In April it will be three years since D.C. teen Raheem Jackson was killed.
Many others, young and old, have been killed since, but it’s Jackson who I most often think about as I report and edit for Homicide Watch D.C. In nearly three years, his words have never left me.
Walking Benning Road at night is like
being scarred on your first fight.
Jackson was young, and bright, a straight-A student, a basketball player, and a poet. He was shot and killed at 9:30 one April evening in the 1300 block of Congress Street Southeast.
If his words had any premonition, it was simply reality. That he was a young black man in a city where young black men are all too often victims — or suspects — of homicide.
It’s crazy. You are paranoid, cautions on every
turn. You hear a voice, turn around.
No one speaking a word.
walking through the dark street
you run away with a long distance scream.
You’re running from dark faces you’ve seen,
all the nightmares you have ever dreamed.
Jackson’s words have lived with me, through three years of running Homicide Watch D.C., not because they are poignant — though they are — or because they are artful — though they are that, too, but because I hear them, so often, from so many corners of the District.
Writing for Homicide Watch D.C. about the death of her brother, Timothy Dawkins, just this year, Kia Dupree Joppy said:
I feel like Timothy was assassinated because no one really cares about the violence that’s erupting in this city. The neighborhood where he was murdered has been plagued with violence since my parents’ generation. It’s so ironic that Timothy died the same way so many other young black males have died in this city. He worked so hard counseling others about the evils associated with violence and ignorance. How ironic that many more have been slain since his death in the same neighborhood.
Or the words, earlier this year, from a commenter, Scared Citizen, who wrote:
When I was 12 years old my 17-year-old brother was killed, shot dead on D.C. streets, this was in 1995, from that day forward I vowed to never have children because I was too scared someone will kill my child … but life goes on & needless to say I’m 30 years old with 3 kids, when I became pregnant I prayed to God that I didn’t have boys because they always seem to get killed, I have two boys. My point is the world is so cold, girl or boy you just might end up dead!!
This is our city. Our neighbors, friends, colleagues, ourselves.
Last year D.C. celebrated a milestone: fewer than 100 people were killed in the District that year. This year, with the twelve victims of the mass-shooting of the Navy Yard counted among our homicide victims, the number will be higher.
Though the count rises, we recognize that this year, our losses are not greater, but more.
Which is why Jackson’s words come back to me.
It’s just you facing reality as you get to your house
still in a daze, trying to figure out
what it’s like to
walk down Benning Road.
Jackson’s death remains an open case, without any arrests. Other cases have closed. The death of teen Lucki Pannell, who was killed the same year as Jackson, was closed just this year, as were 26 other homicides from 2012 and earlier. With these cases, the Metropolitan Police Department is likely to announce a closure rate of more than 75 percent.
As these cases move through preliminary hearings, indictments, trials, pleas and verdicts, we watch, each day, the march of justice. But we don’t forgot those for whom there hasn’t yet been justice. Those like Jackson, waiting. Those like Joppy, becoming frustrated. And those like Scared Citizen, living in fear.
For them, we at Homicide Watch D.C. promise: Mark every death. Remember every victim. Follow every case.
