Hannah Woods spent the last Friday evening in July visiting with family on Village Green Drive, where cousins in the Landover neighborhood were preparing food for a relative’s funeral the next morning.
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Woods, 65, stood outside and chatted with her son and daughter-in-law when just before 11 p.m., a car drove by and started shooting.
Bullets sprayed the dark neighborhood, hitting nearby houses and cars and striking the car seat of Woods’s infant grandchild.
Caught in gunfire, the family dropped to the ground to take cover. When the shooting stopped, Rhonda and Donnell Woods turned toward their family matriarch.
“We told her everything was over, and for her to get up,” said Woods’s daughter-in-law Rhonda Woods. “She wasn’t moving.”
Hannah Woods died soon after, becoming the first of six people — including two teens — killed in shootings in Prince George’s County during what law enforcement called an especially violent summer weekend at the end of July. Another person, 24-year-old Nijah Johnson, also died in the shooting, and a third person was injured by the gunfire. Police are still investigating and have not released a motive.
“For us, it was totally random,” Rhonda Woods said. “We were totally caught off guard.”
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That weekend’s violence in Prince George’s has left law enforcement, elected officials and residents unsettled, compounding the unease they’ve felt for more than a year as homicides and carjackings spiked during the pandemic and dozens of young people — including juveniles — became victims and perpetrators of life-changing crimes.
Homicides in 2021 are nearly double what they were at this time in 2020 and 2019, according to data from the police department. This summer has been especially violent. From June 1 to Aug. 4 this year, 25 people were killed in Prince George’s — a stark uptick from the same time period the last two summers, with 16 homicides in 2020 and 13 in 2019.
Crimes involving juveniles are also higher than in past years.
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Eight children or teenagers have been killed so far in 2021, compared with a total of six in 2020 and 2019 combined. And 11 juveniles have been arrested on murder charges this year, compared with six in 2020 and 12 in 2019.
Two teens among six dead in weekend violence in Prince George’s
At the start of the summer, officials were hopeful that a robust rollout of summer crime prevention initiatives would help curb the violence. The county executive’s office has been sponsoring activities for young people, the state’s attorney’s office launched a campaign to collaborate with crime-affected communities, and the police department instituted Operation Heat Wave to flood areas experiencing violence with more officers.
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While those efforts have led to tangible progress, officials acknowledge violence persists and ensuring public safety takes time and collaboration.
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For residents and those impacted directly by gun violence, the uptick in shootings is intensely personal. Donnell Woods, 41, now has another funeral to attend: the one for his father that originally brought his family to Village Green Drive that Friday night, and now also for his mother.
Hannah Woods was a “funny” and “all-around sweet person” with a beautiful singing voice, family members said. She raised two adult sons, and after retiring from years working in security, she spent her time playing with her four grandchildren.
Watching her “inquisitive” and “loving” mother-in-law gunned down at random has made Rhonda Woods realize that the gun violence in Prince George’s has “gotten out of hand.”
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“It’s just senseless,” she said. “They don’t know what they’re doing behind the gun.”
'A longer-term approach'
Since the onset of summer, when vaccines rolled out and the county began to reopen, police and political leaders have been pledging to collaborate with community members to make neighborhoods safer. Officers and lawmakers have met with church leaders and organizers to walk the streets and barbecue in parking lots.
But Sunday evening was the first time State’s Attorney Aisha Braveboy mobilized a neighborhood walk in the immediate aftermath of violence.
A mile and a half apart in Landover, two shootings had taken four lives in one night.
“I couldn’t go to sleep, I couldn’t rest,” Braveboy (D) said. “And so if I can’t rest and I don’t even live in the communities where it happened, I can’t imagine how the residents who live in those communities feel.”
Braveboy’s staff joined homicide detectives, lawmakers, church members, organizers from Moms Demand Action and Village Green residents and walked door to door, asking if neighbors had witnessed anything the Friday that Woods died. The volunteers and officers worked together to canvass for home security cameras and bullet casings.
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That collaboration, Braveboy said, can help build trust between police and communities skeptical of them.
“I wanted to make sure that the community knew that we were as concerned as they were,” the state’s attorney said.
The greatest success of the night, she said, was gathering the names of more than 20 people who were interested in developing a neighborhood watch group that Braveboy’s office will help guide.
“It was a fact-finding mission and a community-building mission,” Braveboy said.
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That has been the theme of her “Our Streets, Our Future” campaign this summer, which launched in early June for Gun Violence Awareness Month. They’ve hosted basketball games and cookouts in communities where shootings have rattled residents. Hundreds have attended, Braveboy said.
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“This is a longer-term approach to build really solid foundations within our community that can help to address crime,” she said.
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For her part, County Executive Angela D. Alsobrooks (D) created a “Summer Passport” program that has targeted young people, who advocates have said struggled in the pandemic when schools and youth sports were shuttered.
Alsobrooks’s office said more than 250 children aged 12 to 18 have participated in the approximately 20 activities the county has organized, including a white-water rafting experience hosted by the Police Athletic League, a circus night in National Harbor, and an immersive class on cybersecurity, drones and multimedia.
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Later this month, the children will be invited to Six Flags to learn about how the amusement park is run — and then ride the rides.
Since those efforts launched along with the police department’s Operation Heat Wave, crime has decreased in some categories.
The police department said homicides in July were down 10 percent compared to the month of June. Citizen robberies — those not involving a business or home invasion — were also down 7.9 percent, police said, and assaults dropped by 4 percent.
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To date this year, police said they have also recovered nearly 900 guns, already hundreds more than were recovered over the last two years.
One hundred officers across the department, including from bureaus that “are not typically engaged in uniform patrol functions,” have been detailed to Operation Heat Wave, police said.
At one of the first community crime walks of the summer, the county executive, police chief Malik Aziz and officers assigned to the area walked the streets of Capitol Heights. Their first stop was the BP gas station on Walker Mill Road. A teen was injured and a 23-year-old woman had just been killed by gunfire there.
The commander for that area, Maj. Katina Gomez, said the gas station has become the “pinnacle” of crime for the area, a hub for drug sales, gun stashing and violent clashes. Police had tried and failed for years, she said, to clean up the area.
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Gomez, using a collaborative approach leaders have touted all summer, had her officers get creative. They presented stories and camera footage to the nuisance abatement board, regulatory violations to the Department of Permitting, Inspections and Enforcement, and even escalated concerns to the Comptroller of Maryland.
A county, hit by the pandemic, grapples with soaring crime after spending a decade lowering it.
In the meantime, three more people had been shot inside and outside the gas station.
By late July, police had succeeded in shutting it down.
In the weeks since, calls for service to the area have decreased, Gomez said, and community engagement efforts from the state’s attorney at a nearby apartment complex have helped residents feel acknowledged and more safe.
“It was definitely a collaborative effort to get this done,” Gomez said. “Everybody took a piece and we held each other accountable and we held ourselves accountable.”
'Stop all the killing'
Standing underneath a gazebo at Brentwood Town Hall, as children kicked around a soccer ball with uniformed police officers and residents roamed with ice pops in their hands, Aziz took the microphone for National Night Out just days after the deadly weekend that left six slain.
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“It’s a beautiful night in Brentwood,” he said. “A beautiful night in Prince George’s County.”
Aziz said the annual nationwide gathering of law enforcement and community members was about “bridging the gap” together “so we can get to the root cause of a lot of the problems that exist.”
One of those key problems — gun violence — was the center of conversation throughout the night.
“I don’t know if that’s somebody shooting in the sky or shooting at each other, but I be glad I’m home,” said 67-year-old Pat Cameron of the increasingly frequent gunshots she hears near her Brentwood neighborhood.
“I just wish we could stop the gun violence .？.？. to stop all the killing. .？.？. That’s what I hope for,” said Cedrick Davis, 57, at the National Night Out event at the Fairwood Community Association, where Aziz also stopped. “It seems like every time I hear something, somebody is getting killed.”
Davis, who sat in a lawn chair while music played from speakers and pizza was passed around, said gun violence seems higher now than in the 15 years he has lived in the county.
As the night went on in Fairwood, a debate over the police chief’s favorite football team, the Dallas Cowboys, broke out with Ravens fan Kim Wilson.
“You’re a Ravens fan?” Aziz said, laughing.
“All day long,” Wilson, 57, replied.
Then, the conversation turned candid.
“We know that this weekend was a deadly weekend,” Wilson said to Aziz.
“One of the worst weekends I’ve seen since I’ve been in law enforcement for 30 years,” Aziz replied.
Turning to a few more residents who gathered around Wilson, Aziz spoke about the rise in violence, “but here is home.” He mentioned the importance of working with the community and listening to their feedback.
“Because as much as I can talk about how we can have resolutions, you know what I was thinking about?” he asked Wilson. “That six families are planning to bury their loved ones, right now. This National Night Out tonight, we’re talking police community relations and six families are grieving right now. And that right there should mean something to us.”
Handing Wilson his card from his pocket, Aziz again emphasized community collaboration.
“If we don’t do something now,” Aziz said. “Then what are we going to do?”
Magda Jean-Louis contributed to this report.
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