There is no dispute that 11-year-old Karon Brown, shot to death one summer evening in Southeast Washington, was an innocent victim. The youngster, headed to a McDonald’s to pick up dinner for his sister, got off a Metrobus and unwittingly walked into a neighborhood conflict that had nothing do to with him.
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Now, as a murder trial gets underway in D.C. Superior Court, there also is no dispute about who pulled the trigger on July 18, 2019. Tony McClam, 31, acknowledges he fired several bullets from a 9mm pistol, one of which struck Karon in the back and exited through his chest as he tried to escape the fracas, a defense lawyer told a jury Monday.
The main question for jurors will be: Why did McClam decide to shoot?
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In his opening statement, defense attorney Aubrey Dillon said McClam, charged with first-degree murder and other crimes, fired in self-defense against an adult who he feared was about to shoot at him. McClam was unaware that Karon was in the line of fire and learned only later that the boy had been “horribly, tragically” killed, Dillon said.
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But Assistant U.S. Attorney Rachel Forman, in her opening remarks, suggested that McClam mistook Karon for a participant in the conflict, which mostly involved neighborhood children. She said McClam “fired multiple unjustified and unreasonable shots directly at” the youngster, who had gotten into a car for safety.
Nearly 400 people, including Karon’s youth football teammates, would later crowd into Allen Chapel AME Church for the fifth-grader’s funeral, with a procession of eulogists bemoaning gun violence in the District. At that point, seven months into 2019, five juveniles ages 11 to 17 had been fatally shot in the city that year.
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The rapid, lethal sequence of events occurred around 7 p.m. in the Naylor Gardens area of Southeast near the McDonald’s and a BP gas station, along three streets that form a triangle — Naylor and Good Hope roads and Alabama Avenue.
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A pivotal issue for jurors will be the intentions of a motorist who happened to be passing by just then — whether the driver stopped to menace McClam, prompting the gunfire, or stopped his silver Nissan because he was thinking about buying cigarettes.
The Nissan driver, repeatedly described by Dillon as “a threatening wannabe cop,” is set to be the prosecution’s key witness. As Karon was running away, the driver came to his aid and offered to take him home. The boy was in the Nissan’s back seat when McClam opened fire at the moving car.
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At the time, Forman said, McClam was living in the Naylor Gardens area with his then-girlfriend and her 8- and 13-year-old sons. Boys in the neighborhood had been chronically getting into fights, Forman said. At dusk on July 18, she said, the 8-year-old came home and told McClam that another fight was going on.
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McClam “went outside to resolve a childhood dispute with a loaded 9mm handgun,” which he had bought two months earlier in North Carolina, the prosecutor said.
She said McClam, with the 8-year-old, an adult neighbor and two of the neighbor’s stepchildren, began “chasing a bunch of neighborhood kids,” who retreated and got on a Metrobus near the McDonald’s.
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“Those kids were lucky,” Forman said. “They were able to get away. .？.？. Unfortunately, Karon was getting off a bus at almost the exact same time,” headed to the McDonald’s from his home. McClam and the others “confronted Karon,” Forman said. “Five against one.” Karon fled, turning off Good Hope Road and running south on Naylor Road, before the Nissan driver stopped to pick him up.
The motorist was headed to the BP station at Good Hope and Naylor to buy cigarettes, the prosecutor said. She said the driver did not know the boy but could see he needed help. Karon got in and asked for a ride home.
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However, instead of continuing south on Naylor, away from trouble, the Nissan driver made a sharp U-turn at Naylor and Alabama Avenue, headed back up Naylor toward Good Hope and stopped at the intersection, just as McClam and his companions appeared at the corner, the defense and prosecution agreed.
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The driver halted his car because “he hadn’t fully decided at that point if he was going to stop at the BP station” for cigarettes, Forman told the jury.
But Dillon said: “That driver threatened Tony McClam — threatened him, threatened the children — and was reaching down for what Tony thought was a gun. Because he was about to shoot as he was driving away, Tony reacted. He just wanted to scare the car off, to get the threatening car off the children.”
He initially fired twice, both sides said. The motorist accelerated, turned right on Good Hope, then right on Alabama, as if he was coming back around to “finish what he started,” Dillon said. He said his client, not realizing that the boy he had confronted at the McDonald’s was in the back seat, fired another burst of rounds.
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Neither Dillon nor Forman mentioned any gun being found in the Nissan. The trial before Superior Court Judge Neal E. Kravitz is expected to last at least two weeks.
“The law allows someone to combat others and to defend themselves” with deadly force if they reasonably believe they are in dire physical danger, Dillon told the jury. “That’s what Tony was doing, and he is not guilty.”
He said that McClam is blind in one eye from a severe beating he suffered as a teenager and that his brother was the victim of an unsolved homicide. After “growing up as a child seeing violence, being exposed to things no child should have to be exposed to,” Dillon said, “it was reasonable” for him to think the driver had a weapon.
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