Damon Ward was celebrating a birthday with friends on U Street when the bullet struck him in the chest. It was the winter of 2006. Two groups of people nearby got into a fight over a parking space near Ben’s Chili Bowl at 3 o’clock in the morning. A man pulled out a gun and started blasting away.
Ward, 33, an architect from Arlington, died hours later on a hospital table.
| Recent cold-case homicides end up in convictions |
| • Yolanda Baker: Terrence Barnett was convicted last year of the 1999 murder of Baker, his wife and the mother of his three children, despite the fact that her body was never recovered. Barnett was sentenced to 20 years. |
| • Ronald Jones: John Holmes was convicted last year for the 1990 road rage shooting death of Jones, a promising student who had been accepted at Howard law school. Holmes was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison. |
| • Raymonde Plantiveau: DNA from the murder scene led to church deacon Melvin Jackson, who was sentenced to 40 years to life in 2009 for the death of Plantiveau, a Frenchwoman visiting her daughter in Georgetown |
Detectives had a few clues: Dark green Suburban-type sport utility vehicle, Virginia plates with a partial number (55H7), occupied by four black men in their early 20s.
But more than five years later, the identity of Ward’s killer remains a mystery.
“That’s one of those cases where you say, are you kidding me? There were so many people around, but no one has been able to tell us anything,” said Capt. Michael Farish, who heads D.C.’s homicide branch.
The Ward killing is all too typical. Of the city’s roughly 10,000 murders since 1969, about 3,300 remain unsolved.
Police and prosecutors are determined to cut into that number. DNA evidence and other new technologies are helping. But the key is a new focus that local law enforcement officials are bringing to closing old cases.
U.S. Attorney Ronald Machen has designated three veteran prosecutors to work cold-case homicides full-time. In recent months, two men were sentenced to more than 48 years each for a 2003 slaying in which they lit a homeless man’s clothes on fire, stuffed his head in a toilet and shot him in the head as he begged for his life.
“You solve one of those cases and it sends a message loud and clear that we’re never going to forget,” Machen told The Washington Examiner.
In five years, the cold-case unit has closed 85 cases, including the District’s most notorious whodunit, the murder of intern Chandra Levy.
Recently, the District has moved thousands of cold-case files from a federal warehouse in Suitland to offices in police headquarters for review. Information about suspects, witnesses, ballistics evidence is being typed into a database for possible links.
Farish says he thinks in 80 percent of the cases, the detectives know who did it, but they don’t have the evidence to prove it in court. Sometimes the name of the killer is in the file, but the police just don’t know it yet, he said.
Ballistics from a slug might show that the gun was used in other shootings. A piece of clothing may now contain enough DNA material to find a match.
DNA is an ever-evolving science, Farish said.
“In the 1990s, you needed a bucket of blood,” Farish said. “Now just a couple of drops will do.”
DNA evidence has recently been used to connect the unidentified man who raped and killed National Academy of Science intern Christine Mirzayan in 1998 to at least eight rapes in Maryland. Police plan to start a website seeking information about the culprit.
Time works against the detectives, memories fade, evidence gets lost, witnesses move on sometimes. But sometimes time works in their favor. Relationships change, the reward money is too good to pass up, or someone finds God.
“Sometimes people just can’t ignore their consciences anymore,” Farish said.
But the ghosts of unsolved cases, like the young architect Damon Ward who was slain at a birthday celebration, continue to haunt law enforcement officials.
Ward’s case file is stacked in Farish’s tidy office, waiting the full attention of one of the nine staff detectives. And his family is still waiting for answers.
“This young man is dead because other people were arguing about a parking space,” Farish said. “That is just insanity, but that is so much of what we see. His family is just devastated.”
