Homicide Watch D.C.

Should cases against those accused of breaking the law in D.C. be prosecuted by a local elected official or federal authorities?

On Tuesday D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton introduced a bill in Congress to allow D.C. residents to elect a District Attorney. She said,

There is no law enforcement issue of greater importance to D.C. residents, or on which they have less say, than the prosecution of local crimes. A U.S. attorney has no business prosecuting the local criminal laws of a jurisdiction, an anomaly from the past that is out of place in 21st century home-rule D.C. The goal of the legislation is to put the District of Columbia on par with every other local jurisdiction in attention to its local criminal laws.

This just in from Metro PD. We’ll follow it and try to bring you more soon.

Good afternoon community,

The MPD is currently investigating skeletal remains found in the wooded area in the 2500 Block of Naylor Road S.E.

There are no street closures as it relates to this investigation.

Thank you
Cmdr. Robert J. Contee, III

Homicide Watch DC Editor Laura Amico will be on the Kojo Nnamdi show tomorrow in the noon hour. The topic of conversation is how local blogs and independent media cover crime.
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“We all die,” begins this gripping documentary on the state of post-mortem investigation across America. But what happens after death, especially sudden and unexpected death, may depend on which side of a state or county line that death occurs.

“Post Mortem” is the result of a national investigation by PBS Frontline, ProPublica and NPR, looking at how coroners, medical examiners and forensic pathologists determine causes of death, and how that affects the lives of the living.

Check out this map to see how D.C. compares to the rest of the country.

More reporting on post-mortem investigation is available from Propublica, NPR, and California Watch.

The New York Times reviews the documentary here.

Homicide Watch has taken the spreadsheet of 2010 murders and looked up upcoming court dates for all defendants and added those dates to our calendar.

We’ll be including the recently added cases (in which the crimes predate October 2010) in our week ahead column, which runs on Friday evenings. As always, we remind you that court appointments can change, even at a moments notice. We make every effort to check in before court dates to verify that they have not been rescheduled and pass that information on to you. You can check the court date yourself on the D.C. Superior Court website by typing in the defendant’s name.
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Following are scheduled court appearances for murder cases. This information is current as of Friday, Jan. 21 at 6 p.m. and will be re-verified throughout the week. Please remember that court dates can change, even at the last minute. To view the docket of a case please go to the D.C. Courts website and search by the defendant’s name. To add an item to the calendar, email homicidewatchdc [at] gmail.com.

Monday

DeAngelo Garner in courtroom 310 (Judge Lynn Leibovitz) for a felony status conference in a second-degree murder case. The victim, Antonio Valdez Vela, was shot to death August 30 at approximately 11:30 p.m. in the 4400 block of F Street SE. Garner is represented by attorney Justin Okezie. The status conference is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. Charging documents in the case are here.

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My Fox D.C. reports today that the U.S. Attorney’s office has launched a new effort to examine “cold” homicide cases, assigning three veteran prosecutors to the effort.

U.S. Attorney Ron Machen says he’s formed the unit in part to send a message to the community these cases have not been forgotten. With new resources and a low homicide rate, Machen says it’s a perfect time to re-examine the hundreds of unsolved murders in the city.

Prosecutors Deborah Sines and Amanda Haines will work with DC Police Detectives. Prosecutor Michael Ambrosino will work on ballistics, fingerprints and DNA evidence in the cases.

Metro PD maintains a listing of unsolved homicides on its website.

Washington Post reporter Annys Shin spent some time with me last week, trying to understand what Homicide Watch is trying to do. Her report (and one from Who Murdered Robert Wone) follows. Thanks Annys for being interested in our efforts!

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Last week Homicide Watch D.C. debuted it’s Documents Library, an online resource for all documents related to homicide cases in the District of Columbia.

Here you’ll be able to find unsolved case fliers, news releases, charging documents, case dismissals and more.

Here’s the back story:

One of our primary goals in building Homicide Watch D.C. has always been to display our primary source documents in public whenever possible. Originally that meant just court documents, but as we’ve worked on the site the past four months the field of documents has grown to include reward posters, news releases and more.

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A New York Times opinion piece this morning looks at the United States’ daily murder rate through the eyes of last weekend’s tragic shooting in Tucson.

Excluding the people killed in the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, more than 150,000 Americans have been murdered since the beginning of the 21st century. This endlessly proliferating parade of death, which does not spare women or children, ought to make our knees go weak. But we never even notice most of the killings. Homicide is white noise in this society.

The overwhelming majority of the people who claim to be so outraged by last weekend’s shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords and 19 others — six of them fatally — will take absolutely no steps, none whatsoever, to prevent a similar tragedy in the future. And similar tragedies are coming as surely as the sun makes its daily appearance over the eastern horizon because this is an American ritual: the mowing down of the innocents.

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