Three years ago this evening, Kanika Powell got a strange knock on her apartment door. A man claiming to be a FBI agent held a badge up to the peephole, but when Powell asked for identification, the man left.
The encounter left Powell shaken, and she called police.
Less than a week later, Powell was gunned down outside her Laurel apartment door, and Prince George’s County police are still looking for her killer.
Powell, 28, graduated from Largo High School in 1998, spent three years in the Army and returned to her home in Prince George’s County to become a security contractor at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel.
The Army veteran was so disturbed by the incident that she wrote an email describing the man to friends and family.
“It freaked me out completely because this man knew my name,” she wrote. “The whole situation was scary and seemed so false.”
The FBI told Powell that they hadn’t sent anyone to interview her and that the man was probably bogus.
Five days later, on Aug. 27, 2008, Powell heard another knock at the door, this time from someone claiming they had a package to deliver. She refused to open the door, and the person left without leaving the package.
The next morning, someone knocked on the door again without identifying themselves and she called police. An officer came out to talk to her, but nothing was found.
Powell left to run some errands. When she returned, she was gunned down execution-style on the landing outside her apartment. She suffered several gunshot wounds to the head and was taken to a hospital where she died the next day.
Police are asking anyone with information to call the county’s Crime Solvers hot line at 866-411-TIPS (8477). Crime Solvers is offering a $25,000 reward in this case.
