Montgomery County police said a ward of the District’s juvenile justice agency was a suspect in the murder of an American University professor after searching the teen’s D.C. home.
Deandrew Hamlin was taken into custody late Monday night after crashing accounting professor Sue Ann Marcum’s stolen Jeep Cherokee in D.C., police said. Marcum was found strangled and beaten to death in her Bethesda home Monday morning. Authorities say her house had been broken into and burglarized.
Police said Wednesday the 18-year-old Hamlin is a “potential suspect” in Marcum’s murder after they found items of “evidentiary value” during a search of the teen’s District home Tuesday evening.
Hamlin has been a ward of the District’s Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services since March 2009, when he was convicted on destruction of property and theft charges, sources told The Washington Examiner.
A source with knowledge of Hamlin’s history with DYRS said a judge directed the agency to send the bipolar teen to a residential treatment center. Judges typically convict juvenile criminals and then leave the sentencing to juvenile justice agency officials. DYRS sent Hamlin to Kids Peace, a psychiatric hospital in Pennsylvania that provides wide-reaching services to troubled youth. Hamlin stayed there for nearly a year before returning to the District, where DYRS placed him in a Department of Mental Health outpatient treatment program provided by a city contractor. He was still receiving services from that provider when Marcum was killed, the source said.
Up until March 2010, Hamlin was on probation under Court Social Services, even while also under DYRS, the source said.
Daniel Onkonkwo, executive director of D.C. Lawyers for Youth, said it’s not unusual for the District’s youth offenders to have passed through multiple agencies.
“It’s not just DYRS,” he said. “Often multiple agencies have failed.”
The Examiner has reported how District teens who later committed murder had slipped through the cracks between agencies charged with prosecuting and treating them, including the D.C. Attorney General’s Office.
So far this year more than a dozen DYRS wards have been charged with murder and at least a half-dozen others have been murdered.
Police said they have interviewed Hamlin, although they have yet to charge him, or anyone else, in connection with Marcum’s murder.
Authorities ask anyone with information to call police at 240-773-5070. Tipsters can also call Crime Solvers of Montgomery County at 866-411-TIPS (8477).
Examiner Staff Writer Emily Babay contributed to this report.
