17-year-old is charged as adult in slaying of D.C. man in July

A 17-year-old has been charged with murder as an adult in an assault that led to the July death of a 76-year-old ex-boxer, D.C. police said Saturday.

A fugitive task force arrested Joshua Ruth about 12:30 p.m. Saturday at his home in the 2600 block of Birney Place SE.

The man they allege he killed, Clarence Lawrence Dews, held on for nearly five days after trying to fend off an attempted robbery in Southeast Washington.

Police said that two men beat Dews. That means the other remains at large.

"There's only one arrest at this time," said Officer Quintin Peterson, a police spokesman.

After 10 p.m. July 20, Dews left his home, in the 2900 block of Seventh Street SE, for a two-block walk to the King Discount store. Dews broke his hands defending himself against two men who approached him on bicycles, police said.

Dews told family members that he struck one of the men but that at some point the other man threw his bicycle at him and Dews fell to the ground. The robbers got his wallet and pedaled away.

Relatives visited Dews at United Medical Center after the attack, where he was talkative and in good spirits. But his condition deteriorated. Dews was airlifted to Washington Hospital Center on July 24 because of bleeding in his brain, relatives said. After he died the next day, the city medical examiner said the cause of death was blunt force trauma.