A Deadly Toll: Nine Hours, Seven Lives

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A Weekend of Bloodshed

Relatives and residents grapple with one of Washington D.C.'s most violent weekends in recent memory.

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"You could hear the shots going off," said Tony Murray, 54, who lives a few doors away. "Seven, eight, nine shots."

Turner, who lived four blocks away on Sixth Street NE, made his living driving a dump truck, said a man who identified himself as an uncle of Turner's. "He was working. He was doing everything he was supposed to do. He was helping out around the house. . . . He wasn't harmful to nobody."

Homicide detectives canvassed for witnesses. Crime scene techs gathered what evidence they could find. There wasn't much for Groomes to do. "So then I got to go home."

She climbed into bed, slipping her pager under the pillow as always. Then came the beeping.

Saturday, 4 a.m.

As Duane Hough steers his GMC Yukon onto Holbrook Street NE, driving with two friends, maybe taking them home after a night of clubbing, gunfire ruptures the quiet. One shooter, or two, sprays the Yukon. Johnny Jeter and Anthony Mincey scramble out of the sport-utility vehicle and are shot as they try to flee.

Those were the dead men Groomes saw as she walked the scene: Mincey, 35, an amateur rapper who lived for nightclub karaoke nights; Jeter, 24, who was Mincey's closest pal; and Hough, 37, a Persian Gulf War veteran and well-liked Government Printing Office employee, a casual friend of the two.

How Mincey and Jeter, who were virtually inseparable, ended up in Hough's SUV appears to be anyone's guess. Mincey and Jeter each told relatives that they were going to a club together but apparently didn't say where. Hough's mother, Rosalind Hough, said that she last saw her son about 12:30 Saturday morning, in their home, and that he went out later, after she was asleep.

Jeter, who lived with relatives in a tumbledown rowhouse in the 1700 block of Holbrook, and Mincey, who rented a subsidized apartment nearby in Langston Terrace Dwellings, got by on occasional part-time jobs and Social Security disability checks. Jeter was much younger than his friend, but each was mildly mentally impaired and they got along great, their families said.

On the karaoke rap circuit, Mincey went by "Natural" on stage. "Just this beautiful, energetic kid," said Danny Roberts, who owns Rose's Dream, a nightclub where Mincey and Jeter were regulars, a few blocks from where they died. "He just lights the place up when he comes in," Roberts said. "Everybody here knows him. . . . This was his home, man."

It was Jeter's home, too, although the two friends weren't in the club Friday night, Roberts said. "You saw one, you saw the other," he said of the friends, adding that Jeter was usually quiet. "He'll just sit and chill, look at the girls."

Mincey had two assault charges in the 1990s, but both were dropped. Jeter's history "is completely clean," a police official said. "All John ever do is smile," said Anita Jeter, his sister.