D.C. Slayings, Nerves Spike
Patterns and Suspects in Month of Violent Crimes Still Hazy

By Robert E. Pierre and Clarence Williams
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, May 6, 2008; B01

One homicide victim was a plumber who got into an argument while shooting dice. A woman was beaten to death with a blunt object. Another victim, awaiting trial for credit card fraud, was shot to death while sitting in his sport-utility vehicle.

April was a deadly month in the District, with 18 homicides, nine of them in Northeast Washington neighborhoods west of the Anacostia River. On one Saturday, four people were fatally shot within four hours. With motives including domestic issues, revenge and conflicts over drugs, authorities have been struggling to develop clear patterns and catch the criminals.

The spike in homicides led police to increase patrols to ease residents' nerves and tamp down crime, a signature response by Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D), who puts a priority on immediate action over more time-consuming approaches.

But that didn't stop Debra Seals-Craven from upbraiding the mayor at a public meeting on the recent crimes. Her 30-year-old son, Melvin Seals, was shot to death a little more than a week ago. People gathered at New Bethel Baptist Church in Northwest Washington on Friday for his funeral, wearing personalized T-shirts that read "RIP Big Melvin."

D.C. Council member Harry Thomas Jr. (D-Ward 5), who has been meeting almost daily with residents to get a handle on the issue, said gun violence is ripping families and neighborhoods apart. "Our city is at war with itself," he told hundreds of mourners at Seals's funeral service.

Over the past two months, gun violence has jumped in the city. The number of reported assaults with deadly weapons rose in six of the city's seven police districts. Citywide, the number of homicides is about the same as last year: 51 as of yesterday, compared with 55 at the same point last year.

But it is the recent violence that has generated alarm. There were 338 assaults, robberies or homicides involving a gun from March through April, up about 30 percent from that period last year.

The toll in Thomas's ward has been especially heavy: 12 killings and 38 robberies in March and April, compared with three slayings and 17 robberies in the same period last year.

Often, the perpetrators of violence and their victims have had brushes with the law, as in the current string of killings. Although the city has undergone an economic revival with new housing and shopping centers, many residents of such places as Brentwood, Trinidad and Ivy City have not shared in the benefits, and residents say that has an impact on crime on their streets.

"The boom didn't touch many of the people who needed it most," said Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner William Shelton, who works with teenagers in the Brookland Manor Apartments in Northeast. "We're dealing with the aftereffects of war."

Although Fenty often appears at crime scenes, decrying violence, the District government has shown no urgency in solving the problem, said David Bowers, who heads the all-volunteer No Murders DC. Despite 6,500 homicides since 1980, he said, the District has no comprehensive plan.

Bowers, the son of a former Superior Court judge, is a native Washingtonian. He is an ordained minister and, in his day job, directs the Washington office of the Enterprise Foundation, a nonprofit affordable-housing organization. After crime spikes like this one, he said, leaders throw a little money at groups like Peaceoholics and the Alliance for Concerned Men, which hire former street toughs and ex-offenders to mentor troubled youths and help defuse beefs before they turn violent.

"Those groups are part of the solution, but they are not all of it," said Bowers, who is heading a citywide task force meant to stamp out homicide. "We wear a T-shirt, have a vigil, extend compassion to a grieving mother, pour out some liquor and say we're going to put more cops on the beat.

"It's easy to do that," Bowers said. "But it's harder to do the work necessary to end violence, to work with people day in and day out to keep our neighborhoods safe."

Fenty counters that neither the problems nor the solutions are new. Still, he agrees that government must reach children earlier. At the same time, he pushes police to respond quickly to crime.

Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier said that many recent shootings in the 5th District stemmed from neighborhood rivalries over drugs or domestic issues. She would not provide specifics because the cases remain open.

Speaking after Friday's start of the department's most recent citywide patrol and enforcement operation, dubbed All Hands on Deck, Lanier said she already had focused more efforts on the 5th District as well as the 1st District, which covers the Capitol Hill area. Both had spikes in gun crimes in the past month. Probably the most visible enforcement efforts are police checkpoints, in which officers use the traffic stops to gather information on individuals that often ends up in the department's intelligence banks.

"We pooled resources from all our districts aimed at specific targets," Lanier said. "We've gone after the most violent predators with warrant squads. . . . We focused on gun interdiction."

From late March through April, a newly strengthened police unit targeting firearms recovered 312 guns from streets -- in a city with one of the toughest gun laws in the country, now under review by the Supreme Court.

"We're getting lots of guns off the streets," Lanier said. "We're closing lots of homicides. And when we do, we're going back to the communities to pass out fliers to let residents know we are closing those cases."

Police said yesterday that officers made 480 arrests, recovered 12 firearms and seized more than $12,000 worth of drugs during All Hands on Deck, which ran from Friday through Sunday morning.

But law enforcement alone is not the solution, Lanier said.

It is a point that residents make constantly: Government agencies, churches and businesses must take a more direct role in bettering the lives of residents, and people must stop writing children off as bad apples without offering help.

"We always wait until the situation gets out of control and everybody wants to talk about the surface of the problem," said Chanell Kelton, 24, who lives in Brentwood. "We say that it has to start in the home, but for a lot of children, there is no home."

What's left are the familiar scenes that follow -- of grief, confusion and anger.

Just before midnight April 16, Sharon Stewart crumpled onto a Trinidad sidewalk, repeatedly sobbing, "My baby's going to be okay." Lanier was on the scene, and the police chief bent down and rubbed her back, offering emotional support to a grieving mother whose son, Darvell, 18, would die of his shooting wounds.

Five days later, Stewart held her head in her hands, wondering where she would get $2,870 for the funeral.

On April 24, George Douglas's father, who did not want his name published for fear of retribution, told a packed crime forum that it was all he could do not to seek revenge. His son, 18, was shot in April.

"My son was shot in the head, and they dragged him on the train tracks," the man said. "I don't want my son to be no John Doe . . . My son was not no criminal . . . That man has blood on his hands . . . I want to see him."

A week later, police arrested a 15-year-old in the slaying.

Seals-Craven also wants justice. On Friday, days after she chided the mayor at the public forum, she saw Fenty again, this time at her son's funeral. Fenty offered his personal condolences.

Fighting back tears, she spoke at the funeral about the need for someone to come forward and tell police who killed her son.

"I have got to have peace to know who killed my son," she said.

Staff writer Keith A. Harriston and database editor Dan Keating contributed to this report.