Death of NE Girl, 12, Is Probed as Homicide

A 12-year-old girl was found dead with possible stab wounds yesterday in a Northeast Washington apartment, a D.C. police source said. Authorities labeled the case a suspicious death and said they are treating it as a homicide.

The police source, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing, said the girl might have been harmed in other ways as well.

The girl, who apparently lived with her family in the apartment where she was found on Hawaii Avenue, was identified last night by the police public information office as Marisol Caceras.

Another D.C. police source said that the girl was found with a plastic bag over her head and that investigators think she might have been strangled or suffocated as well as sexually assaulted.

"We are proceeding as if this is a homicide," said Inspector Rodney Parks, commander of the homicide unit. Police officials said the girl died in a third-floor apartment, but Parks gave no further details.

The cause and manner of her death will not be officially determined until an autopsy is conducted today, according to the source who said the girl was apparently stabbed.

He said one or both of the girl's parents reported coming home and finding her about 1:45 p.m. in their apartment in the unit block of Hawaii Avenue NE, just off North Capitol Street near Rock Creek Cemetery.

Several people who know the victim's family said the family moved to Northeast a little more than a year ago from Columbia Heights. They said the family had left a dilapidated apartment house on Hiatt Place NW where living conditions were poor. The building where the girl was found, called the Hawaiian Apartments, is a three-story brick complex with a secure entrance.

The source who said the girl appeared to have been stabbed also said the investigation was made more difficult because one or both of the parents, who speak only Spanish, disturbed the crime scene before calling police.

"So what we have to determine is what the parents did when they found her as opposed to what the scene looked like before they arrived," the source said. "We have to take them back through everything, step by step, to find out exactly what they did when they went in there."

D.C. Council member Harry Thomas Jr. (D-Ward 5) said police told him that the girl died of a stab wound and perhaps some other type of trauma. "She was home alone in a pretty secure building," he said.

He described the community as tranquil, full of hardworking families.

The D.C. Child and Family Services Agency investigated a case involving an alleged lack of supervision of another child in the girl's family, but the case was closed, according to a source familiar with the child-welfare investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Staff writers Michael Birnbaum, Mary Beth Sheridan, Sylvia Moreno Elissa Silverman, Nikita Stewart and Martin Weil, and staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.