As Harris and McDonald review their notes, the sergeant’s phone rings. On the line is their lieutenant, Brian Reilly, explaining that the previous night, not long after their murder and not too far from the scene, a drug dealer had been wounded in a shooting. The suspects were seen fleeing in a white van that matched the description of the one leaving the scene of their homicide. Reilly tells McDonald that district-level detectives picked up a suspect in the other shooting earlier that morning; the detectives have finished interrogating him, and he now awaits them in the box.
After hanging up, McDonald signals for Harris to follow him. As the sergeant tells his detective about his call with Reilly, they leave the M-90 office, turn down the hallway, and proceed through a set of double doors to enter the office of the District 3 detectives, who investigate most serious crimes short of homicide.
McDonald and Harris pull a detective aside and get a detailed report on last night’s shooting. The suspect in the box is twenty-two-year-old Tayvon Williams, of Oxon Hill. Williams and a few friends had arranged to buy marijuana from a dealer; when something went wrong during the transaction, Williams opened fire on the dealer, and the dealer shot back. Wounded in the left shoulder, the dealer was taken to the hospital. Under questioning, the dealer identified the man who had arranged the purchase and provided the detectives with his number. The detectives tracked the phone and picked up Tayvon Williams, who quickly confessed to shooting the dealer. He also confirmed that he and several friends had been driving around that afternoon and evening in a white van.
The District 3 detective tells McDonald and Harris he’s fairly certain that Williams and his friends were actually plotting to rob the dealer instead of going through with the purchase. “Oh, and they had stolen the van from a church,” the detective adds.
“Nice guys,” says Harris.
The facts seem to suggest that Williams could have been involved in the murder of Charles Walker, but Harris wonders aloud whether it’s plausible that someone would fatally shoot a fifteen-year-old at 4:20 p.m., line up a drug rip, and then ninety minutes later shoot a drug dealer only two miles from the scene of the homicide. Moreover, the notion that the gunman in both shootings is sitting in the box seems too good to be true, especially if he has confessed to one of the shootings after little prompting.
McDonald and Harris thank the detective for his efforts and a few minutes later enter the District 3 interview room. Waiting for them is a relaxed young man in a red-and-blue windbreaker, a black skullcap, and blue jeans. He is sitting at a small table, a half-finished bottle of Gatorade in front of him.
The detectives introduce themselves. Harris sits down across from Williams; McDonald takes a chair to Williams’s left.
“We’ve heard you have been extremely cooperative,” Harris says, smiling.
“Yes,” says Williams, nodding.
“The people we spoke to believe you have been honest, and we want you to continue to be honest.”
Williams take a sip of his Gatorade and looks at Harris expectantly.
Harris says, “We understand about the situation you got into yesterday. What did you classify that as—a drug deal gone bad?”
“I don’t know what to classify it as,” Williams replies.
Harris asks how the deal went down. Williams says he was picked up at his apartment by two friends in the white van between 3:00 and 3:30 p.m. They drove around for a bit, and just before they went to purchase the marijuana, one of his buddies handed him a revolver. When the dealer and some other guys emerged from a dark corner of an apartment building, Williams says, he opened fire.
“So you had a bad feeling about this thing?” Harris asks. “He didn’t do anything aggressive? It didn’t look right?”
“Yeah, that’s what made me do what I did,” Williams says. “I thought he was going to shoot me.”
“It was supposed to be a legitimate transaction?”
“Yes.”
Harris doesn’t believe Williams—he was way too quick on the trigger for someone just looking to buy drugs—and again asks Williams to talk about what he had been doing before the shooting. Williams says that after he was picked up in the van, the group drove to Twenty-Eighth Avenue so a friend could grab some cash at his apartment. That’s right where Walker was murdered, Harris thinks.
After thanking Williams for being so forthcoming, Harris tells him that the police have obtained surveillance video from apartment complexes in the area of Twenty-Eighth Avenue and that they have the van’s license plate. It is a lie calculated to make Williams believe that the evidence against him and his friends is piling up.
“So we already know about the van,” Harris says, adding that they also have witnesses’ statements from their neighborhood canvass. He pauses to study the twenty-one-year-old, who seems more nervous than before, twitchy even.
“On Twenty-Eighth Avenue there was another robbery, and that’s what he and I are concerned about,” Harris says, nodding toward McDonald. “We’re not concerned with the drug deal that went bad.”
Harris explains that Williams is lucky—he is the first one to be questioned. “Once we start talking to everyone else, you just never know how this is going to end up,” the detective says. “Our robbery also turned bad.”
Williams nods and says, “Right. I understand what you’re saying. But to be honest with you, I don’t know what they were doing before they got me.”
Harris shakes his head and says, “No, no, no, no, no. Let’s hit the rewind button. Let’s not even go down that road.” Then he tells Williams that the robbery attempt on Twenty-Eighth Avenue occurred after 4:00 and reminds the suspect that he said he was picked up at 3:00. “You were with them,” Harris says.
Williams dodges Harris again, claiming he had nothing to do with the first robbery. McDonald, who up to this point has mostly been observing the interrogation, presses the suspect but gets the same response.
Harris can see that Williams is weighing whether to talk but is worried about being labeled a rat. “Dude, this ain’t snitching,” the detective says. “This is your life. I’m telling you right now, this ain’t snitching. We have to clear this up.”
“This is called self-preservation,” McDonald says. “It is heavy on you, man. I am sitting here reading you like a book.”
Williams scratches his forehead, then looks back and forth between the detectives and leans forward.
“All right,” says Williams, his words barely a whisper. “I’m going to tell you—the honest-to-God truth.”
After he was picked up, Williams says, the group collected two more friends and then went looking for someone to rob. They were driving along Twenty-Eighth Avenue in the van when they spotted a teenager they didn’t know carrying a bag that clearly contained a box of shoes. The driver handed a revolver to one of the passengers and told him, “He wears your size.” After passing the kid, the driver snapped a U-turn and halted abreast of him. The gunman opened the door, stepped out, and said, “You know what time it is. Give that shit up.”
It should have gone down smoothly, but the kid was wearing headphones, Williams says, and did not grasp the seriousness of the situation. At first he actually laughed, but once he spotted the gun, he turned and ran. It was too late; he made it only a few steps down the sidewalk before the gunman opened fire.
“What provoked him to shoot?” Harris asks.
“I guess because he ran,” Williams said, adding that the gunman seemed more upset about missing out on the loot than about shooting someone. “He was like, ‘Damn, bro, I could have had shoes and money.’”
“He didn’t care that he shot him?” Harris asks.
Shaking his head, Williams looks at Harris blankly and says, “Nope.”
* * *
AT 4:15 P.M.—not quite four hours after Harris began questioning Williams—all five detectives in the M-90 squad gather in their small office to brief Captain George Nichols on their progress; also in attendance are Lieutenant Brian Reilly an
d Sergeant Greg McDonald. Nichols has called the meeting because he is about to provide a briefing to the department’s chief about yet another big case. The chief, meanwhile, has scheduled a news conference that is due to start in just forty-five minutes.
Few things alarm police commanders and local politicians more than an unexplained and apparently unstoppable spate of murders of young people, and Charles Walker is the fifth Prince George’s County high school student to be killed since classes started in August. Amber Stanley was the first; less than three weeks after her murder, another popular honor student, eighteen-year-old Marckel Ross, was slain in a botched robbery as he walked to school. The two killings that followed, both involving teens with gang associations, were cleared, but neither the Stanley nor the Ross murders have been solved, and they hang around the chief’s neck like a noose. Now, with Walker’s murder, the chief is under enormous pressure to explain the recent flood of homicides involving students.
Nichols starts the meeting by explaining the obvious: the chief wants to send a message that despite this string of murders of the county’s youths, his department rules the streets. He will provide an update on the Stanley and Ross investigations, and he’ll have to answer questions about the previous day’s murder of Charles Walker. In particular, he is eager to tamp down rumors that the killing was orchestrated over Instagram.
The captain turns the floor over to Harris, who describes what he and McDonald learned from Tayvon Williams during the interrogation. But Harris cautions that it’s too early to entirely trust Williams’s rendition of events. “Frankly, I think Tayvon may have been the gunman. He shot the drug dealer. And he was really quick on the trigger.”
For now, however, the squad has enough evidence to track down the four men who were in the van with Williams, and all four will be questioned intensively about their roles in the two shootings.
As Harris wraps up his briefing, Nichols takes a call on his cell phone. On the line is his boss, Major Michael Straughan, who says the time has come to announce that they have a suspect in Marckel Ross’s murder. A little more than six weeks after Ross was shot, police recovered the gun used to kill him, and before long they were able to tie it to the man they suspected of committing the murder. The detectives and prosecutors working on the Ross investigation want a few more weeks to solidify their case before bringing charges, but Straughan tells Nichols that the chief feels he needs to release some positive news on a bad day.
After hanging up, Nichols sighs, looks at McDonald, and says: “Marckel Ross.”
McDonald nods: having listened to Nichols’s side of the conversation, the sergeant doesn’t need to be told what the captain has just learned. Nichols checks a roster of detectives taped to a desk, finds the number for the lead investigator on the Ross case—it’s Detective Paul Dougherty—and dials.
When Dougherty answers, Nichols explains that in a few minutes the chief will announce that they are close to making an arrest in the Ross case. The suspect is already in jail on robbery charges, so there isn’t any risk of him hearing the news and fleeing.
But Nichols makes it clear that under no circumstances should the victim’s mother hear about the chief’s announcement from news reports.
“The major wants you to reach out to the mother immediately,” Nichols tells Dougherty. “You can say we are really close and we had a break, something is coming down. Anyway”—Nichols pauses and exhales—“you know what to say.”
* * *
THIRTY MINUTES LATER, at precisely 5:00 p.m., Chief Mark Magaw steps to the podium. A press conference in Prince George’s County is typically a low-key affair, and this one is no different. The chief stands in the lobby of police headquarters, which features a restored 1931 black Model A Ford county police car and a white police motorcycle from the 1970s. To Magaw’s left is Angela Alsobrooks, the county’s state’s attorney, and Michael Blow, director of school security; to Magaw’s right is his assistant chief, Kevin Davis. Standing in front of this collection of officials are a half dozen respectful print and television reporters and a handful of cameramen.
Chief Magaw, dressed in a crisp white uniform shirt and gray slacks, is a balding, fifty-four-year-old former college linebacker who joined the PG force in 1984. The son of a former director of the Secret Service, Magaw is usually quiet and reserved in public. But he has been known to lose his temper. The previous fall, when the third student of the school year was killed, in the Lewisdale neighborhood, Magaw convened a meeting of his detectives, police officers, and their supervisors. After demanding updates on the investigation and details about the steps his department was taking to tamp down tension among rival Hispanic gangs in the area, the chief smacked the conference table with the palm of one hand and yelled, “They don’t own Lewisdale! We own fucking Lewisdale!”
In the twenty-four hours since Charles Walker’s death, Magaw’s anger has been boiling. But Magaw knows that showing even a little of that fury at his press conference will send the wrong message. Instead, the chief wants to appeal for patience and calm, remind his audience that crime in PG County is dropping, and assure people that the county is safer now than it has been in many years.
Gripping the podium firmly with his left hand, Magaw nods to the assembled journalists and begins: “While the murder investigation into Charles Walker is still very active and just barely one day old, I want to first and foremost offer my personal condolences to the family during this difficult time.”
Detectives have been working tirelessly, Magaw says, and have developed suspects. He appreciates the community’s concern and urges witnesses to call with information. He cautions reporters that rumors about a social-media connection to Walker’s homicide are “incorrect” and explains that the motive for the murder is the attempted theft of a pair of shoes.
“When a senseless act of violence takes a young person’s life, this police department and community grieve,” Magaw says. “When five high school students are killed within the 2012–2013 school year, we all demand both justice and accounting of circumstances that give rise to juvenile violence.”
The chief goes on to say that the department, other county agencies, and various interfaith groups will soon announce a new strategy to address the problem, and the effort will focus intensely on conflict resolution. He also touts the Homicide Unit’s success at having solved two of the five murders. He adds that there will be a “significant announcement” in the Marckel Ross investigation next week and that “significant leads are being vigorously pursued in the Amber Stanley case.”
The chief looks at each of the reporters standing in front of him and declares confidently, “I anticipate all five of these cases to close with arrests.”
After taking several questions, Magaw concludes the press conference. He and his commanders return to their offices and begin to discuss the department’s plan to roll out the conflict-resolution program and a crime-suppression plan if the violence continues apace. The latter initiative will involve the deployment of officers in cars with flashing lights at the county’s forty-four most violent street corners from 3:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m. Though it is likely to prevent shootings within a several-block radius of each officer, the program will be expensive, costing the cash-strapped county about $130,000 a week in overtime.
Meanwhile, the press conference jinx has once again worked its dark power. Not thirty minutes after Magaw leaves the podium, a cascade of phone calls and text messages pours down on the chief, the assistant chief, and the other commanders in the department. The calls and messages all convey the same horrific news: a sixth PG student has been shot and killed, and another teenager has been mortally wounded.
7:50 p.m., Tuesday, February 19
Detective Billy Watts slips under the yellow police tape, his head bowed against the night’s cold drizzle, his leather soles clacking against the wet, oily pavement. For a moment, he stands alone in a corner of this dreary parking lot, his face illuminated by the dull glow of a building’s amber f
loodlights. If ever a homicide scene captured the atmosphere of the entire county, it is this one.
To his left, Watts sees Assistant Chief Kevin Davis and several commanders chatting with a group of officers. Davis—a short, stern man—does not look pleased, though that is hardly surprising, since his mouth is usually a frozen grimace and his cheeks are perpetually flushed crimson. It is never a good sign when Davis appears at a scene, and it takes little effort for Watts to imagine Davis growling under his breath about the murder of yet another teenager, this one reported to be just fourteen.
Watts, bundled in a black overcoat, walks across the parking lot. This is his case, and the double shooting took place outside the twenty-four-building Penn Mar apartment complex, which is located in the heart of Forestville, a four-square-mile, amoeba-shaped parcel of unincorporated suburbia nestled against the Beltway. When the detective reaches Brian Reilly, who is standing on the curb in the center of the crime scene, he shakes his lieutenant’s hand and offers a quiet hello.
A tall and imposing man, Reilly has dark bags under his eyes. His colleague Lieutenant Billy Rayle has been out on sick leave while recovering from a burst appendix, so Reilly has responded to most of the crime scenes over the past two months. The forty-two-year-old officer starts with the good news. “Your victim isn’t fourteen,” he tells Watts. “He’s eighteen.”
As Watts jots down some notes, Reilly continues. The victim’s name is Aaron Kidd, and despite his age, he’s only a freshman in high school. The second victim is Kidd’s friend Andre Shuford, also eighteen; later, Watts will learn that he is no longer in school. Shuford is dying at Prince George’s Hospital Center: doctors say he is brain-dead and has only a day or two to live, which will make this a double homicide.
As Reilly finishes, he and Watts are joined by two more detectives, Ben Brown and Andre Brooks. Watts and Brown, longtime partners, exchange knowing nods: having caught the murders while on the evening shift, they are going to go sleepless again. Watts had been about to take a nap and Brown was just sitting down to a family dinner when they got the calls that will upend their lives for days to come.
A Good Month for Murder Page 19
