"For the first forty days of this year there was a total of forty-four murders in the District of Columbia. That is more than a death a day. Seventy percent of them were drug-related. Among this number, teenagers are the victims and the criminals."
Before the story could even get into print, Lionel Harris, 17, became another one of the teenagers murdered in the most violent year in Washington's history.
Harris' life ended early on a Saturday night. He and a friend were shopping in Georgetown when his friend got into a quarrel with a 21-year-old man. When the man reached for a gun, Harris' friend fled but Harris was shot once in the chest. The .22-caliber bullet killed him within five minutes.
When the man was arrested, he tested positive for PCP and cocaine use, according to published reports. His December murder trial ended in a hung jury; a new trial is scheduled for June.
Washington recorded 372 murders last year and registered a homicide rate of 59.4 per 100,000 - the highest of the nation's big cities. Detroit ranked second, with 58 slayings per 100,000 residents. (Philadelphia ranked ninth, with 24.4 murders per 100,000.)
While other major cities also set homicide records last year, none experienced such a dramatic rise as Washington. The number of murders here increased by nearly 70 percent over 1987, when there were 225 homicides. And 1988 easily beat the previous record of 287 murders in 1969.
"Our nation's capital has now become the crime capital," Marlene Young, the executive director of the National Organization for Victims Assistance (NOVA), said during a recent memorial vigil for the victims of the homicide wave.
As in Lionel Harris's case, the dramatic increase in murders has been caused largely by the booming drug trade.
