S Street Rising

by Ruben Castaneda

  I’m not dying in here.

  His bleeding leg quivering, Kuchta struggled to his feet. He braced himself against the door. He reached for the bolt. He grabbed it. He slid it open and collapsed.

  On the other side of the door, Trugman heard the bolt move. Someone tossed him a bulletproof vest.

  Kauffman and Callen got on their hands and knees. Trugman unholstered his Glock. With one hand, Trugman held the vest in front of himself and his fellow cops like a shield; in the other hand, he held his gun.

  Trugman opened the door. Together the three cops moved into the smoke-filled room. Kuchta was lying on his back, bleeding, screaming in pain. Kauffman and Callen grabbed him by his belt. Kauffman was a big man, and he wasn’t gentle. He and Callen pulled Kuchta out of the room.

  Kuchta was bone white. That was bad, Trugman thought. It meant he’d lost a tremendous amount of blood. Yet Kuchta was still screaming—that was good. It meant he had a fighting chance. Kauffman and Callen let go of Kuchta in the hallway, and a couple of paramedics grabbed the wounded agent.

  Kuchta felt two sets of hands lift him from under his arms. He felt himself being dragged backwards through the hallway. He saw officers lined up on both sides of the corridor—uniforms, detectives, ERT cops in full battle gear.

  The rescuers pulled Kuchta into an office. Cops and emergency medical technicians seemed to fill the small room. He saw two paramedics. One of them said, “We need a stretcher.” Kuchta heard the voice of his dead father, who’d been a medic in the Navy: “You have to get him out of here now!” The paramedics suddenly seemed to respond to the voice Kuchta had hallucinated.

  Someone wrapped him in a sheet and carried him to an elevator. The rescuers lowered Kuchta onto a stretcher on the elevator floor. When they reached the ground floor, they ran him out of the building, into an ambulance. A police sergeant rode with him. Kuchta knew he would never wake up if he lost consciousness.

  The ambulance reached the Washington Hospital Center. Kuchta saw a hallway whiz by. He found himself on a bed in an operating room.

  Kuchta shivered so fiercely that he thought he might die from the cold. Nurses placed hot towels on his bleeding body. A doctor moved a mask toward his face. The doctor was going to put him under.

  He thought of Anastasia and Leni. I’m not going to die.

  “Is it okay to fall asleep now?” Kuchta asked.

  “Yes, it’s okay to fall asleep now,” the doctor replied.

  Kuchta knew he would keep his vow. He would not leave Anastasia and Leni. The doctor placed the mask over Kuchta’s face.

  Less than an hour after Trugman and the others pulled Kuchta to safety, Lou and a handful of detectives and FBI agents stepped into the cold-case office. The room remained thick with gun smoke and the acrid smell of cordite. The walls were pocked with dozens of bullet holes. Paramedics had taken away the teenager who’d walked into the office with the shooter and caught a round in his butt as he ran away. Wounded and terrified, he’d hidden inside a small interview room connected to the main office until Trugman and the others rescued Kuchta. The other teenager had run out of the cold-case office as Kuchta and the invader traded shots.

  The lawmen gazed at the aftermath of the massacre in silence. The bodies of Martinez and Miller lay on the floor. Martinez had engaged in a furious shootout with the killer. Investigators would learn that one of her shots had disabled his Cobray. But by then she was mortally wounded. The attacker grabbed her gun and fired a final shot into her head before turning the gun on himself. Lou’s eyes settled on the shooter, whose body lay on the floor next to Martinez’s. The assault weapon lay nearby.

  In the moment, Lou didn’t feel anger or a sense of violation or fear. He didn’t have time to process his emotions. This was a crime scene, and he had a job to do. Forensics would have its hands full accounting for all the fired rounds. The feds would run down the source of the machine pistol. The crucial, immediate questions were: Who the hell did this? What was his beef? Was he working alone, or were there more attacks to come?

  A crime-scene technician walked into the office with his fingerprint kit. He knelt next to the gunman’s body and went to work. Lou and the others retreated to his office to start divvying up assignments.

  As Lou and the FBI agents launched the investigation, I stood on the street outside police headquarters, rocking from side to side, trying to stay warm. Twilight was descending, and so was the temperature. A police spokesman had doled out the basics to me and the other reporters gathered outside headquarters: Two FBI agents were dead inside the homicide office, and a police sergeant had died on the way to the hospital. A third agent was seriously wounded, in the hospital, fighting for his life. The killer was dead, apparently by his own hand.

  For what seemed like the hundredth time, I pulled out my Post cell phone and punched in the digits to Lou’s office. The phone rang and rang. I paged him a dozen times, with no response.

  The afternoon had begun with a routine press conference. Along with a handful of other reporters, I’d gone to a room around the corner from the homicide office where departmental brass would be trying to explain how an officer had apparently botched a kidnapping-and-child-prostitution case. Wyndell Watkins, the chief of detectives, had been assigned the task of damage control.

  Watkins stepped to the podium at the front of the room. Notebooks were flipped open. TV cameras and tape recorders were activated. Still photographers moved into position. Watkins adjusted his tie and began to speak.

  Sergeant Joe Gentile, MPD’s main spokesperson, burst through the door.

  “There’s been a shooting in the building,” he said. “Everyone needs to stay right here. The building’s on lockdown. We don’t know where the gunman is, or if there’s more than one shooter. Stay here. You’ll all be safe.”

  Gentile and Watkins flew out of the room. I called my editor, Keith Harriston; then Lou; then every other cop I knew. I knew that Lou had been planning to take the day off to work on a law school paper, but I also knew he would get to the office as soon as he heard about the attack. Lou didn’t answer his cell phone or his home number, and he didn’t respond to my pages.

  An hour or so after Gentile had announced we were locked down, body-armored ERT officers began escorting us out of the building. We raced down the stairs and jogged out of the entrance.

  For more than two hours I called Lou’s direct office line, with no luck. Finally, he answered.

  “Homicide.”

  “It’s me. What the hell happened in there?”

  “Some guy walked into cold case and shot it up,” Lou answered calmly. I could hear excited voices in the background, but Lou was as composed as ever.

  “Can you tell me anything about the shooter—who he is, why he did this?”

  “Just some guy. Young black male, late teens, early twenties. We don’t know who he is yet.”

  “Any idea why he picked cold case? Motive?”

  The background commotion on Lou’s end intensified. The voices were getting louder, more excited.

  “Not yet. Listen, I’m up to my elbows in alligators right now. I’ll have to call you later.” Lou rang off.

  Someone from the crime lab called Lou a couple of hours later. The shooter’s prints were on file. His name was Bennie Lee Lawson, age twenty-five. A handful of detectives were in Lou’s office. Lou hung up the phone and asked them if they’d ever heard of Lawson.

  “Yeah, he’s the guy you interrogated about a week back,” said Willie Jefferson, a veteran detective. “On that home-invasion triple, remember?” Lou didn’t. He usually had great recall of specific cases, but for some reason he couldn’t bring Lawson to mind.

  “You remember,” Jefferson said. “Home invasion; an old man was killed.”

  Now Lou remembered: A couple of gunmen had burst into a home in Northwest, near the Maryland state line. An eighty-nine-year-old man struggled with one of them. He and two others were gunned down. It looked like a drug beef.

&nbs
p; The night of the killings, a patrol cop had stopped Lawson and another guy as they drove near the triple-murder scene. The cop didn’t have enough evidence to hold them. He wrote Lawson’s name in a field report.

  One of Lou’s detectives paid Lawson a visit. Lawson agreed to come to homicide to answer some questions. Lou watched the beginning of the interrogation on a closed-circuit hookup. Then the detective had to go to court, so Lou stepped in for him.

  “You’ve heard of DNA?” Lou asked.

  Lawson nodded.

  “We found blood on the floorboard of the car you were stopped in. DNA tests will be back in two weeks,” Lou said. “If we find any of the victims’ DNA, you’re done. With three bodies, you’re looking at a hundred years. That number could go down—if you help us.”

  It was a bluff. There was no blood, no DNA test.

  Lawson squirmed. He stared at the table. He said nothing—until he said he wanted to go home. Lou forgot about Lawson the moment he walked out the door.

  There was nothing memorable or unusual about him: Lawson was a garden-variety thug, a low-level member of a Northwest D.C. drug gang that operated about three miles north of downtown. Lou had hundreds of other cases on his plate. That had been nine days earlier.

  An hour or so after Lou learned that Lawson was the shooter, a small army of shotgun-wielding FBI agents and black-clad ERT officers stormed the brick rambler where Lawson lived with his father. Lawson’s room was in the basement.

  Homicide detectives and FBI agents began going over every inch of the basement. Carlito’s Way was in a VCR. In it, Al Pacino portrayed a doomed drug dealer. A detective saw a notebook on the nightstand. He picked it up and started reading.

  Lou was in his office, talking over the investigation with Sergeant J. T. McCann, when the detective who found the notebook called. McCann answered.

  “You won’t believe this,” the detective said. The cold-case shooter was after the captain. He wanted to kill Hennessy. McCann thought it was a bad joke.

  “This is no time to screw around,” he scolded.

  “This is no joke,” the detective said. “We found a notebook. The shooter wrote all these lines; they look like rap lyrics. Over and over, he wrote, ‘Captain Hennessy must die!’”

  McCann put down the phone and looked at Lou. “You’re not going to believe this,” he said.

  He told Lou about the notebook.

  Lou wasn’t sure what to make of it.

  After my brief conversation with Lou, I went back to the office to write the main story. Other reporters were contributing, but I was putting it together. One of the local TV news stations had reported that the shooter was a disgruntled cop, but no one else had anything specific about the gunman or his possible motive. It was after 8:00 p.m. I was crashing on deadline when my phone rang.

  It was Lou. “We got the guy’s name, and we think we know the motive,” he said, his voice a near whisper. There were other voices in the background. He didn’t want anyone to hear him.

  I cradled the receiver on my shoulder and grabbed a pen and notebook.

  “Who was he? Why did he do this?”

  Lou told me Lawson’s name, then added, “He was after me.”

  “What do you mean he was after you?”

  Lou explained—how Lawson was identified through fingerprints, how Lou had interviewed him about a previous triple murder, about the search at the suspect’s home, the notebook, and the lyrics directly threatening the commander of the homicide squad.

  I was already wired, fueled by the adrenaline of working on a big breaking story. As I furiously took notes, I experienced a moment of pure journalistic joy. It was the feeling of having a monumentally great fucking story all to myself. Local and national reporters were covering the massacre, but none of them had this.

  For an instant I thought of the TV reporters who made double, triple, maybe quadruple my salary. A few seemed to be mostly skilled at looking good. Some of them were legitimate, hardworking journalists. Like many print reporters, part of me resented the big money many of the TV people were paid for doing one-or two-minute stand-ups. When you read the paper tomorrow, you can chew on this story, you overpaid, blow-dried—

  “You can’t use it,” Lou said.

  I felt as if a 230-pound linebacker had just knocked the wind out of me.

  “What? Why not?”

  “We’ve got to track down as many of Lawson’s associates tonight as we can. We’ll probably be serving more search warrants tomorrow. We don’t want to tip them off about how much we know. I’m asking you to hold it.”

  He might as well have told me that Thanksgiving, Christmas, and my birthday would be canceled for the rest of my days. I could actually feel the adrenaline recede. My joy at having a great exclusive evaporated. For a moment or two, I had envisioned breaking the news that the headquarters killer was gunning for the homicide chief. But I knew that if I agreed to Lou’s request, news this juicy wouldn’t stay under wraps for long, not with so many TV and radio journalists working on the story. Someone else would break the story.

  For a couple of seconds, I thought about trying to figure out a way to use the information anyway. I had several detective sources—maybe one of them would confirm the incredible story that the headquarters shooter had been gunning for the commander of the homicide squad.

  Lou might be momentarily upset if he saw the story in the paper the next day, but I could explain it by blaming my editors; that was a time-honored and usually reliable journalistic tactic. I could say that my bosses had heard about Lawson and ordered me to call every source I knew until I confirmed the story. Lou knew that I had bosses to answer to, and that I had other sources in the police department; he would no doubt accept such an explanation.

  But Lou trusted me—which was precisely why I couldn’t try to slide the story into print through a side door.

  Lou was one of the fairest, most honorable men I’d ever known, and maybe the smartest. I considered myself a tenacious and resourceful reporter who always found a way, but I couldn’t try to pull a fast one on him. And I didn’t want to do anything to endanger the investigation. Lou had always been straight with me. He deserved the same in return.

  “All right,” I said. “I won’t use it until you give me the green light.”

  I finished writing the story. I sat on the Lawson material. It would likely come out the following day, and one of the well-compensated TV people would be the first to report it. Which is exactly what happened.

  I’d thought that losing the scoop would bother me, but it didn’t.

  Some things are more important than a story.

  Metal detectors were installed at police headquarters the day after the attack. The building was also home to other city offices, including the Department of Motor Vehicles and the Board of Parole. For years, even people with criminal records had been free to go in and out without having to clear significant security. Those days were over.

  Working together, Lou’s detectives and FBI agents quickly determined that Lawson had been acting alone. By interviewing Lawson’s friends and associates, the investigators put together a narrative: After Lawson had returned to his neighborhood following Lou’s interrogation, some of his thug friends had taunted him, suggesting he’d been let go because the police had broken him. They’d teased him for being a “weak link.”

  Lawson had previously been imprisoned for a weapons violation. Investigators discovered strong evidence that he’d been raped while incarcerated. The sexual assault and the taunting had probably motivated Lawson’s attack, investigators believed. FBI agents and police also discovered that the leader of Lawson’s gang, Kobi Mowatt, had apparently planned to have Lawson killed. Lawson had learned about Mowatt’s plan and preempted it by going on a suicide mission. It was a warped, violent way to show his fellow gangsters he wasn’t weak. And by killing himself, Lawson had made sure he wouldn’t face another sexual assault in prison.

  It was happenstance that Lawson had
ended up in the cold-case office instead of the much larger main homicide squad room, where he might have killed more people. When Lawson walked into police headquarters, he had run into two teenagers he didn’t know. He had asked where the homicide office was located, and one or both of the teenagers had said they were headed that way. Lawson had simply tagged along as they walked him to the cold-case office.

  Lawson might have wanted to prove something to his fellow gangsters, but his actions ended up getting many of them locked up. In the wake of the shooting, a team of MPD detectives and FBI agents took down Lawson’s former crew. The task force arrested eight leaders of the gang, who were charged in federal court with offenses including murder, racketeering, kidnapping, and drug trafficking.

  Understandably, the members of the task force took Lawson’s attack personally, and they vowed to search every corner of the earth for the killer’s compatriots. Almost all of Lawson’s fellow thugs were tracked down in the neighborhood where they sold drugs and committed other crimes—around 1st and Kennedy Streets Northwest. FBI agents and police clamped down on the neighborhood, pulling over everyone who bought drugs from the crew and trying to flip them. Facing jail time, many of the drug buyers agreed to testify for the government. By early 1996 the task force had locked up about a dozen of the gang’s most active members.

  Collectively, the suspects were charged with seventeen homicides, including the triple murder that had led to the headquarters attack. Almost all of them eventually pleaded guilty.

  Most D.C. gangsters who go on the lam get about as far as an aunt’s house in another quadrant of the city. But the leader of Lawson’s crew showed some enterprise in his efforts to evade justice. Kobi Mowatt was nowhere to be found in his neighborhood, in D.C., or anywhere else in the country.

  FBI agent Mark Giuliano and D.C. homicide detective Anthony Brigidini teamed up to track down Mowatt. They were determined to get him.

  “He’s the king,” Giuliano recalled. “And he needs to go down.”

  Giuliano and Brigidini interviewed everyone Mowatt knew—gang associates, girlfriends, relatives. The case was featured on America’s Most Wanted. After about a year of painstaking investigation, Giuliano and Brigidini executed a search warrant at the home of Mowatt’s mother, in Prince George’s County, Maryland. They searched almost every inch of the house and discovered nothing suggesting where Mowatt might be hiding out.