Decades ago, when he was in his late teens, Reggie Brown was diagnosed with schizophrenia, one of his sisters said. Then he lost six fingers to amputation because of lupus, a disease of the immune system. He also experienced chronic blackouts, the sister said. Once, after losing consciousness, he collapsed to the pavement and injured his skull so badly that a surgeon had to put a metal plate in his head.
And in recent years he had been battling cancer.
“My brother fought to survive his entire life,” the sister, Nasia Israel, said last week. “And he did.”
Until an early morning in October, just after midnight, when Brown, 64, was out for a stroll in the Brightwood neighborhood of Northwest D.C. He had undergone a round of chemotherapy hours earlier, Israel said, and it made him feel better to walk in the evening quiet, breathing the crisp air. This was how he met his end.
As D.C. police tell it, Brown was accosted by five young girls — three of whom, ages 12 and 13, were arrested March 29 — who chased the frail cancer patient into an alley in the 6200 block of Georgia Avenue NW. They knocked him to the ground, pulled his pants down to his ankles, whipped him with his belt and stomped his head against the concrete, shouting jubilantly as a cellphone camera recorded the attack.
And they left him there, at about 12:30 a.m. on Oct. 17, with the life bleeding out of him.
“He did not deserve to die like this,” Israel said of her brother, who was the youngest of seven siblings. “No one deserved to die like this, killed by children. My 90-year-old mother did not deserve to lose her youngest child, not like this.”
On Thursday, the three girls, charged as juveniles with second-degree murder, were ushered before a judge in D.C. Superior Court by security personnel from the District’s Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services. Two are 13, the other 12, and they were making their second court appearance since being arrested.
The three are being held in a DYRS detention facility. A defense attorney asked Judge Kendra D. Briggs to release them to go home with their parents while the case proceeds in court. Briggs denied the request.
The three are too young to be prosecuted as adults. If convicted, the maximum penalty they would face is confinement to a DYRS facility until they turn 21, after which, by law, they would have to be released. Meanwhile, Briggs ordered each to undergo a psychological evaluation.
Social workers said in court that none of the girls had a criminal history before being charged in Brown’s death but that all had been cited repeatedly for school truancy violations.
The girls’ parents watched silently from the courtroom gallery. Although victims and their families in juvenile cases are allowed to attend trials and sentencings, they are not permitted to watch pretrial proceedings, so Israel was excluded from the courtroom.
“These aren’t teenagers; these are children,” she said later. “But what kind of children can do this? Where are their parents? Their parents should be charged as well.”
The Washington Post generally does not identify defendants charged with crimes as juveniles. The Post was allowed to attend the hearing on the condition that it not disclose the youths’ identities.
Police said they are still looking for others involved in the attack, including an adult male. In court, the lead detective in the case said the unidentified man was the first to confront Brown. Then he stood by as the girls attacked him. The detective said the man, who authorities think is in his early 20s, threatened two of the girls who said they did not want to take part in the attack.
Detective Harry Singleton said in court that security camera video shows the man leading Brown off Georgia Avenue by Brown’s collar. The man then threw Brown against a wall, and he fell to the ground, the video shows.
As Brown got up and tried to stumble off, Singleton said, the group of five girls, who were walking nearby, saw the incident. According to a witness account, one of them asked the man, “Can I fight him?” The man replied, “Yes.”
The girls then chased Brown into the alley. Singleton said the 12-year-old, wearing a pink hair bonnet, pulled Brown off a fence as he tried to escape. The other girls then began kicking him. The 12-year-old, Singleton said, was captured on video striking Brown with his belt and kicking him in the head. She was also seen recording the incident on a cellphone, using the phone’s flashlight.
“He’s leaking,” one them said excitedly as Brown’s blood seeped onto the pavement.
Israel, his sister, said that perhaps the girls thought he was homeless, which he wasn’t.
“I wonder how many homeless people they have done this to,” she said.
