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THE SOUTHEAST SHOOTINGS
The cast of characters
The March 30 drive-by shootings in Southeast Washington that killed three and wounded six, including a victim who has yet to regain consciousness, can be traced to a young man’s anger over a missing bracelet nine days earlier. Here is a list of the accused perpetrators of the violence and their roles, as alleged by prosecutors, and a roster of those killed.
MAIN PLAYERS
FRIDAY, JUNE 4, 2010
WILLIAM HENNESSY JR.
Orlando Carter, left, and Nathaniel Simms at their arraignment.
SARAH L. VOISIN/THE WASHINGTON POST
Mourners pay their respects at the funeral for Tavon Nelson, 17, from whom some of the suspects allegedly sought a handgun in the run-up to the March 30 shootings.
Sanquan “Bootsy” Carter, 19
Instigated a March 22 shooting because he thought someone stole his bracelet; suspected of firing a .380 handgun in that shooting, at 1333 Alabama Ave. SE.
Orlando Carter, 20
Sanquan’s brother; fired an AK-47 at the March 22 shooting; survived a gunshot to the head from a man suspected of trying to avenge Jordan Howe’s death; driver of the minivan in the March 30 drive-by shooting.
Jeffrey Best, 21
Friend of Orlando’s; wielded a 12-gauge shotgun while wearing a ninja mask at the March 22 shooting; one of two men who removed the AK-47 and shotgun from an Irving Street apartment; fired a 9mm pistol in the March 30 shooting.
Nathaniel Simms, 26
Friend of Orlando’s; driver of the getaway car at the March 22 shooting; along with Best, took the AK-47 and shotgun from the Irving Street apartment; fired the AK-47 in the March 30 shooting; now cooperating with authorities.
Robert Bost, 21
Fired a .45-caliber semiautomatic in the March 30 shooting.
SUPPORTING PLAYERS
SARAH L. VOISIN/THE WASHINGTON POST
Workers hand out car tags for the procession as Tamara Nelson sits in a limousine after the funeral for her brother Tavon at a Baptist church in Northwest Washington.
MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON/THE WASHINGTON POST
The shootings occurred just down the steps from this home at South Capitol Street SE. Three people were killed and six wounded in the drive-by attack.
Sparked by vendetta, a tragedy unfolds
shootings from A1
It was Tuesday evening, March 23, less than 48 hours after Car- ter; his brother Sanquan Carter; and two other men, Jeffrey Best and Nathaniel Simms, allegedly wreaked lethal havoc on some people outside an apartment building in a beef over a missing bracelet. A young man named Jordan Howe, who had a lot of friends, had been killed in that in- discriminate spray of gunfire. And now Orlando Carter was bleeding from bullets himself. No one familiar with the retrib-
utive cycles of street violence in the District thought it was a coin- cidence, including homicide de- tectives. They said the shooting in front of the barbershop, ama- teurishly inept, brought massive retaliation a week later: a drive- by attack that killed three people and wounded six. What happened at Sixth and
Chesapeake remains murky. De- tectives said Carter was less than talkative at a hospital that night. But they managed to piece some of it together. A little after 6 p.m., Carter and some other young men (all equal- ly reticent, it turned out) were passing time on the sidewalk when suddenly another man ap- peared, striding toward them with a semiautomatic pistol until the muzzle was a few inches from Carter’s forehead, one law en- forcement source said. The gunman squeezed the trig-
ger . . . and nothing happened. Maybe he forgot about the safety. Carter grabbed the attacker, and they wrestled over the weapon, which went off. The bullet grazed Carter, carving a divot in the right side of his head. As he stag- gered back, letting go of his would-be killer, a second round slammed into his right shoulder and he crumbled to the sidewalk,
helpless. He was a fish in a barrel. Instead of finishing him, though, the shooter calmly walked away, turning into the al- ley beside Harry’s. Just one more pop of gunfire in the urban underworld, or so it might have seemed — another garden-variety shooting on the east side of Washington High- lands, near the southern tip of the District, the neighborhood with the worst violent crime stats in the city.
But these rounds at Sixth and Chesapeake would echo loudly.
A search warrant
An hour later, after 7 p.m., while Carter was getting medical treatment and refusing to discuss his near-death experience, Detec- tive Tony Patterson, the lead in- vestigator in the Howe killing, and Daniel Zachem, deputy chief of the U.S. attorney’s homicide unit, spoke by phone. Both knew the probable mo- tive for the shooting at Sixth and Chesapeake — and they knew what the attack might lead to. One killing begets another.
They didn’t know the identity of Carter’s assailant (and still don’t, not for sure), but they figured he was someone aggrieved by Howe’s fatal shooting two nights earlier on Alabama Avenue SE. And they feared that Carter, ag- grieved now himself, would soon lash back. Patterson wanted Zachem to seek an arrest warrant for Carter in the Howe case, to get him off the street, sources said. Although the evidence linking Carter to Al- abama Avenue was far from over- whelming, there was enough to justify charging him, Patterson argued. As for the additional evi- dence needed to prove the case in court, detectives were confident they could come up with it later.
The point was to take Carter out of circulation before the violence escalated. So Patterson and Zachem went over the evidence — which made for a short conversation. There was the physical descrip- tion of the short, fat gunman with the AK-47 rifle matching Carter. There were a few other threads. And there was the eyewitness who pointed to Carter’s mug shot in a photo array, saying, “It could be number nine.” Could be. Not sure. That was as close as anyone at Alabama Av- enue had come to identifying Or- lando Carter. In a decision that remains a sore spot between D.C. police offi- cials and the U.S. attorney’s of- fice, Zachem said the evidence was too thin. His boss, U.S. Attorney Ronald
C. Machen Jr., would later back him, saying: “We can only ap- prove arrest warrants when suffi- cient probable cause has been es- tablished for a particular offense. . . . It is a difficult balancing act, but that is the process we follow in all of our criminal cases.” Pre- senting the evidence against Car- ter to a judge in a warrant appli- cation — trying to lock him up without solid legal justification — would have been a breach of eth- ics, prosecutors said. Zachem and Patterson agreed,
however, that the evidence was sufficient to justify a search of Carter’s crash pad, an apartment on Irving Street SE, in Garfield Heights. And if anything turned up there that could be tied to the Howe shooting — say, weapons — then problem solved: They’d charge Carter with murder. But they faced another obsta-
cle. It was after 7:30 p.m. that Tues-
day when they finished preparing the warrant request. Detectives then had to wait hours, until after
sunrise, to conduct the search be- cause D.C. Superior Court judges usually cannot allow searches at night, for safety reasons: When people are abruptly awakened by strangers barging into their homes (even strangers yelling “Police!”), they tend to react bad- ly, and things can turn ugly fast, especially if guns are involved. By D.C. law, judges can author- ize night searches in non-drug cases only under exigent circum- stances — for instance, when there’s a clear threat that evi- dence will be lost if a search is de- layed. The exigent circumstances in this case weren’t known to po- lice at the time and wouldn’t be- come clear until much later. With his brother already jailed in the Howe killing and detec- tives snooping around the Gar- field Heights apartment complex, investigators said, Carter grew nervous about two guns from the Alabama Avenue attack — the AK and a shotgun — which he and his friends had stashed in his crash pad. “He knew he was hot,” as one source put it. So before he left Washington Hospital Center in bandages Tuesday night, Carter allegedly phoned Jeffrey Best with orders: Get the AK and the 12-gauge out of the Irving Street place, hide them somewhere else. Which Best, 21, and Nathaniel Simms, 26, promptly did, spir- iting the guns into a car trunk and driving through the darkness to Washington Highlands, au- thorities said. They allegedly hid the weapons with their acquain- tance Lamar Williams, 21, who police said played a supporting role in the late-March mayhem by storing and dispensing firearms. How Simms and Best allegedly accomplished their mission with- out being seen on Irving Street is a bit of a mystery. Weren’t police keeping an eye on the Garfield
Heights apartment while they waited for the sun to come up? Weren’t they watching to make sure nobody went in and took anything? You get shrugs. Some people in
law enforcement think other peo- ple in law enforcement arranged for surveillance, although they’re not sure, because it wasn’t an ur- gent concern at the time. The search was pretty much a fishing expedition — investigators had no idea whether anything in- criminating was in the place. If there was a stakeout, they said, then maybe a patrol unit was parked out front and the bad guys slipped in the back, or vice versa. Who knows? It’s spilled milk now. Patterson and others from homicide entered the apartment at 7 a.m. Wednesday, March 24, and found nothing they could use to get an arrest warrant. “Mail matter, letters, photographs, identification,” a detective scrib- bled in an inventory. A day late and a step behind.
The funeral
As for the suspect: After leaving the hospital, “Or- lando Carter began planning to exact revenge on the people he felt were responsible for shooting him, whom he indicated were friends and associates of Jordan Howe,” a prosecutor later wrote. “Carter began intensive efforts to determine the date, time and lo- cation of the funeral services for Jordan Howe with the intention of shooting and killing persons in attendance at the funeral.” Carter was more blunt: “I’m go- ing to [expletive] that funeral up,” he told a friend, according to a police affidavit. It’s unclear why it was so hard for him and his crew to learn the
shootings continued on A11
WILLIAM HENNESSY JR.
Lamar Williams, left, and Robert Bost at their arraignment.
Lamar Williams, 21
Provided the .380-caliber pistol and 12-gauge shotgun used in the March 22 shooting; described as a “wannabe thug”; showed Best how to use the shotgun for the March 22 shooting; at Orlando Carter’s behest, stored weapons after the March 22 shooting; stored the AK-47 and shotgun used in the March 30 shooting.
“Godmother”
A woman about 40 years old, called “Ma” by neighbors; thought of as a godmother by Orlando Carter; lived in a duplex where Orlando Carter stored his AK-47; rented the minivan used in the March 30 shooting; now cooperating with authorities.
“Baby Boy”
Lived in the Irving Street apartment where shooters fled after the Alabama Avenue attack; the gunmen left the AK-47 and shotgun there after that shooting.
VICTIMS
Jordan Howe, 20
Killed inside a car parked at the Alabama Avenue site early on March 22.
DaVaughn Boyd, 18
Killed in the March 30 shooting.
Brishell Jones, 16
Killed in the March 30 shooting.
William Jones III, 19
Killed in the March 30 shooting.
Tavon Nelson, 17
Killed during a robbery attempt by Best and Bost before the March 30 shooting; had a semiautomatic handgun Carter wanted to use in that shooting.
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