Lindsay Marie Harvey -- Three Years Later

Today marks three years since Lindsay Marie Harvey was murdered outside her apartment in Gaithersburg. She was killed in a robbery by a repeat offender who, just moments earlier, said he "had some things handle." The robber targeted Lindsay at random, accosted her, demanded money, shot her in the head, and took $40 from her.

Then he left her inside a dumpster enclosure, where she wouldn’t be discovered for another 12 hours.

Three years later, these facts remain just as chilling, just as frightening, just as heartbreaking as they were when the news first surfaced.

Three years later, I am still very, very sad and sickened by what happened and angry that it was allowed to happen.

And unfortunately, three years later I still feel frustrated, as I find myself in largely the same position I've been since I learned about Shawn Henderson's criminal past. Three years later, I still find myself telling anyone who will listen about what's wrong with the criminal justice system in Maryland…and wondering whether we truly, collectively get it.

Another legislative session has drawn to a close in the Maryland General Assembly. This year, there were several gun control measures proposed in the House and Senate, one of which would have limited good behavior credits for those convicted of crimes involving firearms to five days per month instead of 20. Almost none of these measures got out of committee.

The good behavior credit measure (SB 173 and HB 172) was actually amended in the Senate. It became a "task force" bill, meaning that a committee would have been formed to study the issue of good behavior credits and then report its findings to the Governor by December.

That didn’t become law either.

To be fair, the amended bill actually did get out of the Senate Judiciary Committee and was passed unanimously by the full Senate. But the bill then had to go to the House Rules Committee, and it died there. (The House Judiciary Committee, which let the original HB 172 die, never saw the amended version of the bill.)

Believe it or not, in Maryland, this is considered progress. And the fact that the full Senate has at least warmed up to studying the issue is something of a small victory (baby steps, I am told -- that’s how it works sometimes in Annapolis).

Still, here we are once again. The legislative session is over, the confetti has fallen from the State House rafters in Annapolis, and we still have no new sentencing guidelines on the books to better protect us from violent criminals.

When I announced the creation of the Justice For Safety movement in September 2008, I thought for sure that lots of people in Maryland would rally around it. They would write letters to their representatives in the General Assembly. They would tell their friends, who would then tell their friends and families, and so on and so forth. They would demand change, and new laws. And lawmakers would start listening. More and more of them would hear from their constituents. And it would become a hot-button issue in Maryland. Hundreds, thousands maybe, would hear about Lindsay's life story -- about how she was 25 years old, a well-educated young professional who worked as both a college professor in Frederick and a federal DNA analyst for the Department of Defense in Rockville and, among other things, loved animals. And then they would look at her tragic, brutal, senseless death at the hands of Shawn Henderson, a total stranger and a career criminal who didn’t even think twice about killing her. And they would get angry, so angry that they would flood the General Assembly with letters and phone calls to the point where the General Assembly would have to pass more stringent laws against violent criminals.

It hasn't happened that way. And the issue simply isn't getting the widespread attention I believe it deserves. The local media, all of whom covered Lindsay's murder and Henderson's arrest back in April 2008, don’t seem especially interested. None of the big four TV network affiliates in Washington (ABC-7, Fox 5, NBC-4, Channel 9) covered Henderson's trial or sentencing hearing. Nor have they covered the push for changes in the sentencing laws. The most in-depth coverage of the issue thus far has come in the form of a Gazette series by Patricia Murret, a piece by Patrick Madden on American University's WAMU radio, an article by Dan Morse in The Washington Post, and the column I penned for the Post two years ago. But even all of that has not kept the issue front and center in the minds of most Marylanders. And the legislators who have continually blocked efforts for change got re-elected by landslide margins last November.

One of the strangest conversations I had with a reporter about Lindsay's case was with Dan Morse. The first time I spoke with Morse, who covers the crime beat in Montgomery County, he told me that his editors were on the fence about running his March 2009 story about our initial attempt at legislation. Why? Because of the uncertainty of the bill's passage (the bill failed to get out of committee).

As a former journalist myself, I was floored by this. Really? I thought to myself. That's how they determine these things? Don’t get me wrong. There's only so much space for news in your average newspaper. And the media obviously can't cover every little piece of proposed legislation in the state. But I also know that had I been a reporter covering this story, not only would I have found Lindsay's life and tragic death fascinating enough to write about, but I would have jumped at the chance to expose the controversy surrounding her killer's odyssey through the Maryland prison system. Story ideas can be hard to come by, and this seemed like as good an idea as any for an enterprising reporter. Patricia Murret seemed to understand this. Most other journalists in the Washington area did not.

And it doesn’t help that there seems to be a mentality now among some in the media that violent crime isn't necessarily the problem we think it is. This was illustrated in a recent piece written by Christopher Beam of Slate.com about the murder of Jayna Murray at the Lululemon store in Bethesda. What that murder teaches us, opines the writer, is that "most crime isn't random."

Only 15 percent of homicides reported every year are committed by someone who doesn't know the victim, according to the Bureau of Justice statistics. And even then, the two people usually have mutual friends and acquaintances, says Richard Rosenfeld, a criminology professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis: "That explains why they're in the same place at the same time." And yet, we often assume randomness, and treat the discovery that a murder isn't random as news.

…

Even the occasional victim of a "random" homicide—the innocent bystander killed in a gang shootout, for example—is usually less random than people realize: He may not be connected to his killer, but he is from the neighborhood or one close by.

Wonderful. So I guess this means that the friends and family of Lindsay Harvey are among the unlucky few in this world who were affected by a homicide that actually was completely random, where the perpetrator really didn't know the victim and had no connection to her whatsoever. They didn’t even live in the same county, let alone the same neighborhood (Shawn Henderson grew up less than a mile from where he murdered Lindsay but was living in Prince George's County at that time). That makes me feel much better.

Washington Post columnist Robert McCartney drew similar conclusions from the Lululemon homicide in this piece. He quoted a Rockville woman as saying, "It tells us something about what’s going on in society…It’s almost easier to be afraid of the boogeyman.” Then he wrote this:

So, assuming the police are correct, the lesson from the Lululemon case is still that you’re not safe. Only the nature of the threat has changed.

I wonder if Robert McCartney and Chris Beam are aware that Maryland was ranked as the 5th most violent state in the US according to the Census Bureau (with the 2nd highest murder rate, I might add). I wonder how much time they've spent, if any, researching the legislative records of lawmakers like Del. Joseph Vallario and Sen. Brian Frosh and have discovered that neither of them are exactly crime victim friendly, especially Vallario. Maybe then they would view the overall threat of violence -- maybe not random violence per se, but still -- just a little more seriously.

Now I understand both Beam and McCartney's logic, which is basically that random violent crime isn't as rampant as one might think. And they've got a point. The problem is, both of these writers seem to think that just because most violent crime isn't random, that somehow it doesn’t affect those of us that have nothing to do with it. See no evil, hear no evil, right?

Wrong, I say. Lindsay Harvey's murder may have been a rare event in the spectrum of violent crime, but it's still proof that violence affects everyone. You want to know what lesson I took away from Lindsay's murder? That you can do all the right things in life, make all the right decisions, and keep company with all the right people, and it still might not be enough to save you from that kind of fate.

And that’s the truly scary part of all this, that you can cross paths with a violent criminal anywhere, at any time, even if your attacker has absolutely no connection to you or anyone you know. Lindsay Harvey was far from the type of person who went looking for trouble. But on April 13, 2008, trouble somehow found her in the most horrifying way imaginable. So that "fear of the boogeyman" is not entirely irrational.

That aspect of all this is why I started Justice For Safety. Because there are so many people out there like Lindsay Harvey. And I want them to stay alive.

We need to stop taking our safety for granted. We need to stop pretending that violent crime doesn’t affect us. Forgive me, for I am not suggesting for a moment that we spend the rest of our lives constantly living in fear or looking over our shoulder. That's no way to live. I know that. But we need to recognize that we do have a serious problem with the way violent criminals and other dangerous individuals (e.g., drunk and reckless drivers) are prosecuted, processed, and monitored in Maryland, and ignoring the problem or pretending it doesn’t affect us all isn't going to make it go away. Nor is standing pat. Your attentiveness, your vigilence, and your commitment to staying on top of this issue and making lawmakers aware of it is going to be paramount in getting those lawmakers to change the system.

Until you start doing this, we cannot and will not achieve justice for safety.

Write to your state legislators now. Keep doing it until they respond favorably to you. And write to these people as well:

Governor Martin O'Malley: http://www.governor.maryland.gov/mail/

Senate President Mike Miller: thomas.v.mike.miller@senate.state.md.us

House Speaker Michael E. Bucsh: michael.busch@house.state.md.us

Rest in peace, Lindsay.

What Makes a Homicide Newsworthy?

It's Friday. A 30-something-year-old female worker in Maryland goes to the store where she is employed and unlocks the door with her set of keys. Later, she is found lying on the floor of the store, unresponsive. She has been attacked and is later pronounced pronounced dead at the scene. Robbery is the suspected motive. Nearby businesses and the surrounding community express concern and are on edge. And this is in a part of Maryland where crimes like this are exceedingly rare.

By now, if you live in Maryland or anywhere else in the Washington area, you are probably all too familiar with the tragic story of Jayna Murray, the 30-year-old clerk at the Lululemon Athletica store in Bethesda who was found dead from a brutal attack inside the store that was initially thought to have been committed by "two masked men" who beat her to death and sexually assaulted her and a coworker. And by now you know about the shocking arrest of Brittany Norwood, the coworker who Montgomery County police now allege made up the story about the two masked men and actually killed Jayna Murray herself.

A tragic incident, yes. But that’s not actually what I'm describing here.

The story I'm referring to is actually that of Jacinta "Patty" Ayala, the 32-year-old mother of two who worked as a manager at a Burger King in Frederick. Frederick Police say that Ayala had just opened the restaurant on the morning of March 18 when she was attacked in an apparent robbery. She was discovered by a fellow employee and a bread delivery man. She had been shot.

It would be understandable if you missed the news about Patty Ayala, considering that so many in the Washington region were still in utter shock and grief over what had happened to Jayna Murray, who had been killed exactly one week earlier. And it just so happened that Ayala's murder took place on the same day that the Lululemon case took its shocking twist, culminating in the arrest of Brittany Norwood. The Lululemon case has attracted all kinds of media attention. The same cannot be said of Patty Ayala's murder. While The Gazette has paid some homage to Ayala's life, other than that, the Washington Post, a nationally recognized newspaper and the by far the biggest daily in the D.C. region, had only brief on the killing that was buried deep inside the Metro section of its March 19 edition (Norwood's arrest made the front page of the very same edition).

For days, a community and business district that had earned a well-deserved reputation for being one of the safest in the Washington area was on edge, wondering how their urban enclave suddenly became a target for what had appeared to be a random, vicious assault on two female employees. I myself was bracing for the possibility, even the likelihood, that two men were going to be arrested for the Lululemon assault, men who had violent criminal histories. That possibility was turning me inside out and keeping me up at night, just as Lindsay Harvey's murder had just three years ago. Could it be, I wondered, that yet another set of violent predators had benefited from the leniency of the Maryland criminal justice system and struck again when they should have been sitting in a jail cell?

My fears -- and everyone else's -- of course, turned out to be unfounded. Jayna Murray's murder was not in fact a random act of violence but one that was perpetrated by a known assailant (allegedly). Her accused killer has no prior criminal record and no known violent history, although she was apparently known to be something of a kleptomaniac. And that was certainly a relief.

But what about Jacinta Ayala's murder? Has it escaped everyone's attention that, as far as anyone knows, this probably was a random attack, by an unknown assailant, one who by the way hasn’t been caught yet as of this writing?

An astute reader of the Washington Post has wondered aloud about all this, noting that the local media have been all over the Jayna Murray story while virtually ignoring poor Patty Ayala. "I suppose the media found Murray’s slaying fascinating because it occurred at an upscale retailer in an upscale neighborhood. I’d like to think socioeconomic factors don’t influence the way you cover news."

Welcome to Journalism 101.

One of the first things they teach you in journalism school is that if it bleeds, it leads. And the second thing? Well, that’s a little more complicated. All homicides get news coverage of some kind when they occur. But the ones that get the most coverage and have staying power are the ones that the news media deems more fascinating.

There are many different things that factor into how much news coverage a violent crime receives, and it's not really an exact science. But among these factors are location, the nature of the crime, the ages of the perpetrator(s) and the victim(s), and the motive.

Anyone who's lived in the D.C. region for even a year knows where Bethesda Row is. It's one of the most lively urban areas of the Washington area. It's perenially bustling with activity. It's got bars, restaurants, and other upscale establishments galore. You see the Lululemon store on the news, and you say to yourself, "Oh my God! I go down that block all the time!" The Burger King in Frederick? Totally nondescript. It could be anywhere. I would be surprised if anyone living outside a two-mile radius of the restaurant even knows exactly where it is.

Even the nature of the Patty Ayala homicide probably seems rather pedestrian by comparison. A restaurant robbery? A shooting death? Happens all the time, right? But in addition to the location, Jayna Murray's murder fascinated people first because it was thought to be a double sexual assault and now because of the bizarre twist that made one of the supposed victims the alleged culprit.

Brittany Norwood's murder trial is almost guaranteed to attract a local media circus. The trial of Jacinta Ayala's killer, assuming it even comes to that, may only be a blip on the media's radar screen, assuming it gets covered at all.

The sad irony of all this is that it is the Ayala murder may well deserve more attention, because it may well have been the random act it appears to be and could once again bring to light the failings of the Maryland criminal justice system (I know, no arrests have been made yet, but then that didn’t stop people from speculating about what happened in the Lululemon case).

Jayna Murray's blond hair and bright smile have been all over the place for the past few weeks now. And her legend continues to grow in the form of numerous vigils, a memorial page on Facebook where more than 3,700 people and counting as of this writing have pressed the "like" button, and other expressions of sympathy and grief. Patty Ayala? All we really know about her is that she's dead, that she was a mother, and that she worked at Burger King. There's no Facebook page, no massive public outpouring of sympathy for her family, nothing like that.

But Patty Ayala was somebody, wasn’t she? She went to work in the morning just as so many of us do. And she paid for it with her life. Is her story not worthy of our attention or concern?

Please don’t misunderstand me. What happened to Jayna Murray was still a horrible tragedy, regardless of who did it and why.

But we shouldn’t let our guard down just because "two masked men" prowling around ritzy downtown Bethesda proved to be a hoax. The arrest of Brittany Norwood may have provided people with a collective sense of relief, but it may also be giving Marylanders a false sense of security. I hate to keep reminding people of this, but Maryland has been ranked as the 8th most violent state in the nation (2nd in homicides) and has a 51 percent recidivism rate among violent offenders. Jayna Murray's murder may not reinforce this reality anymore, but Patty Ayala's murder certainly should.