Girl, 12, Died of Strangulation

Autopsy Confirms Death as Homicide, Rules Out Stabbing

An autopsy found that 12-year-old Marisol Caceres died of strangulation in her family's Northeast Washington apartment this week and that her death was a homicide, D.C. police said yesterday.

The girl, who police initially thought had been stabbed, suffered no such wounds, according to the autopsy, officers said. They said the D.C. medical examiner's office found no evidence that the girl had been sexually assaulted.

Family members returning to their apartment in the unit block of Hawaii Avenue NE found the child dead Tuesday afternoon. Investigators labeled the case a suspicious death and said they were treating it as a homicide. The department said the medical examiner ruled the death a homicide yesterday.

Police said the girl's mother and one of the girl's siblings went to a doctor's appointment Tuesday morning, leaving Marisol alone in the third-floor apartment. When they returned two or three hours later, they found Marisol dead. There were no signs of forced entry at the apartment, police said.

A D.C. police source, speaking on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing, said Tuesday that Marisol had a plastic bag over her head when she was found. In the statement yesterday, police said the autopsy concluded that she had not been suffocated.

The victim's mother, Berta Alvarado, told a relative that she was "completely destroyed" by the death of her youngest child, who had recently finished sixth grade at Harriet Tubman Elementary School. The relative, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the case, described the child as "quiet, studious and intelligent."

"She wanted to be a doctor," he said. "She wanted to get ahead in life. She wanted to help her family and, more than anything, her mother."

Marisol, the youngest of Alvarado's five children, had lived most of her life in a dilapidated building on Hiatt Place NW in Columbia Heights. The building's owner had been sued by the D.C. government because of more than 2,800 suspected housing code violations.

The family moved to a brick apartment building on Hawaii Avenue, near Rock Creek Cemetery, about 18 months ago, friends said, to escape the living conditions at the Hiatt Place apartment.

A neighbor in the Hiatt Place building described Marisol as a quiet, pretty girl with curly hair who loved her dog. She was to start seventh grade at Lincoln Middle School, which is behind the Hiatt Place building.

In addition to the difficult living conditions, relatives and acquaintances described a tumultuous life for Alvarado's family. She separated from her partner, Jose Andrade, in the early 1990s. Alvarado, a homemaker for most of her life, had trouble supporting her children, at times sending them to live with relatives or their father, a relative said.

Alvarado and Andrade had four children, who range in age from 15 to 21.