4 p.m., she said he called to complain that he was tired and was going to go exercise.
Tony Suggs, a longtime friend, said he saw the activist even later, when the two talked at the Charles Houston Recreation Center in Alexandria. Suggs said he did not initially notice anything unusual about the way Harris, 53, was acting, but when detectives talked to him about his friend’s cellphone use that evening, it struck him that Harris seemed to check his phone frequently.
Investigators think sometime after that, Harris met with Lewis, Newman and Johnson; cellphone records show Lewis called Harris that night, law enforcement sources said. Exactly why they got together remains unclear, but Harris and Lewis had met sometime before through his T-shirt business, a law enforcement source said.
That source and the others in this article spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing and they could be disciplined for speaking publicly about the case.
Deborah Harris said her husband worked mainly at his pest control business, although he had started the T-shirt company, Mycha, to teach his 20-year-old daughter, Myia Charde Harris, about entrepreneurship. The company name, Deborah Harris said, stands for “my child,” and Lenny Harris formed it using the first letters of his daughter’s first and middle name.
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