3rd Man Dies In Shooting At Largo Retail Center

In 2003, Sneed pleaded guilty to a handgun violation and was sentenced to the three days he had already spent in jail, court records show. Sneed also was charged with second-degree assault Jan. 1, the records show.

According to the charging document in the assault case, Sneed and three other men were walking near a Landover apartment complex holding bottles of alcohol. When police asked them to put the bottles down, an officer wrote, "Mr. Sneed got very combative and threw a punch at me so I grabbed him and put him against a car."

Maurice Poston, 50, who said he was the father of Charles Harrison and an uncle of Curtis Poston, said in his Landover apartment that his son and nephew often went to the pizza restaurant, about a mile away, to watch football. He said the two young men worked as furniture movers.

At her apartment a few miles away, Sneed's mother, Sandra Sneed, said: "I don't know what could have been said that was so bad that someone would want to kill them. It's just senseless."

Sneed said her son was unemployed but was looking for work. He had a 3-year-old daughter.

"I just want them to catch whoever did this," she said.

The killings were not the first at the shopping center. In 2005, Matthew Pickett, 21, died of injuries he suffered in a beating outside Borders. His 15-year-old attacker was charged as a juvenile and eventually ordered confined in a youth detention center.

Before the shopping center opened, residents exacted pledges from the developer that they hoped would ensure a family-friendly atmosphere. They wanted to limit the number of athletic-shoe stores, T-shirt shops, cellphone stores and other types of businesses that generally attract young people, many of them loiterers with little or no money to spend.

Community activist Arthur Turner, head of the Coalition of Central Prince George's Community Organizations, said crimes such as Pickett's killing have left residents concerned about security at the shopping center. He said a committee of residents, the Boulevard Council, has told the center's owners and managers that they want security stepped up.

Inland U.S. Management, the company that manages the shopping center, said in a statement that managers meet regularly with the council and have "been in touch several times" since the shooting.

"With the council's input and cooperation we have made enhancements to our security program, which has been a high priority during the past three years," the statement said.

Staff writers Paul Duggan, Allison Klein and Hamil R. Harris and staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.