To Catch a Killer

She doesn't have a clue.

"Do you know Cabbage Head?"

"Who the hell is Cabbage Head?" Valencia remembers thinking. She feels like an idiot. It could have been somebody who killed my son or knew something about it, and I don't even know who they are. She makes a mental note to warn other mothers that they should snap pictures and write down the nicknames of their children's friends. They can never know when a detective might come calling.

But for Valencia, it is too late for that. One of the detectives says he is going to make up some reward posters and hand them out.

"How many?" Valencia recalls saying.

"Five hundred," the detective answers.

"Do you have other cases beside my son's?" she asks, thinking: I know doggone well this guy isn't going out there to hand out 500 posters.

"Let me have the fliers," she says.

The next morning, Valencia calls a news conference.

She dresses in a black tam and green Army trench coat, though months later she will not remember choosing the outfit or how she got to the news conference on the steps of the Metropolitan Police headquarters on Indiana Avenue NW. She will not remember much about the day, except that it was a bright fall day in October, the kind of day forecasters call crisp, as if something is about to snap.

Standing on her right is her friend Ayo Handy, whose 17-year-old son was killed in 1994, bludgeoned to death and found dying at the edge of the playground at Shaw Junior High School. On her left is Kenneth Barnes, a community activist against gun violence, whose son, a storeowner, was fatally shot in 2001 in his store on U Street NW.

"The No. 1 killer of African American males between 15 and 34 is death by gun violence," Barnes tells the crowd. "Now if that is not an epidemic, I don't know what is. If I said the No. 1 killer of white children in America is gun violence, what would we be doing?"