To Catch a Killer

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To Catch a Killer
After her first son was shot to death, Valencia Mohammed struggled to hold her family together. When her second son was murdered, she decided to track down the killer herself.

"He has a birthmark on his right arm darker than he is," she says. "He has a tattoo: R-I-T-T-E-N on his right arm and on his left H-O-U-S-E."

"It's my son," she remembers saying to the detective. "It is Imtiaz."

WHAT IS A MOTHER TO DO when two of her sons are shot to death in the District of Columbia, where so many young black boys have been slain in the past decades, one after the other? Enough black boys over the years to fill so many school buses, so many classrooms, vanished like a vanishing tribe?

What is a mother to do when she doesn't think police are moving fast enough? What is a mother to do when her son's so-called friends go silent, won't tell the truth to police, although they saw it all -- right there on Rittenhouse Street, that bright sunny day, 4:30 in the afternoon, rush hour, Thursday, October 28, 2004, watching the killer pump bullets into her son as if he were a target in a video game? When her son sits dying in the driver's seat, engine running, driver's door wide open, loaded .380 semiautomatic pistol on his body, bullet wounds in his chest and neck? People see it, and people close their blinds.

What's a mother to do when people who knew her son whisper the killer's name to her? Then tell her that someone can "take him out" -- administer a street kind of justice with no police, no cold case files piled up and forgotten, no courts, no juries? She shudders at the thought; she wants the killer arrested and tried the old-fashioned way, sent "underneath the jail." But she has heard of mothers who have waited more than 10 years for their sons' killers to be arrested.

What's a mother to do with all that information, all that grief and heartache?

Nothing to do, the mother says to herself, "but go out there, knock on doors and try to track down the killer my damned self."

VALENCIA LEAVES THE MORGUE with her ex-husband Wakili Raqib, who has accompanied her to the hospital after breaking the news. He is going to take Valencia back to her apartment, but first she insists they stop at the crime scene. They pull up on Rittenhouse Street NW, off Georgia Avenue. It is now more than six hours after Imtiaz was shot. The street is dark and quiet.

This is how Valencia and Wakili will recall it several months later:

Valencia gets out of the car. She wonders why there is no yellow police tape. A crime scene is like sacred ground. Why would they leave it unprotected, she thinks. She glances down at the section of sidewalk where she heard Imtiaz last lay. It is right next to the white picket fence in front of 803 Rittenhouse, the house that she and Wakili had rented in the 1980s when the family was still together and the children were young.

Isn't it strange, she thinks, that Imtiaz was killed right outside that house?

People are still congregating on Rittenhouse. One man tells Valencia he was in his back yard when he heard the shots. But he didn't see anything. A heavyset man with green eyes crosses the street to tell Valencia that he is sorry. He slices his apologies with assurances that he "had nothing to do with the shooting."