Lennard Sweeney, 23, was held Friday on suspicion of first-degree murder while armed in connection to the stabbing death of Edward Eugune Hall Jr..
Hall was found On Sept. 9 in the 4000 block of 1st Street Southeast, bleeding from the abdomen, charging documents say. Before falling unconscious, Hall told officers, “I was robbed by two males.”
An autopsy later found that 38-year-old Hall was stabbed three times: once to the chest, once to the stomach, and once to the right side abdomen.
Charging documents in the case state say surveillance footage from the nearby 7-Eleven showed Hall enter the store while a black man in all black clothing loitered outside. A picture of the man in all black was placed in an MPD database, documents say.
Two days later, a police officer identified the man in all black as Sweeney, a man that the officer saw regularly, “oftentimes in front of, or inside of, the [7-Eleven] store on Martin Luther King Avenue, Southwest,” documents state.
According to the documents, two witnesses who were together in a car told police separately that they each saw two men chase Hall out of an alley that runs between Atlantic and Brandywine Streets Southeast, less than a mile away from the 7-Eleven.
One witness told police that one of the men chasing Hall was wearing all black, and that the other wore a red shirt and jeans. When the two men caught Hall, they hit him in the upper head and body, the witness said, according to the documents. When Hall fell to the ground, the two men continued to beat him, according to the witness.
The other witness said that Hall was “running for his life” out of the alley, but one of the men cut off his getaway path. Then the other man, who was wearing all black, approached Hall. The second witness said the two men began then punching and kicking Hall, including after Hall fell to the ground.
Both witnesses eventually identified the man wearing all black as Sweeney through photo identification, documents say. But the second witness initially picked out an incorrect photo and expressed hesitancy about its choice after leaving the interview room.
Back in the interview room, the second witness explained, “I was concentrating more on the dreads than the faces of the photo,” documents say. Then, the second witness changed its choice to a photo of Sweeney.
Sweeney is scheduled for a preliminary hearing on Sept. 26 at 9:30 before Judge John Ramsey Johnson.
A copy of the charging documents will be added below.
