To Catch a Killer

Reporters take notes. Cameras roll. A few dozen people from the community hold up signs protesting violence.

"My son Imtiaz is dead," Valencia says, her voice strained by grief and anger. "Find who killed my son, damn it."

Days after the news conference, the police chief invites Valencia to his office. When she walks in, she notices his top brass standing there in white shirts. She remembers wondering: How can they hold their heads up when people are being killed as they stand there?

She wants the chief to tell her they will find her son's killer -- quickly. But he says that the department is overwhelmed. There are 4,469 murders committed since 1969 that are still unsolved in the District, he says. He needs more help from the community.

"I need to help you," Valencia remembers telling him. "That's a whole lot of people dead, a whole lot of people left suffering."

Valencia leaves. But all she can think of is the number 4,469.

VALENCIA, 54, RECOUNTS HER LIFE with a kind of emotional detachment, like the journalist she is and the politician she was. Three marriages, three divorces. Six children, two buried.

In 1973, she married her first husband, Mervyn Steve Mohammed, a diamond cutter born in Trinidad. Valencia gave birth to Halima, Taariq and Imtiaz in Chicago. A nonpracticing Catholic, she converted to Islam and remained a Muslim after divorcing Mohammed in 1981, when the children were 6, 4 and 1, respectively. She heard that Mohammed had joined the Army, but she says she hasn't heard directly from him again.

At night sometimes, Halima would hear Imtiaz crying for his father.

Several months later, Valencia met her second husband, an engineer, self-proclaimed Islamic scholar and father of her daughter Malika. After one month, she knew it would not work. He was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, she says. "I'd be asleep and wake up, and he'd be at the door with a machete," she says.

After fleeing to her sister Monica's in Annandale and requesting an Islamic divorce, Valencia met and married Wakili Raqib, a construction contractor, in an Islamic wedding, and they lived together in the District. Said was born in 1984, and Mukhtar was born in 1985. In a family photo, Wakili is sitting in the center, and the six children encircle him as though he were a king. Valencia, then a stay-at-home mom, is standing in the back, and her baby dreads are short, as if her power were just sprouting. She is not yet a school board member, reporter or activist.

By 1990, she was running for the school board and writing freelance newspaper articles. The schools were considering how to incorporate diverse cultures into the curriculum. Valencia pushed for an Afrocentric curriculum, which would focus on the history and accomplishments of Africans and African Americans. Her campaign posters featured her, her husband and all six of her children.

She lost that race, ran again in 1992 and was elected to an at-large seat for a four-year term, during which she and others continued to push successfully for an Afrocentric curriculum. She became the focus of media attention as she fought the concept of allowing private companies to run public schools, arguing that privatization could eventually prove more expensive as contractors hiked costs.

At home, Valencia's marriage to Wakili had fallen apart, and they separated. Now that she was on the school board, she was no longer there when the children arrived home from school. Instead, she called home during breaks from work, parenting as much as she could by phone.

Meanwhile, Imtiaz slipped slowly -- almost imperceptibly, it seemed at the time -- out of his mother's grasp.

Imtiaz had big, beautiful black eyes and straight, jet-black hair. He had skinny legs and couldn't run fast. He was a lefty and had lovely handwriting. Imtiaz did well enough in school, Valencia says, until the day in sixth grade when teachers accused him of carrying a "weapon," a toy water gun. He was dragged down the hallway in handcuffs, she recalls, and was to be expelled for a school year, under a zero-tolerance school board policy that forbade children to carry even imitation weapons onto school grounds. After Valencia appealed, the punishment was reduced to a one-week suspension.

After that, Imtiaz hated school, Valencia recalls, and trouble shadowed him.

Valencia asked her sister Monica to watch the children while she attended board meetings. Monica remembers Imtiaz, then in junior high school, staying out late with friends.

After Imtiaz straggled in one night, Monica told him that the next time she would cut his hair. But when the next time came, Valencia intervened. Years later, after Imtiaz was murdered, Valencia would call Monica, shaken, saying maybe if she had let her cut his hair that night, the act would have saved him. But at the time she remembers thinking his misbehavior was a phase. This was her quiet son, who did not talk back to his mother, who would take the dish towel or broom if he saw her washing dishes or sweeping.

Eventually, he would live at friends' houses as much as at home, but if she left him a note to take out the trash, she'd come home to find he'd done it. Imtiaz and Said were different, Imtiaz full of flash, Said quiet and studious. But they were very close, Valencia says. They fished and biked together, and Imtiaz would iron Said's clothes and help him get ready for school.

When Imtiaz was 15, Valencia says, he was arrested while sitting in the back of a stolen car and was charged with unauthorized use of a vehicle. He tested positive for marijuana and was sentenced to probation. But because he kept failing urine tests, a judge sent him to a juvenile detention facility.

In a strange way, Valencia was relieved. "He was off the street," she says. "For me, it was a break . . . None of my kids got in trouble like Imtiaz. What was this crazy madness he was bringing into my house?"

When Imtiaz came back home at 17, Valencia's term on the school board had ended, but it seemed as though Imtiaz's course had been set. He dropped out of school in 11th grade. The next year, Said was found slain in his bed.

SEVERAL DAYS AFTER IMTIAZ'S DEATH in October 2004, Valencia calls for an appointment with a detective. She does not believe police are moving fast enough to catch the killer. At police headquarters, she says, a police source shows her the suspect's mug shot -- he has light brown skin and black, curly hair -- and the source gives her his full name: Raymond Thomas McCoy. His nickname is Mo.

Valencia already knows McCoy's name from people in the neighborhood. Armed with the name and a blurry memory of the mug shot, she walks up and down Georgia Avenue, near Rittenhouse, not far from the Maryland line, looking for Mo. She walks door to door on all the streets bounded by Georgia Avenue on the west, Peabody Street on the south, Fifth Street on the east and Butternut on the north. Past the Quality Wash Laundromat, where the homeless woman sits wrapped in yellow plastic while her clothes wash. Past the porches with wicker chairs, the mulched lawns, the trimmed grass, the magnolia trees. Past the Exodus Missionary Baptist Church. Past the white picket fence, where someone spray-painted "R.I.P. M" in black on the sidewalk.

That was Imtiaz's nickname: M.

She knows some people might think her search is crazy. Police are working on the case, after all. Anyway, what does she think she will do when she finds the killer? But grief propels her. She does not care whether she lives or dies. "Kill me," she says. "You already done killed my son."

For months, Valencia spends almost all her "off time" away from her job as a reporter at the Afro American and at News Dimensions, trying to get information about Mo. She stakes out the parking lot at Rittenhouse Street and Georgia Avenue, where she hears Mo drops off drugs. If she sees his car, she tells herself, she will phone it in and hope that police arrest him on drug charges.

The African print cloth she is wearing sways as she moves, passing out cards that thank people for their "prayers, condolences, words of inspiration, monetary gifts and love during our most difficult times bereaving the deaths of Said and Imtiaz."

She passes a card to a young man who knew Imtiaz, but he says he does not know what happened. He tells her that he has grown tired of all the killing. He raises the sleeves on his jacket and shows her the names of the friends that he has tattooed on his arms. "This way I don't forget the names of the people who died. They are always with me."

As she moves, she is seeking to prick someone's conscience, hoping to find witnesses who might talk to police. She watches for flickers of knowledge in the eyes of the recipients, a fake smile, a cut of the eye. Maybe someone will feel sorry for her and give her information that police seem unable to get.

In November 2004, she meets with one of the detectives again. He tells her that there was another murder in Southeast, and the slaying has been added to his caseload. "That makes how many cases?" she recalls asking.

"Eight," the detective tells her.

"That is too many," she says.

Through the winter months, and into spring, she sneaks into crack dens and pays addicts $20 for any information they can give her about Mo.

She tries to get the crackheads to take down the tag number of the car Mo is driving the next time he makes a drop. Whatever information she gets, she leaves on the detective's voice mail.

She is not sure that the information is helping, but she figures calling them is better than sitting at home crying. Police sources will say later that Valencia may have helped the case by raising sympathy in the community. She has also given them information they find valuable, but they say they cannot discuss specifics because the case is ongoing.

Valencia keeps asking police why they don't arrest McCoy, since they believe he's the guy who killed Imtiaz. Finally, she says, a detective tells her they can't because witnesses won't talk. They have to wait for him to make another mistake, they tell her.

But Valencia does not want to wait, and her search intensifies. In her obsession, she gains 50 pounds. She screams at her friends and family if they refuse to join her investigation.

"Valencia would say, 'We are going to pass out fliers.' I didn't know how to tell her I wasn't interested in that assignment," her friend Darlene Aisha Dancy will recall later. "How many people can you call on and say, 'Put your clothes on; we are going to go into a crack house to find a killer?' I wasn't willing to walk down into the belly of Hell."

One night, Valencia meets with the detective on the case.

"Do you know Autumn?" he asks.

No, she says. Then she hears from a crackhead on the street that the suspect is dating a woman named Autumn, and that the couple is living near Rhode Island Avenue NE. She learns that Autumn is a hairdresser at a salon on Georgia Avenue. Valencia dips in and out of beauty shops on the long avenue, asking if an Autumn works there. Finally she learns there is an Autumn at a hair salon near Rittenhouse.

Valencia walks into Carolyn's Beauty Salon. The interior is painted pale pink, and there is a sign at the front desk: "WELCOME -- PLEASE LEAVE YOUR PROBLEMS." The smell of burning hair and perms wrap around Valencia.

"Does anyone here know Autumn?" she asks no one in particular.

A man tells her Autumn worked there, and he points to the cubicle up front. But the stall is empty, and no one knows when she will be back. So Valencia leaves a flier with Imtiaz's photo on the black swivel chair.

One night, Valencia heads back home. The trees in the park near her apartment are swaying as if they are trying to speak. She hesitates at the glass door entrance to the lobby of her apartment building. She is crying now. Shaking.

Sometimes when she gets home after dark, she has the feeling someone is behind her, about to put a gun to the back of her head.

"They say sometimes when you get shot, you don't know it," she says. "You just feel warm, you have this warm sensation."

She is afraid of feeling warm.

IT WAS IMTIAZ WHO CAME HOME TO FIND HIS 14-YEAR-OLD BROTHER'S BODY lying in his bed in a second-floor bedroom of the house on Somerset Place NW, on a rainy afternoon in 1999. When he called his aunt, Valencia's sister Monica, Imtiaz was crying. There was something wrong with Said, he said. He couldn't wake him up.

Monica remembers she told Imtiaz he had to call the police.

On the day Said was shot, Valencia was traveling with a D.C. school assistant principal from a conference in Philadelphia. Valencia had just called Said to tell him they had stopped at the woman's house in Columbia to wait out a heavy rain. Said asked her to get him a salad from the Olive Garden. She recalls smiling to herself and thinking Said had remembered that last salad that she had brought home. Said, she says, was a mother's dream -- a quiet, neat kid who never got in trouble. The kind of kid teachers at school sent happy notes home about. He liked to read. He wanted to be an astronaut.

Valencia got a call at about 7 p.m. from Wakili, who had gotten a call from Mukhtar telling him Said was dead.

When Valencia arrived at the house, she found reporters and cameras there. "There was Wakili talking about it was an accident." At first she thought Said had committed suicide because only a month before he had been diagnosed with testicular torsion and had had one of his testicles removed.

But an autopsy later found that the wound was not self-inflicted. Police said that Said had been shot in the eye, but there were no signs of forced entry. Two friends had been visiting Said that day, police said. Nobody was ever arrested in the slaying. The police will not discuss the case because it is still under investigation.

Valencia later heard from sources on the street that some guy had rented a gun to Said for the weekend so he and his friends, whose names she knows but will not reveal, could check it out. Such illegal weekend rentals by curious children are common in some neighborhoods. It is still a mystery exactly what happened in that house, but Valencia says she heard that the gun went off as Said and his two friends were examining it.

The friends "moved away from the area," Valencia says. "I never could force myself to talk to them about it."

"People are telling me stuff, and I'm absorbing information, but I'm in space," she remembers. "I'm thinking Said is going to wake up. He's not dead . . . I'm praying for a miracle. I prayed all the way up until they poured the dirt on the coffin."

Police took Imtiaz in for questioning and then released him. Valencia says Imtiaz would not tell her anything about the day Said died, and he became quiet and subdued. "I could hear him crying from time to time." But Valencia was crying all the time, too.

Imtiaz went to live with his older brother, Taariq, in Atlanta, where Taariq was working for IBM. Taariq says he asked Imtiaz what happened to Said. "He said he didn't know," Taariq says. "He said, 'I found him like that,' " Taariq says.

Malika and Mukhtar moved out. "Everybody left me to cry," Valencia says. When Imtiaz returned home several months after the shooting, he stayed out in the streets. "They killed your brother," Valencia would say. "Go to school!"

Imtiaz may have known more about Said's death than he told Valencia. After Imtiaz was killed, Valencia learned from a police detective that Imtiaz had gone to a prosecutor not long after Said's death and asked for immunity if Imtiaz told prosecutors more about the slaying. According to Valencia, the detective told her the prosecutor went on maternity leave and the issue was never resolved. Police could not confirm who the prosecutor was.

"Did I ever suspect M killed Said? Not one time, but I did know that he knew what happened but spared my feelings and would not go into details," Valencia says. Now, as she sorts through the case, she wonders what the police are not telling her. "If they feel Imtiaz was involved in Said's murder, I need to know. Imtiaz is dead. Dead men can't talk."

As time went on after Said's death, Valencia picked herself back up. She enrolled in a computer class and got the job at the Afro American. She tried to keep busy. Now she can't help wondering whether she kept too busy.

What if she had slowed down and spent more time with Imtiaz?

"Even if I stopped working and stayed home to take him to school and work, he probably would have looked for some thugs to hang around," she says. "M just made some bad choices in his life. My other kids listened to my talks. They stayed away from the streets. He had all the same opportunities but chose the wrong path."

Then she remembers something Said said to her when she was on the school board: "Umi, people call you all day, and you spend so much time helping them. When are you going to be just our Mom? Just with us?"

"For somebody to tell you that, and years later they pass, and you don't have an opportunity to spend any moments with them. Moments, seconds with them," Valencia says. "If I had the chance to turn the clock back, would I have been as community-oriented? Would I have gone on the Board of Education? I think not. I think not . . ."

"D.C. MURDER PAPER! D.C. murder paper!" she yells, standing in the cold of March 2005 at crowded Metro stops to pass out a special edition of News Dimensions.

The weekly's whole issue is dedicated to unsolved homicides, with photos of victims the police department released to her. Valencia paid for the printing herself.

In 12 pages, face after face after face follows. Men with do-rags, in sweat shirts, button-downs, jackets, tuxedos, sailor suit, braids, afros, dreads, clean shaven, smiling, stunned, mad. An old woman in a hat with a cross hanging from her neck. A young girl with dangling earrings. A boy with a Lakers cap. A girl with a wide smile. A middle-aged woman looking into a mirror.

Professional photos, blurred photos, mug shots. A few of the subjects white, like Chandra Levy. But most: black men or boys.

"D.C. murder paper!" she yells, at the Anacostia Metro station at 6:30 in the morning. She hands an issue to one woman.

"Give me another one of those," the woman says.

One man takes a paper, flips through and lands on page 7. "Turner Morgan. I was in jail with him. I didn't know he was dead."

A girl tells her: "You forgot my cousin. He dead, too."

Valencia takes a stack of papers to the D.C. Council offices and to police headquarters.

The "D.C. murder paper" seems to unleash a torrent in the city from survivors who want their dead relatives to be recognized. People start calling Valencia.

The sister of Curtis Murphy calls to say that Curtis used to play with Imtiaz a long time ago. Curtis was killed one day after cashing a paycheck.

A woman calls to say she knew Inga Wilson, pictured on page 10. "She was a good, Christian girl who had no business being killed."

Mostly, Valencia hears from mothers whose children have been murdered. They come from all backgrounds: Mothers who drink wine from china teacups; professional mothers, who tried to instill values in their children; mothers whose children were killed by mistake, who still sit at the kitchen table wondering how does a mother correct that kind of mistake; mothers just out of jail; mothers who just got sober; mothers who are depressed, won't leave the house. Sad, deeply sad, mothers. Mothers whose sons were killed by drug dealers. Mothers whose sons were drug dealers. Mothers whose sons had killed and then been killed. Mothers now strung out on crack.

"Sometimes I sit, and I cry, and I say, 'Imtiaz, why, oh, why did you gravitate to people who are so unlike us?' " Valencia says.

"I look at my arms, and I don't have track marks. I'm not an alcoholic. Don't drink. Don't smoke. I ain't out there prostituting. I'm not taking my clothes off in no nightclub. I don't do none of that stuff."

Her voice is turning inside out again, trailing, twisting around at what she can't comprehend. She flips through the "D.C. murder paper," and, on page 7, there is Imtiaz, standing tall in a black skull cap. And, on page 11, there is Said, a soft photo of a boy.

THROUGH THE DOORS of the Franklin D. Reeves Center at 14th and U streets NW, only mothers were invited to the Mother's Day 2005 luncheon. No fathers, though a few came. No uncles were invited, no sisters, no brothers. Just mothers. And they fill the room, sitting in folding metal chairs, under big windows.

There is the sweet smell of incense. And Valencia is up front in a red, African-print dress. These are Valencia's mothers, and together they have formed a support group, Mothers of Unsolved Murders. In the coming months, they will grieve for one another's children and attend one another's court appearances. They will help find numbers for detectives on cases that have grown cold, offer to help the police straighten files in the cold-case room -- an offer the police will decline. They will trade stories about dreams, about how they keep hearing their children call their names. They will organize vigils, gather at anti-violence marches, feed the homeless. They will pass out wanted posters for mothers too tired to get out. They will help one another celebrate their dead children's birthdays.

Valencia walks to the front of the room.

"Our children shed blood so we could be in a special club," she says. "I would have chosen another club, but we are in this club forever."

Valencia continues, her voice rising, her speech quickening. "According to the police chief, he says it's all your fault, the fault of the community because the community has allowed the thugs to take over the street by not giving police information about crimes."

Like a preacher: "I have people calling me about murders from 1969. A lot are saying the same thing. They are not hearing from the detective. They don't stay in contact. What happens if a white woman gets killed in Georgetown? They have a class thing going and a race thing going. If you are black and poor, there is no action. Even if you are black and middle class, there is no action."

Valencia, in the pulpit of mothers of children who have been slain: "Why do so many of us wait for the police department to do their job? Why does someone else in a family go out and take matters in their own hands. Why have so many cousins and brothers gone to jail to hold up the family honor?' "

And then one of Ayo Handy's sons stands and sings a song for his brother killed in 1994, case still unsolved. The words drift through the water of emotions filling the room:

I was born by the river in a little . . . just like a river, I've been running ever since. A change is gonna come . . .

CAPT. C.V. MORRIS, HEAD OF THE VIOLENT CRIMES BRANCH of the D.C. police department, is sitting at his desk. His cellphone and his desk phone are ringing at the same time. He is a man who has a philosophy about homicides. His own brother was murdered in South Carolina. He knows about Imtiaz's case, and he has some information about Said's, but he says he can't talk in detail about either. Both, he says, are under investigation.

Morris says that police think the motive for Imtiaz's killing was drug-related. "Imtiaz was a drug dealer," Morris says bluntly. "He was found with a gun and crack." Valencia says she does not believe that Imtiaz had a gun. "Somebody could have put it on him. Who knows what happened?"

Morris says there is nothing that makes him angrier than someone accusing the force of not taking homicides seriously, all homicides. "In my shop, I don't care what you did in your past. If you die, I'm out there trying to seek justice for that person. If it's a 25-year-old black male on the corner called Boo-Boo, I do nothing different. If it dies in D.C., it belongs to me."

Homicides are easier to solve in some neighborhoods. Imagine, he says, if a shooting happened midday in Georgetown. "I would need three or four buses to bring [the witnesses] down here to talk." But in other neighborhoods, the police arrive on the scene and nobody's talking.

"One thing about a homicide," Morris says, "is, 95 percent of the homicides that occur, the police department knows who did it . . . Street innuendo, rumor mill, because people on the street know who did it. Now the issue becomes: Prove it. And a lot of times, we are not able to prove it. We have to wait on that break."

Sometimes you get the break, sometimes you don't, he says. Physical evidence is of limited use, Morris says.

Police are working a case right now that proves this point, Morris says. "We caught a person with a murder weapon, but we couldn't prove he was the guy who pulled the trigger."

Fingerprints don't matter. "I shoot you. I walk away. Throw the gun down. Somebody else walks behind me and picks the gun up. And he gets caught with it," Morris says. "You have his fingerprints on the gun . . . But yet we are still not able to solve that case. Because honestly he could have found it . . . You still need that one person who can say, 'I saw him shoot him.' "

But, in many neighborhoods, he says, family members of the victim won't even talk, sometimes because they don't plan to wait for an arrest.

"You get those who say, 'I will take care of it myself.' "

Yes, it's true, he says, that witnesses fear getting killed, because it has happened. In 2004, police investigators went to the home of 14-year-old Jahkema "Princess" Hansen to talk to her about a homicide that had occurred a few days earlier. Princess's mother later took her to the office of the District's violent crimes unit. The police offered to protect Princess if she cooperated, but, according to police, she told them she didn't know anything. That night, Princess was fatally shot at home while watching television.

In 2001, seven alleged members of a Southwest Washington gang were accused of ordering the execution of 18 people, seven of them potential witnesses in murder cases against them. In 1995, a 21-year-old D.C. man was killed after witnessing the murder of his brother two months earlier.

But, Morris says, witness killings are rare, and when they do happen it's sometimes because the witness has violated police protection rules by returning to his former neighborhood. "And then they wind up getting killed. Now, all of a sudden," Morris says, people say "the police department didn't protect you."

While witness killings may be infrequent, threats against witnesses in the District are a real problem, says Heather Cartwright, chief of the victim-witness assistance unit in the U.S. attorney's office. "We meet with several people a week about security issues . . . We probably meet with at least one person a day who is feeling intimidated."

Witness intimidation concerned D.C. judges so much that they issued an edict, in 1994, saying that anyone convicted of obstruction of justice by witness intimidation would receive maximum sentences.

The edict "was a pretty extraordinary thing," says Eric Holder, former D.C. Superior Court judge and U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, who is now a partner in a D.C. law firm. "If every person who had knowledge of these crimes was willing to share that knowledge, you would be able to solve 95 to 99 percent of homicides in this city."

AS SHE WALKS THE STREET clutching the $25,000 reward fliers, Valencia squints with suspicion every time she encounters a young light-skinned black male with black curly hair. In this city, that description isn't really a description.

Still, she tries to discern who this "Mo" is, before he kills someone else. With her dreads now bleached by sunshine, she searches. In and out of the laundromat, the barbershop. Into the store that sells penny candy. Passing the yards that look so nice, taking pains not to step on the section of sidewalk where Imtiaz last lay on Rittenhouse Street.

One day she sees the man who some people in the neighborhood say may have set Imtiaz up for an ambush. She calls 911: "Okay, I'm seeing somebody over here who is light-skinned, weighs about 200 pounds, and he has on a striped shirt. Here, I'm looking at the guy. This is the guy I heard was in the car with M, and this guy is standing right there at Rittenhouse and Georgia, talking to somebody."

She is calling 911, saying that the accomplice in my son's murder is right here. "I'm at the corner. He has on this --"

Then the operator interrupts: "Ma'am what are you calling us for?"

"What do you mean what am I calling you for?" Valencia says.

"You should be calling the detective," the operator replies.

"The detective told me that if I ever saw anybody to call you, so I'm calling you." Valencia curses. "You guys can't do anything."

"You don't have to go there," the operator says. And hangs up.

One day, a woman wearing a blue sweat suit comes to Valencia's office at the Afro. The woman mentions seeing the "murder paper," then tells Valencia that her son has been killed and that the person suspected of killing her son is in jail on another case. He's going to be released in December, she tells Valencia. And her eyes light up. She smiles.

"He's not going to live long when he gets out," the mother whispers.

Valencia gets frightened. Later, she discovers that this mother has been in prison herself.

She goes home and writes a News Dimensions column with a benign headline: "Parental Involvement Pays."

"Far too many times than we wish to admit, grieving parents are involved in the revengeful deaths of persons responsible for the murder of their children," the column says. "Sanctioning another person's death for revenge does not mean you are a good parent. It shows that you do not value another person's life!"

One weekend, Valencia is at home when the phone rings. She recognizes the voice, but she won't now reveal the name. The man says, "Imtiaz was my man." Then he starts trying to catch his breath like he is crying.

"All you have to do," the man tells her, "is say it. I'll take him out."

"No!" she says.

"Mo was on the run. If I see him out there, I'm going to get him," he says.

"Hell, no!" she says.

"Imtiaz was my man. I'm going to hurt somebody," he says.

"My name is Mohammed. In honor of my family, don't do that," she says.

"But Imtiaz was my man," he says.

"No," Valencia says. "This is my son. I am his mother. I do not support that stuff . . . He might be your buddy, but this is my son."

VALENCIA IS AT HOME on a Saturday afternoon in June 2005, when she gets a call from Mukhtar, her youngest.

"Ma! Ma!" says Mukhtar. "Somebody told me the guy who killed Imtiaz just got arrested. They got him, Umi. They finally got him."

"You're lying, Mukhtar!" Valencia yells through the phone. "Stop it! Stop it!"

"No, Ma," he says, "look in the paper."

She dresses, runs outside to buy The Washington Post. "And there it is, his name just as big as day, the same name the police had given me," she will recall later. Raymond McCoy wasn't arrested for killing Imtiaz, but for another murder on Rhode Island Avenue NE.

The police always told Valencia that the suspect would make a mistake.

At about 7:45 p.m. on a Thursday in June 2005, someone called 911 and said that a mechanic, 38-year-old Kenzell Durham, had been shot in the back parking lot of Nash Wheels and Tires at 2121 Rhode Island Ave. NE. Paramedics rushed the mechanic to MedStar, but it was too late. By 8:02 that evening, Durham was pronounced dead, killed by one bullet that entered his neck and went out his jaw. He had also been shot twice in the left torso.

Valencia calls up Nash Wheels and Tires. She has to see for herself.

Sir, what time are you going to close?

Open until midnight.

Sir, may I please come over? I think the person who killed your employee is responsible for killing my son.

The owner says: You may come over.

She remembers driving there, pushed by adrenaline, thinking, Why did it take another person to be killed to stop this man?

Valencia pulls up, parks at a meter and walks in.

Solomon Nash, the owner, greets her. She is frantic, trying not to cry. She asks Nash for a description of McCoy.

Nash, who says he has no fear in giving information about killings, tells Valencia: He has light skin and curly hair.

She is thinking that it could be somebody else; the police could be wrong. She cautions herself to slow down.

Then another worker, recounting why he thinks the mechanic was shot, mentions the name Autumn to Valencia.

Click. Autumn. This is it , she says to herself. It's true. They got him. Imtiaz, we got him.

Then she realizes she has been here before, while out searching for the killer, in this alley behind Nash Wheels, where tires are stacked in towers and a grapevine grows. She remembers she saw nothing, and kept going. Later, she will learn that McCoy was staying at an apartment just two doors away.

From Nash Wheels, Valencia calls Det. Ralph Durant, newly assigned to Imtiaz's case. She gets his voice mail. She sends an e-mail to Police Chief Charles Ramsey. She is terrified that the police will not make the connection between Imtiaz and McCoy, that McCoy will somehow be let out.

Don't let him go ! she writes.

A month later, police will charge McCoy with "first-degree premeditated murder while armed" in the death of Imtiaz Mohammed. A police source, who does not want to be identified because the case is in court, says the ballistics in the Nash Wheels case match those in Imtiaz's murder. McCoy's attorney, Christopher McKee, will decline to comment on McCoy's cases.

ACCORDING TO AN AFFIDAVIT seeking an arrest warrant, a witness interviewed by police a month after Imtiaz's murder said that the witness saw "Mo" get into his black Acura near the crime. But the witness told police the witness did not see Mo fire any shots. After McCoy was arrested, that same witness was "re-interviewed" by police. This time, the witness changed the story. The warrant says the witness told police that the witness "heard two shots and saw the same person known . . . as Mo walking toward his black Acura while armed with a handgun."

The witness told police that the reason the witness didn't say anything to police the first time was because the witness "was scared for its life."

In 1998, McCoy had been charged with first-degree murder while armed in the slaying of David James in the 6300 block of 14th Street NW. The case against McCoy was later dismissed when a key witness failed to appear for trial.

ON A THURSDAY IN NOVEMBER 2005, the clerk calls the courtroom of D.C. Superior Court Judge Judith Retchin to order for a status hearing in the case of the United States of America v. Raymond McCoy.

At 9:37 a.m., Valencia walks in. She is in her mud cloth the color of mustard, her hair swept up. Her daughter Malika is with her.

Valencia sits down, wrapped in nervous energy. Yesterday was Imtiaz's birthday. He would have been 25. "Let's see how he walks in here," she whispers. Then she changes seats, moving from the right side of the spectator row to the left side, to get a better view of the man accused of killing her son.

Silence. The courtroom air feels thick and still. The prosecutor stands. The defense attorneys stand. The judge is sitting high in judgment. Then a door opens.

McCoy walks in, wearing an orange jumpsuit and a red skull cap. He rolls when he walks.

"How you doing?" McCoy asks the judge.

McCoy has light brown skin and black curly hair. He has a black goatee. He is standing there in handcuffs. He has big eyes, and he keeps cutting them in the direction of Valencia.

"Look at him with that cold-blooded stare," she whispers. She locks eyes with him.

McCoy turns away first.

The prosecutor, Deborah Sines, tells the judge that she plans to bring two more murder charges against McCoy. Sines will charge him with murder in the case of the mechanic. And she will reintroduce the case against McCoy in the death of David James.

Then they set a court date for another status hearing.

The judge turns to McCoy and says, "Mr. McCoy, the marshals will bring you to court on January 27."

"Okay," he says.

He stares at Valencia again.

"Have a good day," McCoy says to the judge, then he shuffles away in chains.

Valencia rushes out of the courtroom, where she finds her sister Monica in the hallway.

"Was he trying to intimidate me?" Valencia asks. The adrenaline is rushing, her ponytail of dreads swinging.

"He's trying to intimidate," Monica says. "If he gritted on you, what do you think he will try to do with the witnesses?"

Then Valencia tells her the defense is trying to make a plea agreement. "I said: 'Oh, hell, no. Don't think they are going to let somebody give him five years in my son's murder. I'll be police chief in this city before that happens."

The prosecutor, who has followed them out of the courtroom, warns them to be calm. She tells Valencia that she has no intention of accepting that plea bargain. The police have witnesses. The trial is scheduled for December 2006.

But Valencia also knows anything can happen between now and a verdict. A witness can refuse to cooperate, or get killed. A jury can decide to acquit. So Valencia is still scared. The case is not over.

She walks down the escalator and outside the courthouse.

"You know what people in the community say, 'What about Said?,' " she says.

"I say, Don't think I forgot Said."

Valencia walks down the street, headed for a meeting with a deputy mayor and a council member, where she will press them to build a forensics lab quickly. City officials will tell her they are waiting for more federal money. And she, sitting around a table with other mothers of dead children, will tell them they can't wait any longer. Because the longer they wait, the colder those cases get and the harder they become to solve. And mothers can weary of waiting too long for some kind of justice.

DeNeen L. Brown is a reporter in The Post's Style section.