During my two decades and counting of covering crime in our town, I have heard cops and residents repeat this complaint time after time: Bad guys rarely stay arrested.
It goes like this: A thug commits crimes, cops arrest him, lawyers and judges set him free. Drug dealer busted Friday night is back in business Saturday afternoon; cops pick up a kid shooting up the corner after school Tuesday, and he’s playing hooky again on Wednesday.
But never in my years chronicling crime have I come across anything like the frustrating case of Michael Richardson.
Richardson likes to rob people. His method is simple: He jumps them, grabs money or a cell phone or an iPod. Police say he was implicated in 21 robberies, mostly in the lower part of Columbia Heights, near Florida Avenue. Cops arrested him three times; judges released him. He was a juvenile, and they questioned whether he was mentally competent.
Facts are: Cops kept catching Richardson, judges kept releasing him, he kept robbing people. Over and over.
Enter Inspector Edward Delgado. He had seen Richardson go in and out of jail too many times. An 18-year veteran in the Metropolitan Police Department, he sent e-mails to residents last week: “Let them not release this criminal again.” Delgado had the backing of Chief Cathy Lanier, who had seen the flaws in the system during her days on patrol.
Richardson was in custody at the time for yet another robbery. Delgado asked residents to contact D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles, who has some say over juvenile defendants. Nickles tells me he made sure Richardson was in custody Friday morning. Checking again, he found Richardson was out — again.
“A paperwork blunder,” Nickles says.
From what I can gather from sources, here’s what happened:
Each time Richardson was arrested as a juvenile, his lawyers demanded hearings to assess his mental health, even when he was arrested for armed robbery in March. He was found incompetent, but rather than being held and sent to St. Elizabeths Hospital or another correctional facility, he was released. Why?
On his last arrest, Richardson had reached 18 and was no longer a juvenile. His robbery was caught on video. A detective identified him. Still, federal prosecutors decided to “no paper” the case, in hopes of getting more evidence. They knew Nickles had ordered him held and expected him to remain in custody. Apparently, U.S. marshals never got the Nickles order. When federal prosecutors dropped their case, marshals let Richardson free.
“We have a team of seven officers looking for him,” Delgado told me yesterday afternoon. “As soon as I get off the phone, I’ll be looking, too. My goal is to pick him up today.”
My goal is to find out how the system failed — again and again — and why Delgado still has to spend his time looking for a criminal he has arrested, and arrested, and arrested.
