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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Hough, a GS-12 information technology specialist, was arrested on drug charges twice in the early 1990s and again last summer but wasn't prosecuted, according to court records. Co-workers and neighbors described him as generous, bright and affable. He lived with his mother in a neatly kept rowhouse on Trinidad Avenue, less than a mile from where he died.

"He was my heart," said Hough's grandmother, Lendoria Hough.

The southern end of Holbrook, near Florida Avenue, is a hodgepodge of well-tended and gone-to-seed rowhouses, many occupied by elderly people who sit on stoops by day, then retreat inside and lock their doors when the sun goes down.

The shooting occurred near a BP gas station at Holbrook and Florida. One theory is that Hough crossed paths somewhere with Mincey and Jeter and was giving them a lift home. "Something happened in that gas station and spilled out into the street," a police official said. Police found more than 30 shell casings nearby.

Mincey's mother, Shirley Hough, a distant relative of Duane Hough's, said she wants no mercy for the killer. "Don't feed them when you put them in jail. Don't clothe them," she said. "It was a senseless thing . . . to do to my child."

With Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier out of town at the time, Groomes's job was to help oversee the handling of major police incidents and to keep city leaders, including Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D), up to date. She was busy doing that on Holbrook when Scott, her top deputy, delivered more news.

"He says, 'Chief, we got another one,' " Groomes recalled. "And I said, 'What?' And that was the guy they found stabbed."

She stayed at Holbrook, sending Scott to the newest scene.

Saturday, 6 a.m.

A neighbor steps from her rowhouse to take out trash, and sees Larry Simmons's old Mazda parked as usual on Fourth Street NE -- but feet are sticking from the driver's side window. Looking closer, she sees it's Simmons, a bloody heap in his car, stabbed in the head, face and chest.

Two miles north of Holbrook, in the Edgewood neighborhood, residents recall the 66-year-old Simmons as a somewhat peculiar fellow. From most any porch or window in the 300 block of Channing Street NE, if they hollered his name, they'd usually get an answer from an empty lot out back at Fourth and Channing streets.

Anyone who needed a car fixed, a tree sawed, a lawn trimmed -- they'd just yell.

"Larry!"

"Yeah?"

The empty lot, a weedy oblong rimmed with jersey barriers, was Simmons's domain, and he guarded it zealously. Often he would leave the Channing Street apartment that he shared with his 73-year-old brother and sleep in his '97 Mazda Protege, keeping watch on his turf. He was a reed-thin sentinel with a billowing gray beard, a retired auto mechanic. His two brothers said he served in the Vietnam War, repairing helicopters.

Whatever moved him to do it, he left his apartment Friday night and took up his post by the lot. That's where the neighbor found him. What she saw, she said, was "too horrible to talk about."

Detective Anthony Paci said the entire attack apparently took place in the Mazda while Simmons fought desperately to escape. He still had $80 on him when detectives checked his pockets.

Now, on the shaded street, his name floats on whispers tinged with grief.

"It's Larry," people say. "They killed Larry."

Staff writers Allison Klein, Robert E. Pierre and Michael E. Ruane and staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.