After an especially deadly weekend in Prince George’s County, where shootings took six lives and left at least four people injured, police pledged additional resources to help mitigate what has been a violent summer so far — with homicides nearly double what they were last year.
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Police said two of those fatally shot over the weekend were teens, a demographic law enforcement and elected officials have been working to protect through various summer crime prevention initiatives announced this year.
“Crime rises during the summer, therefore homicides do increase,” Prince George’s Police Chief Malik Aziz said during a news conference Monday. “One homicide is one too many for us.”
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Homicides in the county are up 72 percent compared to last year, the chief said.
“Operation Heatwave,” the department’s summer crime-fighting initiative, has been in effect since late June and focuses on community engagement and violence prevention.
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The program is “doing exactly what we intended for it to do,” Aziz said, “to make a higher presence and to mitigate this type of violence.”
But he said that even with officers nearby, they cannot predict exactly where violence will occur.
“We were very close,” he said. “Unfortunately we were not close enough to prevent a few of these from occurring.”
“No one wants to have homicidal violence in a county where we live, and where we’re working and where our children are playing,” he said.
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More officers have joined the prevention efforts, Aziz said, which have included overtime work, placing units in neighborhoods that have seen increased crime and engaging with youths in the community.
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“We’re trying to be in the right places to curtail, or mitigate, this type of violence,” the chief said.
Detectives do not think the four shootings over the weekend are connected, Acting Deputy Chief Todd Lightner said during the news conference.
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Friday was the weekend’s deadliest night. In two separate shootings, four people were killed, police said, and one was injured.
At about 11 p.m., police were called to the 1900 block of Village Green Drive in Landover where they found two women, Hannah Woods, 65, and Nijah Johnson, 24, with gunshot wounds. Woods, of Seat Pleasant, died at the scene, and Johnson, of Upper Marlboro, died at a hospital, Lightner said.
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A third woman was shot but her injuries were not life-threatening, police said.
Detectives think the women were outside for a gathering when shots came from a passing vehicle.
“We don’t know if they were targeted or if our suspects were just shooting indiscriminately into the people that were outside, but it is troubling to us,” Lightner said.
About an hour later on Friday, just before midnight, police said officers responded to a shooting in the 1800 block of Ryderwood Court in the Landover area where two people had fired at each other during a gun sale “transaction.”
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Officers found 17-year-old Kyree Duvall, of Hillcrest Heights, in the street with a gunshot wound. The teen was taken to a hospital, where he died.
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Camisha Jenifer, 20, of Hillcrest Heights drove herself to the hospital about an hour after the shooting seeking treatment for her wounds, police said. Before she died, police said, officers met with her and learned that she and Duvall knew each other.
“We believe they were involved in a transaction where one was selling a gun to the other,” Lightner said. “At some point during that transaction it became violent, and we believe they shot each other.”
Tracking D.C.-area homicides
The violence continued on Saturday, when three people were shot — one fatally — inside a van in Lewisdale. Just after 3 a.m., officers found 44-year-old Angel Olivares and two women, whom police did not identify, inside a crashed van in the 6700 block of 22nd Place.
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Olivares, of Capitol Heights, was in the driver’s seat, had multiple gunshot wounds and was pronounced dead at the scene. The women‘s injuries were not life-threatening, police said.
The second teen victim, 16-year-old Micah Briscoe, was killed Sunday night in Temple Hills. At 7:50 p.m., officers found the boy outside in the 6600 block of Northam Road with a gunshot wound. He died at the scene, police said. An injured person, whom police did not identify, was taken to a hospital.
Family members of those killed over the weekend in Prince George’s could not be reached.
At least 79 people have been killed in Prince George’s this year, according to data tracked by The Washington Post.
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On Monday, Aziz said gun violence “seems to be permeating every aspect of where we live, work and play.”
In the first seven months of the year, the chief said, police have recovered more than 870 guns and arrested more than 579 people for gun-related crimes.
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Responding to the crime numbers, Aziz said he doesn’t think “there is one specific thing” driving them, but he said the coronavirus pandemic, social environments and economic conditions could all play a role.
The compounding factors of the moment, Aziz said, have been a “recipe for disaster.”
Clarence Williams contributed to this report.
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