Six charged with first-degree murder in Suitland stabbing

WASHINGTON POST
By Lynh Bui and Julie Zauzmer July 23, 2014

Prince George’s County police have charged five young men and a teenage girl with first-degree murder in the stabbing death Tuesday of a 54-year-old homeless man.

Police made the arrests eight hours after finding Amos Milburn Jones dead near a liquor store on Huron Avenue in Suitland. The discovery was made off a busy stretch of Suitland Road in an area where Jones liked to sleep and hang out with friends, his family said.

The night he was killed, Jones might have made a comment to the teenage girl, leading to an altercation in which he was beaten and stabbed, authorities and relatives said. Detectives said the limited English skills of the young men and the girl have delayed a full accounting of the events.

Jones’s grandmother said he was a “prankster” who liked to make people smile. If he said anything to spark an argument, she said, there must have been a misunderstanding.

“It’s nothing to kill my child over,” said the grandmother, who asked that her name not be used because of concerns for her safety.

A police spokesman, Lt. William Alexander, said two of the six people arrested may have ties to the street gang Mara Salvatrucha, also known as MS-13. But Alexander said police do not believe that Jones’s death was motivated by gang involvement.

Police said they arrested Almicah Sergovir, 18, of Temple Hills and four Suitland residents: Jose Irving Guzman Dominquez, 23; Oscar Alberto Parada, 20; Jose Martinez Serrano, 18; and Jose Eduardo Menjibar-Alaman, 18. Police also arrested Katherine Abigial Lopez, 17, of Las Vegas, who was charged as an adult.

All six suspects gave statements admitting to various degrees of involvement in the stabbing, police said. There were all being held without bond.

Family members said that Jones liked fishing, basketball and boxing and that he had even sparred once with Sugar Ray Leonard. Jones, who has a 16-year-old son, briefly served in the Army.

“He was a loving person,” his aunt Barbara Bynum Wright said. “He wouldn’t harm anyone.”

His grandmother said he was the oldest of about 70 to 80 grandchildren and had plenty of relatives he could have stayed with. But he chose to sleep on the streets, relatives said, favoring an alley or a wooded area near where he was killed.
“He chose to be homeless,” Wright said. “He liked the company on the streets. They were his friends.”

Jones’s uncle Curtis Bynum said that relatives urged Jones to stay with one of them but that eventually they accepted his habits because he knew he “had a beautiful place to live” whenever he wanted. Jones often stayed with his mother or other relatives on weekend visits, Bynum said, but he always ended up leaving.

“Every since he was a little boy, he would stay in the woods all day and all night,” Bynum said.

Bynum said he was glad that police made a quick arrest in the case. “I feel very relieved because these types of vicious people should be behind bars,” Bynum said. “He didn’t deserve to be slaughtered like that.”

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