Guns, COVID and reluctant witnesses: Police solved fewer shootings in Durham last year
Every night before Nita Shaw goes to bed, she sets up her room to drown out the sound of her children watching TV.
But Aug. 30, 2020, two words snapped her wide awake.
“Amon” and “hospital,” she heard her son’s girlfriend say.
Shaw and her family rushed to Duke Hospital. Her son, Amon Shaw, 20, had been shot at a motel in Durham. He did not survive.
While police are still calling the case a “death investigation,” Amon Shaw’s death certificate says he died from a homicide. The immediate cause was a gunshot wound to the torso, it states.
Five months later, police have made no arrests. And Shaw’s case is not unusual.
The Durham Police Department has cleared only a quarter of the city’s shooting homicides in 2020 and less than a tenth of the total reported incidents during which a gun was fired.
A case is typically cleared by arrest. Police may also exceptionally clear a case if the offender dies or is arrested in another jurisdiction.
Nita Shaw said she was in denial after her son was shot.
Amon Shaw was a quiet boy who loved to play Monopoly and Michael Jackson songs. When someone needed a shower or a place to rest, he’d ask if they could come home, she said.
“No, you got the wrong person,” Nita Shaw recalled saying at the hospital. “Not my child. My son ain’t left me.”
Shaw had also lost her nephew, Gregory Shaw Jr., to gun violence in 2019. He was 22 years old.
After Amon Shaw died, his father died too, of what Nita Shaw believes was grief. He was ill, but their son’s death was too much for him to handle, she said.
Amon Shaw had become close with a family living at Extended Stay America on N.C. 55. Two days before he died, he’d said to his mother, “Help me help them.”
They planned to talk about how to help the family, but Amon did not return from the hotel that night.
Nita Shaw spoke to police officers at the motel and to a detective after her son’s autopsy in September, but said she has found it difficult to get in touch with the detective since. “He wouldn’t call me back or anything,” she said.
Many teens’ deaths in 2020 unsolved
Shaw’s family is one of many looking for answers, after a record number of shootings in Durham last year.
A total of 318 people were shot, including 33 who were killed. There were more than 900 reported incidents in which a gun was fired in Durham in 2020.
The News & Observer used police data to see where shootings occurred in Durham between October 2018 and August 2020.
The data showed a high number of shootings in the historic Hayti area which some call Southside today. On Aug. 10, police found Syncere Burrell, 18, shot inside a car at Linwood Avenue and Lincoln Street in the neighborhood.
Only blocks from the new police headquarters on East Main Street, bullet holes remain in the windows of the Hosiery Mill apartments for seniors. Across the street, Anthony Adams, 15, a student at Southern High School, was fatally shot in a drive-by Nov. 8.
Shootings are frequent in and around some public housing communities, including Oxford Manor and McDougald Terrace. Tyvien McLean, a sixth-grader at Lowe’s Grove Middle School died after he was caught in crossfire around the Cornwallis Road public housing complex on East Weaver Street. He died from his injuries on July 20, one of 10 people shot at a birthday party five days earlier.
As in the case of Amon Shaw, the Durham Police Department has not arrested anyone in those deaths.
“As a community, we grieve with the victims and their families,” Police Chief C.J. Davis said after McLean’s death “However, we as a community must also stand together to prevent these egregious acts of gun violence from happening to others.”
The News & Observer asked to speak with Davis for this story multiple times over several weeks, but the department was unable to schedule an interview with her or any deputy chiefs.
Less than 1 in 4 shooting deaths solved in 2020
Law enforcement agencies look at the percentage of cases they clear to help measure how they are doing.
Police had cleared seven of the 33 reported shooting deaths last year, with an eighth exceptionally cleared due to the death of the offender, according to police incident reporting data obtained Jan. 13.
Police departments can only exceptionally clear cases when they have identified the offender, gathered enough evidence for an arrest, know the location of the offender and have encountered a situation outside their control that prevents them from making the arrest. Those circumstances include the death of an offender, a victim refusing to cooperate or a prosecutor choosing not to prosecute, according to the FBI.
The clearance rates for incidents reported in 2020 in Durham may improve as investigators continue to work cases from last year.
The national average for murder clearance rates in recent years has been between 59% and 63%. It was just over 61% in 2019, according to the FBI. That includes cases cleared by arrest and those exceptionally cleared.
Cases were more difficult to solve last year because of the COVID-19 pandemic, police officials said. In 2019, Durham police cleared shooting homicides at closer to the national average. Of 33 shooting-related homicides, 14 were cleared by arrest. One was cleared by exception because an offender died. Three were classified as justifiable homicides and were not counted in the clearance data.
Marion Bailey, a board member with the Religious Coalition for a Nonviolent Durham, helps families of homicide victims get counseling, pay for funeral and burial costs, and connect with other resources.
“The family (in an unsolved homicide) has a different kind of struggle because nobody has been held accountable,” said Bailey, who lost her grandson to gun violence in Durham in 2015. “You feel like you have a void and the void will never be filled.”
“You don’t have support from the police because they say it can’t be solved and you don’t have an ADA (assistant district attorney) represent you because nobody’s been arrested,” Bailey said.
But even when people responsible for homicides are convicted, the loss can still be very difficult.
“It will never completely take away the pain, the loneliness, the anguish, the rage of children. … It will not make any of that any less,” Bailey said.
Arrests made in less than 8.5% of shooting incidents
Durham police made arrests in an even smaller proportion of the total shooting incidents in 2020: less than 8.5% of the incidents in which a gun was initially reported to have been fired, an analysis of police data by The News & Observer shows.
That was down from arrests in roughly 9.5% of shooting incidents in 2019.
In 2020, which saw the most total shootings in Durham since at least 2016, there were at least 976 incidents in which a gun was fired. Those include homicides, assaults, vandalism, robberies, weapons violations and drug violations.
Only 95 of those incidents were cleared, while 13 were unfounded, meaning police determined the reported incident did not occur. Of the cleared incidents, only 72 were cleared after the police department made arrests (10 additional suspects were arrested in other jurisdictions). 23 incidents were exceptionally cleared.
According to police, the coronavirus pandemic has made solving those cases more difficult.
“COVID-19 certainly had some impact on the ability of investigators to conduct in-person follow-up investigations,” Lt. Jacquelynn Werner with the Durham Police Department’s Public Affairs Unit wrote in an email to The N&O.
The police department also cannot gather enough evidence without witnesses, she said.
“It is not unusual for a shooting victim to show up at the hospital and refuse to provide the officer any information about where the incident happened or what occurred,” Werner wrote. And when that happens, there is little to no chance of the crime being cleared, she said.
The first week or never
Phil Cook, a professor at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy said police departments typically clear fewer non-fatal shooting incidents.
“Homicides are given the highest priority and they simply put more resources into the investigation,” Cook said. Investigators on homicide units have lower caseloads and often get priority in crime labs.
Most non-fatal shootings are either solved in the first week or they are never solved, Cook said. There is an initial effort, but detectives must often move on. Homicides are often solved months or even years later.
In a 2017 Durham study, Cook and Duke University students Jeffrey Ho and Sara Shilling interviewed 17 investigators on the Durham police force who said fatal shootings were more likely to result in arrest because homicide detectives had more time, resources and community cooperation. When shootings are non-fatal, the people who are shot don’t always want to cooperate, the study found.
With drive-by shootings and gang-related shootings, it is especially difficult to get people to say what they know, Cook said in a phone interview. Many of the shootings reported in Durham in 2020 have been drive-by shootings.
Durham County District Attorney Satana Deberry said in an interview that the evidentiary standard for prosecuting fatal and non-fatal shootings is the same. Both types of cases can take years to prosecute or go through the legal system, she said.
“It is very difficult to charge and prosecute cases when people don’t come forward,” she said.
More firearms, more shootings
Deberry said rising firearm ownership in Durham and North Carolina is contributing to violence.
“There are a lot of guns out there. There are a lot of opportunities for people to settle what issues they have with a firearm,” she said. “We have to ask those questions about whether we want so many guns on the streets.”
Gun sales are soaring in the Triangle, The News & Observer reported. The Durham County Sheriff’s Office issued more than 6,500 gun permits last year, compared to roughly 2,500 in 2019, according to WRAL.
The police department is looking for solutions. Police Chief Davis requested 18 additional patrol officers in 2019, but the City Council rejected her request in a 4-3 vote. Council member Mark-Anthony Middleton has unsuccessfully pushed for the use of gunshot surveillance technology. The council has instead decided to invest $935,000 in Bull City United “violence interrupters,” who deter crime through outreach.
Nita Shaw is now marching to the police station on Saturdays with other families of victims of gun violence. The organization is called Guns Down, Hearts Up and looks to bring the police and community together to seek justice for those killed by gun violence.
Shaw misses her son. Amon Shaw graduated from Southern High School and worked as a forklift driver in a Coca Cola warehouse. He had a baby on the way with his girlfriend and planned to start a trucking business with his uncle so he could care of his family.
“He had things in life right at the end, and he just had to be here,” Shaw said.
In Shaw’s dining room are photos of her son and nephew displayed on a side table with large blue flowers in front. Signs for the Guns Down, Hearts Up marches are tucked between sofas and the walls.
Shaw said she powers through heart disease to lead the marches and suffers behind closed doors.
“Even though I’m in pain and I’m hurting and I’m missing my son and I feel empty at times, I have to push what I feel to the side and be there for other people and show them my strength,” she said.
