Washington, like any other U.S.
city with a large inner-city poverty population, has a high homicide rate
(195 homicides in 2005, down substantially from the high of 482 recorded
in 1991). But homicides involving strangers are the exception; most of
these deaths involve disputes among acquaintances, turned into killings by
the ready availability of guns. Most threatening to people whose mates and
acquaintances aren't violent is the "robbery gone bad", as happened in
Mount Pleasant in September, 2005, when Gregory Shipe was shot dead on
Irving Street, probably by a teenager attempting a
robbery.
The "shotgun stalker", in early
1993, was a threat of a wholly different order. Here was a man
who targeted total innocents, residents minding their own business, walking on
the streets of Mount Pleasant and Columbia Heights. Such a shooting is
a nearly insoluble crime: there is no motive, no connection between
the murderer and the victim, no forensic evidence, and this man was careful
to shoot with no witnesses about to identify him, or his car. (Shotgun
pellets bear no gun-identifying marks.) Because these shootings were
utterly random, everyone and anyone was a potential victim, no matter how
innocent, no matter how well-behaved, no matter how street-smart and
cautious. This quite naturally terrified residents who ordinarily might be
hardened to the occasional shooting in Columbia Heights.
The first target was a
woman walking alone on Holmead Place (see photo, Holmead and Oak, "ground
zero" for the shotgun shooter), at Monroe Street, at 8:45 pm on February
23, 1993. A gun barrel appeared from the window of a slow-moving car, then
a shot rang out. The shooter missed. The would-be victim called police,
who declined to take the matter very seriously, dismissing the gun as a
pellet or BB gun, the perpetrators teenage vandals, the target a window
nearby, and the woman as merely happening to be nearby.
|
Holmead
Place and Oak Street, today. Most of the shotgun stalker's victims were
shot near here.
|
Even as these officers
interviewed the first intended victim, the stalker fired again, now on Oak
Street, a very short distance away. But the officers speaking to the woman
had turned their radios down for their interview, and were unaware of this
second shooting, 20 minutes after the first. The victim this time, a
22-year-old man, was hit in the head, and very seriously injured, losing
one eye and much of the use of one arm. Unfortunately, because this victim
was young, male, and black, MPD detectives dismissed this as an ordinary
drug turf dispute, despite the victim's denials that he was involved in
drug dealing. (He had planned to start a job at a nursing home the day
after he was shot.) Not for another month did the officers learn of the
earlier shooting on Holmead Place.
This was perceived, it seems, as merely the "normal" level
of violence associated with this part of Columbia Heights. (Today, 13 years later,
the 3500 block of 14th Street remains a crime "hot
spot".)
On March 4, two weeks after these two shootings,
the stalker returned, shooting another pedestrian on Holmead Place. This
time the victim was a 43-year-old man, shot in the head. Again, the police
attributed this attack to drug warfare.
The situation changed
abruptly on March 17, when a woman was hit by shotgun pellets from a
passing car, similar to the February 23 shooting, but now in Mount
Pleasant. This changed the calculus: shootings, and drug wars, may be
"normal" in Columbia Heights, but that's not the case in
rapidly-gentrifying, upscale Mount Pleasant. Almost a month after the
first shooting, police began to wonder if there was something exceptional
taking place. Still, they speculated that the victim perhaps just happened
to be standing in the crossfire between warring drug
gangs.
On March 23, precisely four weeks after the first
shooting, the stalker struck again, this time killing Elizabeth "Bessie"
Hutson, 28, as she walked her dogs in an alley paralleling Park Road in
Mount Pleasant (see photo). This was on the far west end of Mount
Pleasant, between 19th Street and Rock Creek Park, far away from any
street-gang disputes in Columbia Heights. For the first time, the MPD
realized that they had a random shooter in the neighborhood, gunning down
perfect innocents, and they connected this series of shootings to the
first incident on Holmead Place. "That shooting made the link," said the
police district commander.
|
The
alley running parallel to Park Road, west of 19th Street.
This dead-ends at Rock Creek Park. No one happened by for 20 minutes, and the shooter
had ample time to escape.
|
I recall seeing the notice of
that shooting in the morning Post, and realizing myself that this was
something very much out of the ordinary. (I knew nothing, of course, of
any of the previous shootings.) I warned my wife, and our young cousin
resident on our top floor, to be extra careful. To this day, Emily is
convinced that she saw the blue Toyota associated with this shooter one
evening as she parked across the street from our home, and she warily
waited in her car for that car to disappear before getting out to walk to
our house.
On April
4, the stalker took another shot, once again at a
woman walking on Holmead Place. On April 10 he returned to Holmead Place, shooting
at three pedestrians in the area in turn, killing one, a
35-year-old man.
On April 19, two months after the first
shooting, the stalker returned to Columbia Heights, taking shots at three
pedestrians, in broad daylight, even as hordes of MPD officers patrolled
the area. On 13th Street, a 61-year-old woman was shot dead, the stalker's
fourth homicide.
Finally a lucky break came: the stalker, leaving the
scene of this last shooting, was spotted by Kenneth Stewart, an off-duty
MPD officer, who spotted him running a red light on Sherman Avenue at
Kenyon Street. Officer Stewart, northbound on Sherman, turned around and
gave pursuit. The stalker turned into the Atlantic Plumbing parking lot,
hoping to elude his pursuer. Stewart blocked the exit with his own car,
trapping him in this lot on Florida Avenue (see photo). The shotgun, lying
on the back seat of the now-infamous blue Toyota, tied the driver, James
Swann, to the shootings. I understand that patrons of the Sparkle Car Wash, adjacent to the parking
lot, applauded the capture.
|
The parking lot of Atlantic Plumbing Supply, on Florida Avenue, where the pursuit
finally came to an end, courtesy of an alert
off-duty MPD officer, Kenneth Stewart.
|
And so ended the two-month nightmare in Columbia
Heights and Mount Pleasant, after a total of 14 shootings, including four
homicides.
Why did he do this? It was utter insanity: Swann heard
voices, including the "evil spirit" of Malcolm X, which commanded him to
shoot people in Northwest Washington. Why these neighborhoods in DC, where
Swann, a resident of New York, New Jersey, and Maryland, had no
connection? Somehow, this "evil spirit" believed the people of northwest
DC, "the civil rights side of town", to be responsible for his 1965
assassination in New York. Curiously, there was nothing racial about this
rampage, and almost all of Swann's victims were black. Swann drove
here from New Jersey to do his violence, and I guess he just came down
16th Street and turned off, choosing our neighborhoods more or less at
random. He used a 20-gauge shotgun that he had purchased just under a year
earlier, at a K-mart in Oxon
Hill
.
It all
made no sense. Swann was declared "not guilty by reason of insanity" in
1994, and committed to Saint Elizabeth's. As of 2005, he was still there. We can only hope that he remains
today held safely in confinement, in a mental hospital
somewhere.
Two aspects of this miserable incident stand out.
First was the level of fear instilled in residents, because no one was
safe, everyone was threatened, no matter how innocent, no matter how
careful. Most homicide victims are people who are intrinsically at risk,
because of their associates, because of their activities, or because of
their poor choice of mates. The great majority of homicide victims in the
District are young, black, and male, so those of us who are not, and who
live "clean" lifestyles, can feel fairly secure (against homicides, if not
against automobile break-ins). The shotgun stalker changed all that,
putting everyone at risk, black or white, young or old, cautious or
careless.
Second was the failure of the Metropolitan Police
to take the first shooting incidents seriously, because they involved
victims who were perceived to be "at risk" due to their locations.
Shootings on Holmead Place in Columbia Heights were shrugged off as simply
part of life on that street (which remains today, 13 years later, on the
rough side). Shootings in Mount Pleasant, especially far on the west end,
are a different matter, because such things are not supposed to happen in
this "good" neighborhood.
Perhaps the day will come when
shootings, and gunshots, are rare in Columbia Heights, as well as Mount
Pleasant, and will command a high level of police attention, instead of a
dismissal as no more than the ordinary violence of the
neighborhood.
One more note of interest in this wretched
episode: the plainly insane Mr Swann had found occasional
employment, as a security guard!
Return to home
|