Prince George's Police Face Trend of Killings 'for Nothing'

Officials Cite Crimes by Young Men Who Routinely Carry Guns

Tron S. Johnson and Terrance L. Sneed were the same age, grew up in the same neighborhood, attended the same high school and, police said, became crime statistics on opposite sides of the same handgun after a fight at a pizza restaurant one night.

Sneed is dead. Johnson, 22, is in the Prince George's County jail, accused of killing him and two of Sneed's friends that night.

Johnson, a slight man who was training to be a barber, by all accounts did little to provoke the Feb. 3 fight. But when trash talk during the Super Bowl turned to fisticuffs, police said, he pulled a handgun from his jacket and fired at his attackers in the restaurant.

The triple slaying is part of a trend that county law enforcement officials call "wear and carry" killings: callous acts committed on little provocation, often in public settings by young men who carry guns as casually as they do pocket change.

The crimes are called wear-and-carry killings based on the statute outlining the penalties for wearing and carrying a weapon, authorities said.

Police statistics show that 1,739 guns were confiscated from suspects in the county last year, 407 more than five years ago. Most of the illegal-gun charges filed involve men ages 18 to 24, said county State's Attorney Glenn F. Ivey.

"Some of the guys, if they are drug dealers . . . feel like they have to have a gun to protect themselves and their quote-unquote business transactions," Ivey said. "But there is a growing number who carry because there are no consequences. Some feel it is a status thing. Some say it's for protection."

A friend of Johnson's put it more simply: "If anybody ever tried to hurt me, I would shoot them. I'd rather be in prison than dead."

Most homicide victims in Prince George's are ages 18 to 24, as well. Of the 1,141 homicides from 1998 to 2007, 90 percent of the victims were black men, officials said, and 75 percent of those were in that age range.

National crime statistics also reflect that young black men are victims and suspects in homicides more than any other demographic group.

In December, Antonio Lonelle McGhee, 20, of the District was convicted of fatally shooting a 24-year-old Capitol Heights man who refused to give him a cigarette while standing in line at a restaurant. In February 2007, Ramsey N. "Ham" Bush, 24, of Oxon Hill was convicted of fatally shooting a 23-year-old friend who owed him $25. After the shooting, Bush took the money from the dying man's pocket.

"Everybody's got a gun," said Joseph J. Vince Jr., former chief of the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives crime gun analysis branch. "Instead of getting upset and fighting or beating each other up, they're shooting each other."