Damion King
For One Family, the Living Pain of ‘Unsolved’
Lawrence King Sr. sometimes sits on his porch and imagines that he sees his son turning the corner down the street, heading home. But Damion Mikel King doesn’t come home anymore. He was found early one May morning on a quiet Northeast street, stabbed in the neck.
Why Damion was killed remains unclear to the King family. Though the murder occurred more than two years ago, the case is unsolved.
Damion lay on the pavement at about 1:30 a.m. on May 16, 2000, perhaps three feet from the curb in the 2800 block of Myrtle Avenue NE. Lawrence King Sr. saw his son’s uncovered body from behind the police tape.
It still grieves Marie King, Damion’s mother, to picture her second-oldest son calling out for his parents as he lay dying just one block from home. “I know he wanted us,” she said. “I know he was hollering Mommy. I know he was hollering Daddy.”
Damion was 22 years old and, in the grim tally of the District’s homicide statistics, one of 242 people killed in 2000. For scores of families like the Kings, the pain and heartbreak of neighborhood violence knows no end when the crime goes unsolved. They watch as police indefatigably investigate other, more high-profile, deaths. They see other families interviewed on television. They wait in vain for witnesses to break their silence.
The time when the District was known as the murder capital of the nation seems a distant memory — in 1991 alone almost 500 homicides were reported. Last year, the number of people slain in the city dropped to its lowest total in years, at 233. This year, police said that as of last Monday morning, 171 homicides had occurred, an increase of 23 percent over the same period last year but vastly lower than the rate a decade ago.
Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey has said that better police deployment, more attention to solving homicides and other initiatives have helped to make Washington a less violent place to live.
But the numbers tell only a small part of the story.
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The rest can be found in the living rooms of people such as Lawrence and Marie King, who have a picture of their dead son on the mantel above the fireplace in a silver frame. A father sits in a chair on the screened-in porch, dreaming of Damion.
Damion, second of four sons, was a quiet boy, shy around strangers but jolly around the house, entertaining family and friends with renditions of Michael Jackson’s moonwalk dance. Playing football was a passion, and so were dogs. One day as a teenager, he brought home a puppy and begged his parents to let him keep it. Naturally, they relented, and the wolfhound-mix named Cowboy became part of the family.
Lawrence King Sr., 54, said that although Damion had a few run- ins with the law, one of them alcohol-related, he was no different than others his age, a good kid who had made mistakes. “When you’re young, you sometimes do things your parents have warned you about,” King said. Damion dropped out of the now-closed McKinley Senior High School before graduating, and his promise to complete his education was never fulfilled.
In the two years since Damion was slain, the King family has waited for justice. It is a unique anguish, this waiting. There is the hope of an arrest, one day, somehow. There is the feeling of disgust when they drive past a group of youths who hang out in the neighborhood. The Kings believe that these youths are responsible for the murder or know what happened to Damion.
There is the frustration of watching city leaders and police officials rally resources, manpower and public attention for high- profile homicides, such as the Chandra Levy case, while Damion’s death goes unnoticed, without benefit of media coverage or scores of officers combing the crime scene. “If Damion’s case had gotten that much attention, I feel it would have been solved,” said his older brother, Lawrence Jr., 31, of Lanham.
There is also frustration with lack of communication, and lack of progress with the investigation, by D.C. police, family members said.
“Two years later — nothing,” said Lawrence Jr. “Since this case is still open, and the people responsible for it are still walking around, you can’t get any closure from that.”
As of late last week, family members said, the last time they spoke with a detective was July 10 and the last time they met one face to face was in March. Immediately after the murder, Lawrence Jr. and his father talked to many people in the neighborhood, some of whom had information about the case, and they notified detectives about what they learned. Family members said they question how thoroughly or quickly police pursued these tips.
“I just feel that the information that they got from us, an arrest should have been made,” Marie King said.
Police Capt. Thomas McGuire, commander of the Violent Crimes Branch, said he understands the family’s frustration. He said police followed up information supplied by family members, but that it did result in solid leads. Police have tried to stay in contact with the family, he added.
“This is a tough case,” McGuire said. “We’ve interviewed a number of witnesses and people he was with that night. But when it comes down to seeing who may have stabbed him, we’re not getting that from anybody.”
McGuire said police have received no information from anyone who actually saw the stabbing, and there is the possibility, as in other cases, that witnesses are afraid to come forward for fear of retaliation.
He said police are doing everything they can to solve the case. “We want to bring this case to closure just as much as the family does,” McGuire said.
Damion had been walking home from a friend’s house in nearby Mount Rainier on the night he died. Family members said they believe that he had an altercation with a group of young men he knew and that this dispute led to the attack. Lawrence Sr. suspects that robbery was not a motive but that someone might have come upon Damion’s body after the attack and taken the $50 or so that he carried.
McGuire said police believe that Damion was with five or six individuals earlier in the evening when a dispute over money occurred. McGuire said he would not call the individuals suspects.
Lawrence Jr. said he is frustrated with lack of cooperation by some people in the area. Family members talked with two people who later changed their stories about when they were with Damion that night. Others refused to talk at all about what they may have seen.
“I know people had to notice it,” said Lawrence Jr. “For nobody on the street to have seen nothing, it’s just hard for me to believe.”
The family put up posters around the neighborhood with Damion’s picture and placed small cards in local stores urging people to call police. “Murder can be an insufficient word,” one of the cards reads, “until it hits your door, your friend, your child, as it did ours.”
They organized a vigil at the spot on Myrtle Avenue NE where Damion was found. Lawrence Jr., whose surviving brothers are Corey, 18, and Bryson, 9, has been writing and recording rap songs about Damion’s murder. He plans to have a CD called “Unsolved” available in stores in three months.
“Still to this day, we really don’t know exactly what happened,” Lawrence Jr. said. “We really don’t know for sure what Damion died for.”
This year, police have achieved about a 49 percent homicide clearance rate, meaning that an arrest was made or police know who committed the crime and the perpetrator is in jail or dead. The local figure is below the national average of about 56 percent for cities of similar size.
“I’m not happy with 49 percent,” McGuire said. “We need to do better. . . . To me, it’s not about the numbers. It’s about the closing of the case, so that I can bring closure to that family.
“We need information. We need someone who’s going to be able to come forward and tell us exactly what happened at 1:28 in the morning.”
Damion is buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery. He would have turned 25 last Friday. “Sometimes, I just go past the cemetery and just say ‘Damion, who did this to you? Show us a sign or something,’ ” his mother said.
Anyone with any information about the case is asked to call police at 202-727-9099. Police are offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction.
The Washington Post
by Manny Fernandez
September 19, 2002
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.
