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Years ago, Alton McDougle — then a young kid from Southeast Washington — asked his mentor Joe Shymanski a tough question: “Why do you trust me so much?”
Shymanski, an effusive guy from Michigan who sold photography in Eastern Market, had made McDougle a market assistant at the tender age of 12. This apprenticeship blossomed into something much bigger. They became business partners, served as one another’s best man and became godparents to one another’s children.
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McDougle couldn’t understand why Shymanski had taken a chance on him. But Shymanski was quick to answer: “I know your heart.”
“As a mentor, he was my guy,” McDougle said. “I always looked up to him. I wanted his approval. I never wanted to disappoint him. He didn’t want disappoint me … We grew together in this life.”
McDougle and regular shoppers at Eastern Market who knew Shymanski for more than two decades are reeling after his body was found in Pennsylvania and a man was charged with his murder.
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In a news release, the Calvert County Sheriff’s Office said officers responded Sept. 4 to a residence in the 2300 block of Cari Court in Huntingtown, Md., after Shymanski, 51, was reported missing by a family member.
After authorities suspected foul play, the release said, a suspect — Brandon R. Holbrook, 47, of Reedsville, Pa. — was arrested in Pennsylvania and charged with first-degree murder and other offenses. An attorney for Holbrook did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
On Thursday, the Mifflin County Regional Police Department in Pennsylvania said in a news release that they located human remains in a wooded area “within several hundred yards of Holbrook’s residence” believed to be Shymanski.
“The common denominator we believe between the two men is a common former romantic interest,” Mifflin County Regional Police Department Chief Andre French told WUSA9.
French and Calvert County Sheriff Richard Cox did not respond to requests for comment.
Ted Shymanski said his brother Joe was born in Detroit in 1971 and raised in the city’s suburbs. In high school, he was captain of the football and track teams — but also developed the love for photography he would turn into a career, taking photo classes and working in a local studio.
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After getting a degree in teaching from the University of Michigan, Joe traveled the world, teaching English in Asia. After a brief return to Michigan, he set off for Honduras to teach for two years — by car.
“He drove a car down there,” Ted Shymanski said. “He drove a car from Michigan. Everyone thought he was nuts.”
After that trip, Joe landed in the District in the late 1990s and ended up teaching in a D.C. public school. He was appalled by the school’s poor conditions, Shymanski said, and had to wait until November to get his first paycheck.
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He built a lifelong connection, however, with his community and his students. Though Joe didn’t last as a full-time DCPS teacher, he stayed in the city, buying a house on D Street not far from Eastern Market. When he had to gut the house, he looked to his former pupils for help, turning them loose on interior walls with sledgehammers. And when he started selling photography in the market, he enlisted some of them as helpers.
One of these apprentices was destined to take over the business.
McDougle said he met Shymanski through his older brother, who was in Shymanski’s sixth grade history class. The teacher from Michigan was in his mid-20s. McDougle was 12. When his brother lost interest in helping out at the market, McDougle stuck around.
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At first, Shymanski was a mentor — like Mr. Miyagi in “The Karate Kid,” McDougle said. Soon, however, it became clear that both men had something to learn from the other. They competed artistically, each trying to outdo the other in their signature style: comical, close-up photographs of Legos. The partners even gave themselves a name: “The Dream Team.”
“He taught me photography,” McDougle said. “I taught him how to hustle photography.”
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The Dream Team wasn’t just about business. When both men’s marriages ended in divorce, they supported each other, texting messages of encouragement daily. When Shymanski migrated to Calvert County, where he shared custody of his children with his ex-wife, McDougle put in more time at the market.
Now, McDougle said he’s working with Shymanski’s family to create a foundation to honor his former mentor’s memory and encourage kids to pursue photography.
“They might’ve killed Joe, but they awoke a beast,” McDougle said. “Everyone is behind him … we are going to keep his name alive.”
At a candlelight vigil Thursday, more than 100 people gathered to share memories of Shymanski. Joe taking a job shooting head shots for a law firm — then becoming the firm’s official photographer. Joe driving cross-country to meet a friend for a golf match that he won even though he had a broken foot.
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Micheline Mendelsohn, who helped organize the vigil, said she met Shymanski in 2001 when she was an intern at the Canadian embassy. After enlisting him to shoot an event there, she worked with him for years, photographing events at her family’s Capitol Hill restaurants and taking photos for her brother Spike Mendelsohn, a “Top Chef” competitor.
Shymanski’s photos went beyond mere portrait photography, she said. He was able to get to the center of a crowd without drawing attention to himself, according to Mendelsohn, creating work that was more like journalism.
“He was just always there,” she said. “He was able to build an amazing community of people around him.”
At Eastern Market Saturday, that center was missing. Joe was gone.
“Everybody loved him,” Ted Shymanski said. “Multiple people said, 'Hey, I was Joe’s best friend. For me, as a brother, I was lucky just to have him.”
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