Hit-and-Run Driver Was Fleeing D.C. Officers
by David A. Fahrenthold and Jamie Stockwell, Washington Post
Nearly two months after three friends from Forestville were killed in Northeast Washington by a driver fleeing Prince George’s County police, investigators on both sides of the District-Maryland line say they have no suspects in the case.
Michelle Rene Brown, 27, Lashawn Dennise Willis, 30, and Tabitha White, 19, were killed about 5:40 a.m. June 30 when their Nissan Maxima was broadsided by a 1994 Chevrolet Caprice at 58th Street and Nannie Helen Burroughs Avenue NE. The driver of the Caprice was being pursued by Prince George’s police because the car matched the description of one used in a shooting earlier that morning in Fairmount Heights.
The chase lasted only four blocks before the Caprice crashed into the Maxima, police said. The driver of the Caprice, whose face had been obscured by the car’s tinted windows, ran off.
Prince George’s and D.C. police have not made an arrest in either the shooting or the hit-and-run deaths. D.C. police say they’ve identified a “person of interest” in the case -- a male relative of the Caprice’s owner who had driven the car in the past. But police say they can’t find him and don’t have the evidence to issue a warrant for his arrest.
D.C. police have sent evidence from the car to an FBI lab, hoping to find DNA left by the driver.
Relatives of the three women say they’re disappointed with the probe.
“I hope it gets solved, but they [haven’t] done a good job of solving it” thus far, said Charles Willis Jr., Lashawn Willis’s husband. “They haven’t caught him yet, and it seems like it might be dropping out of their minds.”
“I feel very, very upset,” said Linda Willis, the mother of Michelle Brown and the mother-in-law of Lashawn Willis.
The three victims and their families shared an apartment on Hil-Mar Drive. Family members have said the women had been at a bar in Clinton for a “girls’ night out” before the crash.
The car carrying the three women was traveling east on Burroughs when it was hit by the speeding Caprice, which ran a red light, police said.
After the accident, D.C. police investigators from the major crash section located the owner of the Caprice, a woman who lives about two blocks from the crash site in Northeast, a police official said yesterday.
The woman said she usually kept the car at her sister’s house and had not driven it in awhile, the official said. She said that no one else had the keys to the Caprice or permission to use it, and that the car must have been stolen.
The woman’s sister also said she did not know who was driving the car that night, the official said. Both women were brought before a grand jury and made similar statements, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The car’s owner hung up yesterday when called by a reporter.
Patrol officers from the area said they had previously seen a man, a relative of the car’s owner, driving the car in the District.
The car’s owner and her family say that man has gone missing, according to the police official. This is the “person of interest” whom police say they would like to question.
Prince George’s police say their investigation into the Fairmount Heights shooting has also not yielded a suspect, spokeswoman Diane Richardson said yesterday. She said police have leads in the case, but she did not have further details.
The victim in the Prince George’s shooting was a 31-year-old man who was shot multiple times in the upper body but survived. Richardson would not comment on whether he is cooperating with investigators.