D.C. Man Given 24 Years in Activist's Death

On the bench, Retchin clenched her lower lip.

"The pain will never go away," Lewis continued. "It will never go away."

Retchin wiped a tear from her cheek.

It was nearly time for Parrott to speak, but first the court would hear from the attorneys. Though one urged leniency and the other did not, they were in many ways of like mind about Parrott.

Most of his life had been ordinary, uneventful. But over the last few years, Parrott had spiraled into depression, according to court papers filed by his attorney, Lexi Negin Christ. His diabetic father died after his legs were amputated. His marriage failed. He lost his job as a technician at the morgue. His diabetes began displaying troubling parallels to his father's condition.

Amid it all, he turned to drugs, according to the court papers: first marijuana and alcohol, later crack cocaine. All the while, he tried to hide his addiction and keep up his relationships with his mother, his children and the woman who would become his third wife.

But his addiction was deepening and, with his new wife, Parrott sought help, according to the court papers. He needed intensive inpatient treatment, he believed. But when he sought it, he was told that, unless he had been arrested or was otherwise entangled in the criminal justice system, he had few options for inpatient treatment, and those would entail paying as much a $180 a day.

He tried outpatient treatment, but he was not an ideal participant and he relapsed. Still, he knew he needed to kick his habit, so two or three weeks before he took a knife to Wanda Alston, he was once again asking to be placed in an inpatient program. But again he was told that his prospects for such a placement were slim.

And so it was that on March 16, Parrott was high and looking to get higher, off his insulin but on his pipe.

It was a new side of him that entered Alston's house that day, Assistant U.S Attorney John M. Cummings said. "It's as close to a Jekyll and Hyde situation as I can imagine there being," the prosecutor told Retchin. But Parrott cannot escape culpability, the prosecutor said.

And when his time finally came to speak, Parrott did not try to shift the blame.

"I take full responsibility for what happened," he said.

Alston, he told the court, was not just a neighbor: "She was a friend."

Parrott provided no answers, and the judge shook her head in frustration. "For those of us looking for some rational explanation," she said, "there really is none."

There was only punishment.

She gave him the maximum term under sentencing guidelines.