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Crime Alerts: August 2-3

The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) sent out three crime alerts between 9:00 p.m. on Aug. 2 and 9:00 a.m. on Aug 3.

A crime alert was sent out at 10:42 p.m. due to a shooting at the 5100 block of Brooks Street, NE. Police do not have information on the suspect(S).

A second crime alert was sent out at 11:24 p.m. due to a shooting at the 500 block of 50th Place, NE. Police do not have information on the suspect(s).

A final crime alert was sent out at 8:12 a.m. due to a robbery while armed investigation in the 3300 block of Holmead Place, NW. Police identified the suspects as a Black male wearing a white T-shirt and blue jeans, seen leaving in a white Toyota with unknown tags.

Document: Arrest Made in Homicide Investigation

Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) detectives have made an arrest in relation to a July 18 homicide.

At about 1:28 a.m. officers reported to the 6700 block of 5th Street, NW, due to a report of a shooting. Police found 29-year-old Dara Northern with gunshot wounds and transported her to a local hospital. She later succumbed to her injuries, according to the press release.

An investigation later found that the incident occurred on the 6100 block of 4th Street, NW, according to the press release.


Judge Rules Fatal Stabbing Case Has Enough Evidence to Go to Trial

A DC Superior Court judge ruled that a homicide case has enough evidence to go to trial.

James Lewis is charged with second-degree murder while armed for allegedly stabbing 30-year-old Brenea Franklin to death on the night of Jan. 30 on the 1100 block of Bellevue Street, SE.

During the Aug. 2 hearing, the prosecution played surveillance footage showing the 43-year-old defendant’s van as it enters the block, parks and turns its headlights off at around 10:25 p.m. The lights in the vehicle then come on and there appears to be movement inside before a shadow emerges, stumbles away from the vehicle and collapses where Franklin’s body was later found.

A Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) detective on the case testified that a witness who has known Lewis for about 20 years identified him from surveillance footage of his van.

Defense attorney Bernadette Armand argued the video was too blurry and indistinct to identify a face, but the detective maintained that the witness “was adamant about it.”

The detective testified that, at the time of the homicide, Lewis was living in his van, which MPD officers later recovered.

The prosecution said that Lewis sent text messages asking for help cleaning up his van, which had bloodstains on the passenger seat and soaked into the carpet on the passenger side. She also said that the witness who provided the identification said she never saw anyone besides Lewis drive the van.

Armand argued that the footage is not enough to identify the driver as Lewis and that the involvement of Lewis’ van is not enough to conclude that Lewis was the one driving it. She also said that, even though Lewis sent text messages about cleaning up his van, the texts were not sent until 12 hours after the incident, as if he had just discovered the situation.

Judge Neal Kravitz found probable cause but said the witnesses’ identification from the surveillance footage was “subject to challenge.”

“There’s a lot of circumstantial evidence in this case,” said Judge Kravitz.

Lewis is scheduled to return to court on Aug. 9.

Murder Defendant Held After Two-Day Preliminary Hearing

On July 30, a two-day preliminary hearing concluded with a DC Superior Court judge ruling that a homicide case has enough evidence to go to trial.

Ronnie Melson, 40, is charged with first-degree murder while armed for allegedly shooting 41-year-old Demetrius Jones on the 1700 block of Gales Street, NE, on Nov. 6, 2020.

“This does appear to be a premeditated act of retribution committed in an incredibly dangerous manner,” Judge Neal Kravitz said. 

The preliminary hearing was previously scheduled to take place in April, but it was postponed after Judge Kravitz ordered the prosecution to disclose evidence that the defense argued they should have received.

When proceedings picked back up on July 29, Judge Kravitz said that the evidence in question, which includes a video of police interviewing a witness, should be given to the defense under a protective order.

Defense attorney Bernadette Armand said they had previously only received a summary of the interview’s transcript. Armand said there were no actual answers to some of the questions officers asked the witness in the transcript, implying nonverbal responses that Armand had no way to observe.

“A lot of material was turned over a lot later than it should have been,” Judge Kravitz said.

On July 30, a Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) detective assigned to the case testified that officers responded to shots picked up by gunfire detection technology at about 10:40 a.m the day of the homicide. According to the detective, Melson was identified based on the account of the witness from the interview, who told officers that Jones and Melson had been involved in a dispute.

The detective also testified that the witness in the interview initially said she did not see the incident take place, but during a phone call she made during the interview when detectives were not present, she told someone that detectives knew she had seen it.

Armand said that the descriptions given by multiple witnesses at the scene were not consistent with one another. Armand said the witness in the interview footage described the shooter as wearing a mask, while other witnesses did not, and only one of those other witnesses was able to give any description of the shooter’s hairstyle. Other descriptions of the shooter included information on height and skin tone that was not consistent with Melson’s appearance, she said.

The prosecution said that Melson’s phone was picked up by a cell tower in the area at the time of the homicide and that Melson has a stab wound from a previous altercation with Jones, a story that the witness corroborated during her interview.

The prosecution argued that Melson should remain held at DC Jail, saying that he has 12 prior convictions and has never successfully completed a period of probation. Armand argued that Melson should, at most, be placed under 24-hour home confinement so he could take care of his elderly, medically infirmed relative.

Judge Kravitz decided to hold the defendant based on the dangerousness of the incident, citing the entire magazine’s worth of bullets found on the scene and the collateral damage caused by stray bullets. Judge Kravitz also said there are a number of violent crimes on Melson’s record, including assaults in 2009 and 2019.

Judge Kravitz scheduled Melson’s next hearing for Nov. 1.

Document: 700 Block of O Street, NW

Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) detectives are investigating a homicide that occured on July 31.

At about 11:15 p.m. police were in the area of the 700 block of O Street, NW, when they heard sounds of gunshots. Upon arrival, police found 31-year-old Kervin Sanches with gunshot wounds and transported him to a local hospital. He later succumbed to his injuries, according to the press release.

Crime Alerts: August 1-2

The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) sent out four crime alerts between 9:00 p.m. on August 1 and 9:00 a.m. on August 2.

An alert was sent out at 11:02 p.m. due to a robbery investigation in the 1300 block of Anacostia Road, SE. Police identified the suspect as a Black male who is about 15-16 years old wearing a black jacket, white tank top, and armed with a gun.

A second alert was sent out at 11:48 p.m. due to a robbery in the 3100 block of 14th Street, NW. Police identified the suspects as a Black male wearing a black hoodie, black pants, black shoes and a black face mask.

A third crime alert was sent out at 12:37 a.m. due to a shooting in the 3700 block of Hayes Street, NE. Police do not have information on the suspect(s).

A final crime alert was sent out at 7:21 a.m. due to a shooting investigation in the 400 block of Burbank Street, SE. Police do not have information on the suspect(s).

Judge Holds One Domestic Violence Defendant During Presentments 

A DC Superior Court judge released eight domestic violence defendants and held one during presentments on July 31.  

In total, 33 defendants were brought before the court. 

The held defendant is charged with simple assault. Judge James Crowell decided to hold him due to the other cases he also has open. He is scheduled to return to court on Aug. 17. 

The released defendants are charged with simple assault, destruction of property less than $1,000, contempt, second-degree cruelty to children, unlawful entry and attempted possession of a prohibited weapon. They are scheduled to return to court on Aug. 2, Aug. 18, Nov. 12 and Nov. 15.

Judge Releases Six Domestic Violence Defendants During Presentments

A DC Superior Court judge released six domestic violence defendants during presentments on July 30.

In total, 32 defendants were presented before the court. 

The charges for the released defendants include attempted threats to do bodily harm, simple assault, unlawful entry, destruction of property less than $1,000, attempted possession of a prohibited weapon, disorderly conduct and obstructing justice.


Judge Renee Raymond scheduled the released defendants to return to court on Aug. 8, Nov. 10, Nov. 12 and Nov. 15.

Opinion: Is D.C. wasting money on violence reduction programs?

As published in the Opinion section of the Washington Post.

Amos Gelb and LaTrina Antoine are publisher and editor in chief, respectively, of D.C. Witness.

Any delusion that our city’s gun violence afflicts only certain (poor) neighborhoods has to have been erased by the past several weeks.

The grisly list includes a mass shooting and killing of a 6-year-old girl in Congress Heights, a shootout outside Nationals Park that set off panic in one of our most protected public sites and then a spray of bullets outside one of the swankiest restaurants on arguably the hippest street in the city.

All that as a coda to D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) sitting in the Oval Office as President Biden intoned that cities needed to do more to stop the national epidemic of surging violent crime.

The D.C. Council is stepping up to that challenge in its 2021-2022 budget that includes huge sums of money aimed at reducing our city’s increasing violent crime. Among the line items is $8 million for doubling current violence interrupter programs that put former prisoners back in their neighborhoods to intervene in disputes and interrupt violence before it happens.

If recent events were not enough justification for such spending, the numbers should be: D.C. has seen about a 10 percent increase in the year-over-year homicide rate for the past three years.

There’s only one problem.

That same data shows that the city’s violence interrupter programs, one run by the Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement, and Cure the Streets, run out of the Office of the D.C. Attorney General, aren’t doing what they claim: preventing violence. Rather, they may be merely dispersing it, spreading the killings to nearby areas that previously did not have any.

But how can we state this with certainty when the city says the programs are working and are worthy of healthy increases in funding? The answer: because unlike the city, we have data that measures the programs’ performance.

D.C. Witness is a six-year-old website that tracks every homicide in D.C. from act to judicial resolution, telling every story and gathering data about each case. The goal is to bring transparency and accountability to our city’s criminal-justice system and the policies implemented to reduce violent crime. We are nonpartisan and non-advocacy. We neither advocate for nor oppose any policy. We just share the data and use it to evaluate how official policies are working.

To understand how the D.C. violence interrupter programs were doing, we did the obvious: We asked the organizations running the programs for the data that showed their success.

They didn’t reply.

So, we took the homicide data we have gathered from public information and from sitting in every hearing of every homicide case (we track 104 data categories, including addresses) and mapped it over the areas in which interrupters are deployed. We then compared the differences in homicide distribution in those areas between 2019 to 2020 and 2020 to 2021, which are the periods for which we could find information on the location of the violence interrupters.

You can see the data maps at dcwitness.org. You be the judge.

We offered our data to both offices. Neither was interested.

Will dropping twice as many interrupters into neighborhoods change anything? We don’t claim to know the answer. But it would seem to be a question worth exploring before the city writes a virtual blank check to these programs. The programs themselves seem more driven by politics and messaging than efficacy.

Nor does there seem to be any appetite for oversight. The D.C. Council’s judiciary committee admitted to D.C. Witness that it did not have any data on how the programs were performing and relied on the assurances of the agencies running the programs that in turn relied on the assurances of the organizations hired to implement them.

Sadly, the saga of violence interrupters reflects a pattern in D.C. of more and more policies supported by more and more city money with less and less evaluation. A recent report by the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform painted an even less flattering picture. The report reviewed all D.C. violent crime reduction strategies and blasted the mayor and council’s approach as ineffective with more than 100 programs that often overlap and even compete with no evaluation. “D.C. is resource rich and coordination poor,” it concluded.

It would be easy to assume from our evaluation that we oppose violence interrupters for political or philosophical reasons or are calling for the programs to be canceled.

Not so.

Rather, we are saying that, as it is run in D.C., the violence interrupter programs are not making the difference they could or claim to. There is a spectrum of violence reduction/prevention strategies that use violence interrupters, ranging from those that support the work of returning citizens with wraparound community services (Roca Baltimore and Chicago Cred are two examples) to the de minimis version that D.C. implements, so there would seem to be plenty of room for adjustment.

We will leave it to experts to explore why the programs are dispersing rather than interrupting the violence. Other data collected by D.C. Witness suggests that the rising homicide rate is driven by a culture of gun violence that has grown over the past few years, so unless that is addressed, any strategy, including violence interrupters won’t significantly reduce the violence.

Just like everyone else in the city, we want the violence and killings to stop. But throwing more tax money at programs that make for great political messaging but aren’t working and aren’t measured isn’t going to get us there.

Domestic Violence Defendant Sentenced for Near-Fatal Stabbing

A DC Superior Court judge sentenced a domestic violence defendant to serve about five-and-a-half years for assault with intent to kill while armed following a near-fatal stabbing.

“I get up, I’m standing in a pool of my own blood,” the victim recalled in an impact statement.

The defendant, 56-year-old Tony Mobley, stabbed her multiple times, including in the neck and head, she said. 

The stabbing took place in her apartment, where she still lives. The prosecution is trying to help her move out so she doesn’t have to keep living in the home where she nearly died.

“Everybody kept telling me to get away from him…I never thought he’d try to take my life,” she said.

Judge Milton Lee told Mobley he came very close to killing the victim, and that if he did, “you would be in prison for the rest of your natural life,” rather than the 66 months he ultimately received.

But the victim expressed dissatisfaction with the plea deal. “To give him five-and-a-half years…I don’t see justice in that,” she said.

Judge Lee said he had an obligation to honor the plea deal. The prosecutor said she took Mobley’s serious struggles with addiction into consideration when she extended him the plea offer, which also allowed his assault with a dangerous weapon charge to be dropped. 

Mobley told Judge Lee he has been receiving treatment for his drug addiction during his incarceration. Judge Lee encouraged him to use the resources available to help him live a peaceful life upon his release.

“The benefit to you, I think, is the journey you already started,” Judge Lee told him. “Because you will have an opportunity to return to the District of Columbia.”

Mobley was also ordered to stay away from the victim.

Man Charged in Six-Year-Old’s Death Held During Presentments 

A DC Superior Court judge held a homicide defendant and released two domestic violence defendants as well as one sex abuse defendant during presentments on July 29. A total of 30 defendants were presented. 

Judge Judith Pipe held 22-year-old Marktwan Hargraves, who is charged with second-degree murder while armed in the shooting of six-year-old Nyiah Courtney on the 2900 block of Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue, SE.

The prosecution said the July 16 shooting wounded Courtney’s parents and three other people as well. They also said the defendant’s vehicle and text messages linked him to the homicide.

Hagraves is scheduled to return to court on Aug. 18.

Two domestic violence defendants were released. Their charges include simple assault and destruction of property. A defendant charged with misdemeanor sex abuse and simple assault was also released. All three of them are scheduled to return to court on Nov. 10.

Crime Alerts: July 29-30

The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) sent out four crime alerts between 9:00 p.m. on July 29 and 9:00 a.m. on July 30.

An alert was sent out at 2:06 a.m. due to an assault with intent to commit a robbery investigation on the 1500 block of Alabama Avenue, SE. Police identified the suspects as two Black males, one with a slim build wearing a black mask and one with a heavy build and wearing a grey sweatshirt.

A second alert was sent out at 4:37 a.m. due to a robbery investigation on the 600 block of Acker Place, NE. Police identified the suspect as a Black male who is approximately 20-24 years old, wearing a grey sweatshirt and dark pants.

A final crime alert was sent out at 4:39 a.m. due to a robbery on the 600 block of 4th Street, NE. Police identified the suspect as two Black males who are about 20-29 years old. One is wearing a white shirt and dark pants.

Prosecution in Murder Case Accused of Violating Disclosure Rules

A DC Superior Court judge said he was “admittedly frustrated” after telling the prosecution they had violated the Jencks Act, which requires the prosecution to hand over reports made by government witnesses, several times throughout the course of a three-day preliminary hearing to determine if a murder case has enough evidence to go to trial.

Kirk Spencer, 26, is charged with first-degree murder while armed for allegedly shooting 49-year-old Marcus Covington on Feb. 23 at the Anacostia Metro Station on the 1100 block of Howard Road, SE.

Judge Michael Ryan found probable cause but said the prosecution violated the Jencks Act on four separate occasions with four different judges. He said this caused the hearing to go on longer than necessary. 

On July 27, the second day of the preliminary hearing, Judge Ryan ended the proceedings early after defense attorney Jacqueline Cadman asked the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) detective about documents and files he obtained throughout his investigation, and he referred to pieces of evidence she said she never got. Judge Ryan told the prosecution they “will have until midnight tonight to find every communication this detective has made.”

When proceedings picked back up on July 28, Cadman spoke to the detectives for approximately five minutes about his emails regarding the case, finishing the cross-examination. 

During re-direct, the detective told the prosecution that, while executing a search warrant on the defendant’s home, he recovered two pairs of shoes which he said were similar to those shown in video footage. 

The footage shows Spencer entering a dumpster enclosure through an alley in the rear of his home after Covington was killed. The suspect exits the dumpster enclosure soon after, wearing different clothing. He then leaves the view of the camera.

According to court documents, previous video footage shows that the defendant allegedly changed into the shoes and coat before the homicide in this same dumpster enclosure nearby his home.

After finding probable cause, Judge Ryan ruled that Spencer should remain held at DC Jail. He is scheduled for a status hearing on Aug. 12.