As the Democratic nominee for the seat he currently holds, D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb will likely win reelection in November with the support of voters satisfied by his focus on negligent landlords, penny-pinching employers, and exploitative corporations.
Even so, Schwalb doesn’t have a fan in Natasha Kay, a District mother who’s still fighting the attorney general’s office for a six-figure settlement awarded to her family in the aftermath of her son’s police-involved death.
“He shouldn’t even be up there because he’s all for white people [and] he’s not for Black people at all,” Kay said about Schwalb. “This man don’t care about nobody else but him and his race, because if the shoe was on the other foot, he would understand how Black people feel. But it’ll never be that way for him to understand.”
Last summer, a jury in a civil trial found the D.C. government liable for the death of Deon Kay, who was 18 when he was shot and killed by Metropolitan Police Department Officer Alexander Alvarez during a 2020 encounter in Congress Heights.
However, the D.C. Office of the Attorney General (OAG) is fighting the decision on the grounds that the $655,000 amount exceeds what the government, based on the evidence, believes the family deserves. Grassroots Black-led abolitionist organization Harriet’s Wildest Dreams has since circulated a petition demanding that OAG reverse course.
“If he didn’t want to give the money out… from what their officers are doing, they need to either train these people or get rid of them,” Kay told The Informer.
Redacted body camera footage from Sept. 2, 2020 showed Alvarez and his colleagues chasing the 18-year-old and intercepting his path before Alvarez shot him in the chest. In the footage, the late Kay appears to be holding a gun, though some community members have questioned the authenticity of the tape.
The U.S. Department of Justice never pursued charges. Although the Office of the D.C. Auditor found the shooting justified, its report acknowledged that Alvarez acted recklessly.
The teen’s mother expressed similar thoughts.
“He could have done anything else besides the shooting,” she said about Alvarez. “He could have tased them or he could have shot them in the leg or the arm or something, but people are trained to shoot to kill. There shouldn’t be a result anytime a Black person do something or get caught doing this or doing that and you got to kill them.”
As the Kays gear up to commemorate what would’ve been their fallen son’s 24th birthday with an August 18 rally and prayer vigil, they await word from the courts about a briefing schedule. The mourning mother calls OAG’s appeal the latest in a long list of slights since her son’s death. As she recounted, MPD continued to engage her family at their new home, raiding it in search of weapons.
Though she acknowledges no dollar amount can replace her son’s life, Kay told The Informer that her family, and her son’s siblings in particular, have long suffered.
“Everybody’s disappointed about what happened from the beginning and disappointed of what they have to go through and have to keep going back and forth to court,” Kay said. “My kids are still hurt. My kids have nightmares, and sometimes my kids get up and can’t even make it to do anything. They cry so much in the morning because they miss their brother.”
Attorney to Attorney: Schwalb Weighs In While Yaida Ford Counters
Schwalb declined to speak on the Kay jury award appeal as well as his endeavor to get the civil trial around Kevin Hargraves-Shird’s police-involved shooting death dismissed. He, however, did address how he reconciles his office’s position on those matters with his overarching pursuit of holistic crime prevention strategies.
“It’s important for the public to know that [as] the chief law officer of the city, I have a job to defend the District,” Schwalb told The Informer. “Whenever there’s a case where there may be serious errors made in a trial that are prejudicial to an outcome, part of the job is to determine whether an appeal or further litigation is appropriate. That’s what we do in all cases.”
As the District’s second-ever elected attorney general, Schwalb has prioritized consumer protections, housing affordability, and more recently, protection of Home Rule amid the Trump administration’s deployment of National Guard troops to the District. Schwalb, who sued the Trump administration last year, told The Informer that a second term would include stronger collaboration with the D.C. Council and Executive Office of the Mayor to build upon his legal actions.
In regard to public safety, Schwalb also pledged to continue supporting the work of community-based organizations in addressing deep-seated structural inequity. His office has done so in the past through the “Leaders of Tomorrow” grant program, the beneficiaries of which include T.R.I.G.G.E.R. Project; Access Youth; the Anacostia Coordinating Council’s Building Futures Program; and Horton’s Kids.
Amid debates about public safety approaches, Schwalb touts what he calls a balanced outlook when it comes to the young people interacting with his office on alleged offenses.
“One crime is one too many, and particularly communities east of the river where there’s been historically high levels of violent crime, those communities want there to be less crime,” Schwalb said. “There isn’t uniformity amongst our residents as to the best way to get there. Unfortunately, public safety is a complicated and nuanced area, and politics don’t always allow for a complicated and nuanced conversation.”
As it relates to the Kay jury decision, however, some people, like Yaida Ford, say there’s no room for debate.
“On one hand, he’s fighting the feds and saying he doesn’t want the National Guard here, but on the other hand, he’s saying that when local police officers terrorize Black people, or make a mistake and kill someone in violation of the rules, that’s something that he defends,” said Ford, the attorney representing the Kay family, about Schwalb. “It can’t be both things…That’s not an even-handed approach to police accountability here.”
Ford, a former mayoral write-in candidate, called Schwalb’s actions “highly unprecedented,” especially considering his reelection bid and the timing of Kay’s death, which happened nearly four months after George Floyd’s police-involved murder.
She went further in asserting that Schwalb is doing a disservice to District residents.
“Taxpayers will be paying 4% by the day, plus whatever it costs the attorney general to litigate it, and if this were a matter of attorney’s fees, the taxpayers would be paying that too,” Ford told The Informer. “You just think that public servants, at some point, if they don’t care about Black folks’ lives, that at least they care about their reputation of wasting taxpayer money.”
Schwalb, in speaking about the nature of his role, rebuffed the notion that he’s not cognizant of the community.
“I try to exercise my discretion informed by the stakeholders and their views,” he told The Informer. “I try to inform my discretion based on the professionals that work with cases in my office and their experience, and ultimately make a judgment that I think is in the best interest of the District of Columbia government and residents and consistent with the law. And sometimes those are very difficult decisions to make.”
Unfinished Business for the Family of Kevin Hargraves-Shird
Per Ford, jury selection in the civil trial for Hargraves-Shird’s police-involved shooting death will start in November. In June, U.S. District Court Judge Christopher R. Cooper rejected OAG’s argument that MPD Sergeant Ronaldo Otero Camacho was entitled to qualified immunity.
Between this case and the Deon Kay settlement appeal, Ford predicted that constituents may start recognizing a modus operandi.
“The thing is his office drags cases out so long,” Ford said about Schwalb. “With this term only being four years, these cases drag out to three [so] you can understand why there might only be a handful of cases where we can see this. But now going into a second term, we will actually see if there is a pattern.”
Four years ago, Otero Camacho shot and killed Hargraves-Shird at the end of a vehicular pursuit that started along Missouri Avenue NW and ended near Fort Slocum Park. That’s where Otero Camacho fired a fatal shot at Hargraves-Shird who, by that time, was running away from the vehicle that he and two other occupants left when it crashed at the scene.
The Office of the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia has since decided not to pursue charges. That’s why, for members of Hargraves-Shird’s family, a civil trial represents a significant milestone in their pursuit of justice.
“There was a time when the police just let them run and come to the house and get them,” said James Shird, Hargraves-Shird’s father. “They had the car and all that stuff like that. If Kevin did anything wrong, they [could have] arrested him, but they chose to kill him, and that’s constantly on my mind.”
In 2022, Hargraves-Shird’s police-involved death sparked protests at MPD’s Fourth District Headquarters and, for members of the Brightwood community, evoked memories of the vehicular pursuit that claimed the life of Karon Hylton-Brown years earlier.
This year, MPD’s Fourth District came back into the spotlight after a Gen-Zer documented his encounter with an MPD officer known for accosting youth along the Kennedy Street NW corridor, near where the 2022 pursuit of Hargraves-Shird took place. Meanwhile, Shird reflects on what he calls the bigger picture about his son’s police-involved death.
“What hit me more than anything was that this cop was in an all-Black neighborhood with a reputation of just harassing people,” Shird told The Informer about Otero-Camacho. “He chased a man down in an all-Black neighborhood and killed him in the neighborhood, but if it was a Black cop in a white neighborhood, I don’t think that would have happened.”
