Twanda Douglas approached the makeshift street memorial Wednesday evening on Eastern Avenue for the ninth Prince George's County homicide victim in six days. She placed a white stuffed dog among the mementos.
Douglas, whose right arm sports a tattoo of a tombstone with the letters "RIP," stood among the mourners and sighed.
Antoinette Jefferson visits the site of the street memorial where her son, Craig Saint Jamada, 20, was shot to death on Eastern Avenue in Seat Pleasant.
(James A. Parcell -- The Washington Post)
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"It is getting real tired," she said. "It is getting sickening."
Violence is something Douglas knows too well these days. She said she recently lost three relatives, including a brother, to gunfire. On Wednesday, she grieved again, this time for friend Craig Saint Jamada, 20, a recent high school graduate who was shot to death late Tuesday in the 400 block of Eastern Avenue.
Saint Jamada, a D.C. resident who lived across the avenue, was sitting on the front steps of a small apartment building when an unknown assailant fired several shots about 11:15 p.m. Tuesday, striking him in the chest and killing a woman sitting next to him.
Police said the woman, Aminata Toure, 29, of Woodbridge was probably the target of the shooting. Those who gathered at the memorial said that she was an unfamiliar face in the neighborhood and that she had spent the better part of the night arguing with someone on her cell phone.
The deaths in Prince George's represent a shocking run of bloodshed, even for the region's most crime-troubled suburb. It has been years since county detectives have faced such a murderous surge. In January 1999, five people were killed during a 20-hour stretch. A month later, five more were slain within 24 hours.
Police said the recent killings, which are unsolved, don't appear to be connected, each having its own set of circumstances and possible motives.
Yet common threads exist: Most of the homicides occurred late at night or early in the morning while it was dark. They happened outside weathered, garden-style apartments sandwiched between liquor stores and run-down commercial strips inside the Capital Beltway, areas where the county's persistent drug trade thrives, police said.
"We're not sure why, but a lot of the homicides occur in the late-night hours," Deputy Chief Jeffrey Cox said. "It's something we're conscious of."
Police said they could not offer reasons for the surge in killings, which has brought the county's total this year to 96 (compared with 88 recorded through last Sept. 3).
Police reiterated that additional officers will be posted along the most dangerous streets. Overtime shifts and repositioning of undercover detectives will keep the neighborhoods covered through the overnight shifts, said Lt. Steve Yuen, a police spokesman.
Maj. Linda Dixon, head of the Criminal Investigation Division, said investigators are working round-the-clock to solve the recent killings, as well as many of the other slayings that have been recorded this year.
"We're working very hard and we're doing everything we can to find the perpetrators," she said.
