Around midday on March 9, 1977, Maurice Williams, an up-and-coming reporter with WHUR radio, asked to join his boss and a colleague on a business lunch.
Kojo Nnamdi, WHUR news editor at the time, turned down the 24-year-old Howard University graduate. Though his colleagues described him as energetic, observant and a bright shining star, “Junior” simply wasn’t one of the “big boys,” Nnamdi said.
A short time later, 12 members of the Hanafi Muslims stormed a virtually unprotected District Building on Pennsylvania Avenue. Williams stepped off a fifth-floor elevator when a gunman shot him in the chest. He died in the hallway.
“To this day,” Nnamdi said, “[then-Washington Post reporter Milton Coleman] and I said, ‘What would have happened if we had just taken him to lunch?’ ”
On Monday, District dignitaries past and present joined Williams’ family and friends to rededicate the John A. Wilson Building press room in the reporter’s honor — a plaque that once memorialized Williams disappeared years ago — and to reflect 30 years later on a shocking act of domestic terrorism that rocked the nation’s capital.
At the height of the siege, armed Hanafis held nearly 150 hostages at the District building, the B’nai Brith building and the Islamic Center. The Hanafi leader, Khalifa Hamaas Abdul Khaalis, demanded revenge for the 1973 killings of seven family members in a D.C. home.
The terrorists shot Williams, special police officer Mack Cantrell and then-D.C. Council Member Marion Barry. Cantrell died several days later; Barry survived and won the mayoral election in 1978. The 39-hour horror ended after the ambassadors from three Islamic nations joined the negotiations and convinced Khaalis and his partners to surrender.
Barry, an at-large council member at the time, recalled stepping off the elevator just outside the council chambers when shots rang out. A bullet struck him just above the heart.
“My stomach is turning, listening to all of that, reflecting back on it,” he said, repeatedly praising God for saving his life.
The memorial ceremony comes days after a federal appeals court ruled the District’s gun ban unconstitutional. The events of 30 years ago should serve as a reminder “of what tragedy can befall people when guns are in the hands of the wrong people,” Council Chairman Vincent Gray said.
Khaalis earned a conviction and a prison sentence between 41 years and 120 years.
