A Fatal Clash Between Street and Success

Troubled 17-Year-Old Held in Slaying of Man Who Overcame the Obstacles

One damp autumn evening on a shabby side street, a scuffle ends with the squeeze of a trigger.

A decent, hardworking man, Kwamari Harrell, 36, is dead; the teenager accused of killing him sits behind bars; and Jellani Kush, who cradled his mortally wounded brother on the pavement, hears the gunshot echoing in his mind.

Kush saw it happen Sept. 27, in front of his Northeast Washington home. He saw Harrell, his youngest brother, an off-duty federal police officer, clutch his chest and fall, slain by a bullet to the heart.

The alleged killer was a 17-year-old neighbor, an unruly youth whom Kush, an Afrocentric motivational speaker, had tried to set straight. "Tried to encourage him," Kush recalled last week, after Lavander J. Williams, who had been missing since the shooting, was arrested on a D.C. street and charged as an adult with murder. "Talked to him about how there's a whole world out there. Told him it's beautiful, you ought to see it. . . . Talked to him about Africa."

Now the futility of it, like the clap of the gunshot, haunts him, he said. "It's really difficult to describe how it feels. How it could happen. . . . Why it happened."

It was one more homicide in the District -- No. 139 of 161 this year, a tragedy that went largely unnoticed beyond a tumbledown block in Deanwood. But the lives of the victim and suspect -- the obstacles both faced, and the opposite paths they were on when they collided that night on Kane Place NE -- illustrate a message that Kush has been preaching for years about success and failure in the inner city.

It's a message about self-reliance that he imparts at churches, schools and community centers, lecturing on the importance of strong family guidance and support, on rising up through hard work and discipline, pursuing education, resisting ruinous impulses and staying off the streets, away from the lure of the thug life.

"We can change the course of our cultural history," he said of the black community. "But we have to take it on ourselves to do it."

As for Williams, "I wanted him to see himself outside of his circumstances," said Kush, 43, recalling the half-dozen times he buttonholed the youth in the neighborhood and tried in vain to counsel him.

Williams, who moved to Kane Place about 18 months ago, lived across the street from Kush's two-bedroom Cape Cod, sharing a small house with his two sisters, an aunt, a disabled grandmother and a revolving cast of other relatives. Kush said Williams hung out with a gaggle of noisy, foul-mouthed pot smokers on the front porch of another house, a run-down rental property on Kush's side of the street.

"He didn't always attend school every single day," Shirley Williams, 15, said of her brother. At his initial appearance in D.C. Superior Court last week, Williams, a chubby youth with dreadlocks who goes by the nickname "L.A.," was ordered jailed to await a preliminary hearing Nov. 13. He did not enter a plea, and his attorney, a public defender, did not return phone messages seeking a comment on the case.

Unlike his alleged killer, Harrell faced adversity and thrived.