Gathered around the clear casket of an 11-year-old boy killed at a stop-the-violence cookout on the Fourth of July in 2020, D.C. officials vowed the moment would be a turning point in the nation’s capital.
Three years later, Independence Day in the nation’s capital was again awash in violence — with five people killed in separate incidents Tuesday and Wednesday, and nine others shot and wounded in a single episode that came during a holiday celebration.
The bloodshed was both predictable — the Fourth of July is often violent in D.C. and elsewhere — and a demonstration of how city leaders have struggled to control crime. A community leader in Northeast Washington said he had asked police to have an officer monitor the celebration where nine people were shot — and was less than satisfied with the response.
D.C., like many other cities, has experienced surges in homicides during the pandemic. But this year, while places like Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York have seen killings fall, D.C. has only increased its pace. As of Wednesday evening, 126 people had been killed so far in the city, putting the District on track for one of its deadliest years in two decades.
“I can’t talk about other cities, but I can tell you that we have identified gaps,” said D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) at a Wednesday news conference, before encouraging the city council to pass her legislative proposal that would impose new penalties for gun crimes and make it easier to detain some youths awaiting trial.
The shootings over the July Fourth weekend occurred across the District, from Columbia Heights in Northwest to Washington Highlands in the city’s southern tip. Most appeared to be separate acts. Three people were killed in a span of three hours on the Fourth of July. A 16-year-old girl was left fighting for her life. The latest fatal shooting in the District occurred Wednesday morning during what police described as a dispute on the campus of Catholic University. Police said 25-year-old Maxwell Emerson, of Crestwood, Ky., was slain in that incident.
The other victims: 44-year-old Charles Antonio Stanton, who was fatally shot just before 4:30 p.m. on July Fourth in the unit block of Patterson Street NE; 54-year-old Keith Bradley, who was killed about 6:45 p.m. in the 600 block of Eastern Avenue NE; 28-year-old Nathaniel Holmes, of Southeast Washington, who was shot and killed just before 7:30 p.m. in the 4000 block of Livingston Road SE; and 22-year-old Jesse Benitez, of Northwest Washington, who was shot and killed just before midnight in the 3500 block of 13th Street NW.
The Fourth of July is known among law enforcement officials nationwide to be a sometimes deadly holiday — when the popping of fireworks and the crack of gunfire can be hard to distinguish. Shootings in other areas of the country also had high numbers of wounded people: 30 in Baltimore with two dead, 11 in Texas with three dead, seven in Philadelphia with five dead, and seven in Salisbury with one dead.
But the nation’s capital faces some particularly acute challenges.
Police staffing reached a half-century low earlier this year. Bowser has yet to name a permanent replacement for Robert J. Contee III, who formally retired as police chief last month. She has not tapped interim replacements to lead two offices central to confronting violence — the Office of Gun Violence Prevention and the Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement — both previously led by Linda Harllee Harper, who died in May. Bowser declined Wednesday to discuss when she will fill those positions.
In preparation for the Fourth, the Bowser administration deployed 28 teams of non-law-enforcement officials, including violence interrupters, known as Go Teams, to de-escalate tension in the streets before it turned deadly.
Those teams were sent to areas deemed most dangerous from 6 p.m. to 1 a.m. on July 3, and 4 p.m. to midnight on the Fourth. During that period, there were four fatal shootings. Two occurred in Go Team-designated neighborhoods — one as the team was setting up, and another while the team was actively working.
Then, before 1 a.m. Wednesday, a gunman in a car opened fire at a group of residents at a block party on Meade Street in the Deanwood area of Northeast Washington in what officials called a targeted attack. A 10-year-old and 17-year-old were among nine people injured in that shooting. Police said Wednesday that all victims were expected to survive.
The Deanwood area was not selected as one of the 28 communities most vulnerable to gun violence.
Asked at the news conference about the effectiveness of her violence interruption programs, which employ front-line workers tasked with mediating street conflict, the mayor said: “We have work to do.”
Antawan Holmes, who chairs the Advisory Neighborhood Commission in the Deanwood area and lives on Meade Street, said that at the request of the people holding the block party, he asked D.C. police to put an officer at a nearby corner. He said police responded that they would have officers throughout the area — though Holmes felt that was insufficient.
Bowser said police do not assign officers to a particular block.
Leslie Parsons, who was acting D.C. police chief on Wednesday, said that the shooting “happened in a split second” and that police were on the scene within one to three minutes.
City Administrator Kevin Donahue said that he was pleased with the Go Team operation and stressed that “they cannot control for or stop every instance of violence.”
Holmes, who lives a block from the party where the shooting occurred and heard what he described as gunshots mixed with fireworks, said focusing on illegal firearms and holding shooters accountable misses a larger point.
“We need to talk about all the missed opportunities that got us to the point we’re at right now,” Holmes said, noting failures in education, housing, economic development and jobs. “If we had sped those programs up 10 years ago, we wouldn’t have these issues now.”
Crystal McNeal, Davon McNeal’s mom, has spent the three years since her son’s death trying to disrupt cycles of violence. She said she has taken groups of teenagers out of the city to try to end neighborhood disputes. She has enrolled in the D.C. Peace Academy, a privately funded program that provides intensive training to front-line intervention workers. And she has urged her community to focus on providing resources not just for children, but also for their entire families.
But not on the Fourth of July. That day is not for celebration or even for outreach. It’s one that she and her family simply need to survive, she said, the memory of her small son cratered by a stray bullet still etched in her brain. It was his favorite holiday.
This year, McNeal’s younger son asked her if they could spend Independence Day outside D.C.
“We don’t know the difference between gunshots and fireworks, and that is how I lost my brother,” the 10-year-old boy told her, McNeal recalled. “So I don’t want to stay here.”
They spent the Fourth inside a hotel room in Baltimore.
Omari Daniels and Martin Weil contributed to this report.