Sharon Smith's eyes narrow warily at the unexpected, but she is unafraid to meet another person’s with her own wide open, saying nothing for long moments. Her son Tony and her husband Edward are dead, the former from a bullet, the latter, Smith believes, from grief.
James Trainum is a D.C. homicide detective. Since 2000, he has been the director of the Violent Crime Case Review Project, an effort by the Metropolitan Police to catalogue the city’s 4,000 unsolved murders. He works until late in the evening each day with a team of college interns in a small, hot room filled with filing cabinets, in the police headquarters at 300 Indiana Ave.
He described running a “sweatshop” with the interns, reviewing cases one at a time and cataloguing them into a matrix of “solvability factors” that can be cross-referenced with the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program database, known as ViCAP. Any case with evidence that could be examined with new forensic techniques is given investigative priority and passed on to the one of the 12 detectives assigned to cold cases, a term Trainum dislikes.
Trainum’s work is essentially investigative triage, trying “to get the biggest bang for our buck,” as he explained it. Unless a detective, a family member or a politician requests that a cold case be reviewed, Trainum’s team works methodically through the backlog. Most cases receive no investigation. But an efficient once-over has helped their cause to an infinite degree. Before going into a computer, their chances of being solved, one folder tucked onto a shelf of thousands, were zero. Now it is at least a remote possibility that a cross-reference or a random question might produce a hit.
TRAINUM PULLED HO-98-38 from the shelf after a call from Smith and her daughter, Stacey Gainey. He met with the women at 6 p.m. on May 22 to discuss the case of Tony Smith, who had been shot as he drove his car down Benning Road, in North-East D.C. early on Jan. 11, 1998. They did not meet in Trainum’s office, surrounded by cases like Tony’s, but across the hall in an interview room for victims of sexual assault.
“What do you know about the case?” Trainum asked. Smith gave a detailed description. When Trainum mentioned in passing that there were no suspects in the case, Smith replied angrily.
“You don’t have a suspect?” she asked.
“Who do you consider a suspect?” Trainum replied.
Smith described in detail several recent encounters the family had had with a relation of one of the men who had been with Tony on the night he was killed. Trainum responded in a way he would repeat many times throughout the interview. He nodded his head, jotted down notes on a pad of paper and asked a pointed question about a specific detail in the police file.
Smith and Gainey led the conversation. One strand at a time, their complex web of often-conflicting theories, filled with clues, coincidences and suspicious behavior, began to slip out. Trainum dealt with most of the information by politely ignoring it, occasionally asking several questions about a particular name. Trainum’s reliance on witness testimony frustrated Smith and Gainey, whose narrative-driven theories pegged many of the witnesses as potential perpetrators or accomplices.
In response, Trainum advocated bluntly for the “the simplest explanation, [revolving around an altercation with strangers in the parking lot of a nightclub,] that these guys just drove down the street and popped off a couple rounds in the car. If that’s the case, this will be a very difficult case to solve.”
Trainum described a theory of “planting seeds.” He suggested they post flyers, one hundred of which he had brought with him and gave to Gainey. He also said they should contact Mount Vernon District Station’s gang unit, to encourage them to ask about Tony when interviewing gang members from the neighborhood. “The main thing you’ve got to remember is even though we don’t have a lot here — even though we are only doing A, B, and C — we are doing the most productive things,” Trainum said.
As the interview was about to end, Gainey remembered something. She brought up a clue she had forgotten: keys missing from Tony’s key ring, then a break-in at Smith’s house during Tony’s wake. It took her several minutes to explain all the details. When she finished, she looked across the table at Trainum.
“But let me know if you hear anything from the posters,” Trainum said.
TRAINUM ESCORTED Smith and Gainey into his record room, surrounded by thousands of murder cases. Smith wept when Trainum showed them the Metropolitan Police web page with Tony Smith’s picture. Trainum warned Smith and Gainey he did not want to give them any false hope, “[But] You’re going to be able to at least do something that might generate a lead.” Gainey said she could put up the 100 posters fast. She asked how she could get more.
After the family left, Trainum said he meets with victims’ families at least once a week.
This one was “very typical,” he said. “They take all these random occurrences and they weave all these theories with them. That’s what we as cops do as well.” In Tony’s case, there may have simply been too many possibilities. “He was associated with so many people who would resort to violence to settle disputes,” Trainum said, “so typical in this city, where these mild confrontations just explode.”
Trainum said much of the family’s pain results from the inconsequential origins of the emotional explosion he believes killed Tony. “They want it to make sense,” Trainum said of families affected by murder. “It’s like a suicide. People don’t want to admit their loved one killed themselves. They don’t want to accept that their loved one died because of something so senseless as they looked at someone the wrong way.”
“The problem with unsolved crimes is that you can’t wrap your arms around them,” explained Dottie Ward-Wimmer, a child and family clinician at the Wendt Center for Loss and Healing in D.C., who has extensive experience counseling the families of murder victims. She agreed with Trainum that Smith and Gainey’s reaction is typical. “It’s not unusual for families who have had a loved one die in an unsolved event to always have a need to pursue it,” she said. “In essence what happens in a traumatic loss is first you’re caught up in the traumatic event and then you do some of the grief work to say goodbye. But with trauma there’s always that old hook that sits there … They’ll always want to know why their son died and how it happened.”
Ward-Wimmer explained Smith and Gainey’s theorizing as a way of coping with the loss. “That’s really what grief work is about,” she said. “It is about telling the story over and over and over and over again until every single detail, every nuance has the time and place to be told and held and honored. You can’t fully say goodbye to anything unless you’ve really said hello to it.”
But Ward-Wimmer said that healing can occur without answers. “[Survivors] construct something that somehow makes sense to them in the unknowing,” she said. “Somehow they get their arms around it and contain the unknowing space so it doesn’t keep leaking … Somehow each person does.”
IN DISCUSSING the categories framed by the FBI’s ViCAP database into which he plugs his cases, Trainum mentioned that before the meeting, Smith asked him how he would classify Tony. “Drug user/seller,” Trainum said he told them, “gang member.” Trainum views these classifications a necessary step in solving the crime. “We’re not saying he’s a bad person, but that’s the most important thing we need to know about a case.”
But Smith felt Trainum’s definition was a dismissal of the case, rather than a step toward solving it. “My son used weed,” Smith said. “But that doesn’t make him a big-time drug-dealer. He knew a lot of gang members. But that doesn’t make him a gang member.”
In an April interview, Smith and Gainey’s description of the murder was a confusing repetition of fact and theory, a search for a narrative to explain the death of Tony Smith that would give it a reason, and in doing so, the possibility of a meaning. The interview five weeks later was different. Though they did not say it, their hopes of spinning out and catching hold of the one true story seemed to have nearly evaporated. Having quelled their hope of finding a reason for Tony Smith’s death, his family now seemed to be searching for validation of the reasons behind their pain.
One of the things that made Trainum’s theory of Tony Smith’s death so difficult to accept was the killer’s indifference to Tony Smith’s importance. For eight years, Smith and Gainey had found themselves facing the world’s indifference to the same subject. And to Smith and Gainey, Tony’s friends and the D.C. police were the most obvious faces of this indifference.
The Smith family believes the D.C. police’s failure to acknowledge the importance of Tony Smith’s life and the tragedy of his death resulted in only a half-hearted effort to find his killer. “If they had done their job years ago and set examples,” said Smith, “crime wouldn’t be so rampant as it is today.”
As for Tony’s friends, who dropped him on the street while moving him to the back seat of the car after he was shot, and drove around for over fifteen minutes before calling an ambulance, “I wouldn’t have done a dog that way, and they did my son that way,” Smith said. “They need to accept responsibility for what they did, and they haven’t.”
But Smith said an apology from the police would not help. “I wish the DC police would get on the ball,” she said. “If they would solve somebody else’s, that would make me feel good. Because every time there’s a killing in the District, it brings it all back.” This issue was a recurring theme in Smith’s second interview: the families, mainly black, that she saw in the news mourning their dead. She said she had a long talk with a mother in the neighborhood whose son was murdered one year ago. She said it was a good experience.
FOR YEARS, Smith and Gainey had been helpless to prevent or respond to the moment that sucked the center out of their lives. In the past weeks, they had addressed it, contacting the police and the media. Now after meeting with Trainum, after describing their son for a newspaper article, they would be waiting again. Gainey said she had put up “a handful of posters.”
Then the missing house key came up again, then the meeting with Trainum. Half an hour passed. Smith cried silently several times. But she was also able to laugh. After the conversation wheeled back to Tony’s gang ties, Smith went off on a long digression about Tony’s lack of gang tattoos. “You can tell I’ve been thinking about this,” she said. “I’m not a basket-case. I’m just trying to give you the whole picture. Not in order,” she laughed, “but the whole picture.”