For three days, the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) didn’t issue a statement about a young man’s body found hanging from a tree near its Fourth District headquarters. District residents instead relied on footage that Eyone Williams gathered and posted online.
On the afternoon of April 13, shortly after a relative called him, Williams drove to Quackenbos Street NW, between Ninth Street and Georgia Avenue. As he recounted, that’s where he saw MPD officers setting up a perimeter, cutting the young man’s body from a tree, and discouraging onlookers from recording video and taking photos.
“That was pretty much how I discovered what had happened,” Williams told The Informer, “When they cut the body out of the tree, I ended up seeing the body on the ground.”
The Fight to Receive Documentation and Get Answers
Per MPD’s statement, officers found the 19-year-old Latino male unconscious and not breathing while hanging from a tree limb. The adult adolescent, who hasn’t been identified, was pronounced dead on the scene after attempts by D.C. Fire and Emergency Medical Services to revive him.
“Currently, no foul play is suspected, and this is being investigated as a suicide,” MPD’s statement said. “The decedent’s family has been contacted by MPD, and our hearts go out to them during this difficult time.”
MPD released its April 16 statement within 20 minutes of The Informer visiting Fourth District Headquarters and calling MPD public information officer Nicole Deaner. The trek to 6001 Georgia Avenue NW came one day after an email sent to MPD went unanswered.
A police report, which The Informer received soon after the release of MPD’s statement, said at least a dozen officers arrived at the scene and recovered a white Ford E-150. Some of those officers, Williams said, went to great lengths to stop him from recording, even threatening to arrest him.
“For them just to have a body hanging and not say s— to the community about it was crazy,” Williams told The Informer. “There were many, many people out there. Parents, grandparents, and children, and they couldn’t understand what was going on.”
Days after his footage attracted nearly 9,000 views on YouTube, Williams continues to question why MPD didn’t immediately publicize the gruesome discovery.
“The only thing I did see was some little flash reports…that just said police [were] over the scene,” Williams said. “They just made no issue that there was a body hanging in broad daylight at 1:30 p.m. They tried to cover it up… and then nothing came out after that.”
An Advisory Neighborhood Commissioners Paints a Bigger Picture
For days, reports circulated online about a Black man found hanging from a tree. Upon the release of MPD’s statement, people evoked references to “Strange Fruit,” a 1939 Billie Holiday song that highlighted the reality of lynching.
The recent death on Quackenbos Street NW took place six years after MPD found 50 year-old Jose Rodrigo Hernandez-Pena, under similar circumstances, on the 7200 block of Seventh Street NW. It also comes amid tensions between police and young people, the latest juncture of which culminated in D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s reinstatement of a limited youth curfew.
For Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Tamira Benitez, the tenuous relationship between young people and police, much like what community members said led to the 2020 police-involved murder of Karon Hylton-Brown, calls into question whether the local authorities will practice empathy in their investigation of the 19 year old’s death.
“Historically, but even more in the last couple of years, our youth have been not only policed by our local government, but also by the federal government,” said Benitez, who represents Single-Member District 4B05.
Benitez, who’s currently discouraging other commissioners from advancing resolutions in favor of stronger policing, said she learned about the young man’s death from social media posts. On April 16, after three days of no communiques from police, she visited Fourth District Headquarters to inquire about the situation.
Though she received a number for MPD’s victims crime unit, who she said ultimately confirmed the death, Benitez called Fourth District personnel disinterested and disengaged.
“He was like, ‘Why do you need to know?’ Benitez recounted about her interaction with an officer. “I was like ‘There was a loss of life in our community and neighbors would like to know [about it] and support a family.’ He mumbled something…along the lines of ‘Let me find out more information,’ and walked away to not come back and give anything back.”
While she’s declined to speculate on whether the young man’s death was, in fact, a suicide, Benitez acknowledged how Black and brown communities are, as she described it, under siege during the second coming of President Donald J. Trump.
“Right now, we’re feeling that the government does not have our back,” she said. “I think more people are finding out that that is the case. And I think people are finding themselves, at times, hopeless.”
Changing the tide, Benitez said, will require an all-hands-on-deck endeavor outside the confines of government.
“My goal here has been to figure out ways in which we can be better neighbors, take care of one another,” Benitez told The Informer. “We understand that while government is a structure and a social contract between communities and elected leaders and administrators, we still, as a community, have a responsibility to ourselves to take care of each other, and protect one another. Often, that will be against the local and federal government.”
