Memorial to Henry J. Daly
Officer Killed in the Line of Duty
End of Watch: November 22, 1994
Rank: Sergeant Badge No. ___
Age: 51
Years of Service: 28
Location of Death: 300 Indiana Avenue, NW (MPDC Headquarters)
Circumstances
Sergeant Hank Daly was shot and killed after a gunman entered the Metropolitan Police Department headquarters at 300 Indiana Avenue, NW.
The man rode the elevator up to the third floor and then entered the Cold Case Squad room. As he entered, Sergeant Daly, who was reviewing an old homicide case, ask if he could help him. Without warning, the suspect pulled out an automatic weapon and shot Sergeant Daly at point-blank range, killing him instantly. He then turned and opened fire on three FBI agents in the adjoining office, as they returned fire. Special Agents Martha Dixon Martinez and Michael John Miller were killed and the third agent was seriously wounded. Agent Martinez was able to shoot the suspect but did not kill him. The suspect ultimately took Agent Martinez’s gun and killed himself.
The suspect had previously been a suspect in a triple homicide. After being questioned several times by detectives, he was cleared, but members of the suspect’s gang labeled him a snitch. In order to redeem himself in the eyes of his fellow gang members, he decided to kill a police officer. A further investigation revealed that the suspect entered the Cold Case Squad office by mistake and was looking for the Homicide Squad office.
After an extensive investigation by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the gun that was used by the suspect was traced back to a man in Kentucky who was illegally selling guns to convicted criminals. That man was eventually sentenced to 15 years in federal prison.
Biography
Sergeant Daly had served with the Metropolitan Police Department for 28 years and had previously served in the United States Marine Corps. He was survived by his wife and two children.
The DC Municipal Center Building located at 300 Indiana Avenue, NW, that was the headquarters for the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police Department was later renamed The Henry J. Daly Building in his honor.
Articles from the Washington Post – transcribed by Dave Richardson, MPD/Ret.
THE DEATH OF DETECTIVE SERGEANT HENRY (HANK) J. DALY, AND TWO F.B.I. AGENTS ON NOVEMBER 22, 1994.
WASHINGTON POST ARTICLE DATED NOVEMBER 23, 1994, PAGE A3
D.C. COP, TWO FBI AGENTS KILLED IN SHOOTING SPREE
Two FBI agents and a District of Columbia police detective were fatally shot inside police headquarters Tuesday and two other people were wounded when a gunman opened fire with a compact assault weapon on the building’s third floor, authorities said.
The shooting occurred about 3:30 p.m. in one of the District government’s busiest buildings inside offices occupied by a homicide task force of police detectives and FBI agents, authorities said. Besides those slain, two people – an FBI agent and a civilian – were wounded, Police Chief Fred Thomas said Tuesday night. The assailant also was killed, but it was unclear by whom.
The slain detective was identified as Sgt. Hank Daly, 51, a police officer for 29 years. He lived in Falls Church, Md.
The slain FBI agents were identified as Martha Martinez, 35, and Michael Miller, 41, both assigned to a joint FBI-police task force that works on unsolved murders.
Two law enforcement sources said the gunman’s name was Benny Lawson. It could not be determined how old Lawson was or where he lived.
Lawson was questioned by homicide investigators a week ago in a triple slaying in Washington, according to one of the law enforcement sources. In that case, an 89-year-old retired federal worker was shot in a scuffle with gunmen moments after the assailants had fatally shot the man’s granddaughter and a neighbor, police said.
Many details of Tuesday’s shooting remained unclear Tuesday night as federal and local investigators, as well as city officials, worked to sort out what happened.
One of the law enforcement sources who identified Lawson said Lawson rode in an elevator with two other people to the building’s third floor. But the source said investigators think the two others were strangers to Lawson and were not involved in the shooting.
After the gunfire broke out, Thomas said, members of the task force were able to drag two of the victims – the police detective and an FBI agent – out of the offices. The wounded civilian, shot in the leg, crawled from the room, Thomas said. The offices were sealed off, and members of the Police Department’s heavily armed Emergency Response Team arrived.
A negotiator made contact with the man in the room at 4:05 p.m., Thomas said. The team made a forced entry into the offices at 4:30 p.m., he said, and found two FBI agents and the gunman bleeding from bullet wounds. Both of those agents died.
The shootings – in offices a short distance from where reporters and ranking police officials had gathered for a routine news conference – created a frantic scene in and around the six-story building at 300 Indiana Ave. NW, as heavily armed police officers and federal agents swarmed corridors.
An investigator familiar with the incident said Tuesday night that the gunman walked into the task force offices in the southwest corner of the third floor and, apparently without saying a word, opened fire with what might have been an automatic weapon.
As Lawson arrived at the offices, Daly, moments before he was fatally wounded, asked Lawson if he needed assistance, a law enforcement source said. Lawson then opened fire with what a federal official said was a TEC-9, an assault weapon slightly larger and bulkier than a handgun.
Members of the joint task force, known as the “Cold Case Squad,” returned fire and killed the gunman, police said.
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WASHINGTON POST ARTICLE DATED NOVEMBER 23, 1994, PAGE A12
Slain Detective Known as Dogged Investigator
Sgt. Henry Joseph Daly, a D.C. police officer for 28 years, was a big, tough, chain-smoking cop who liked to joke in his gravelly voice about the squad room coffee, but was always known as being cool yet aggressive under pressure. He was respected by his colleagues as a dogged investigator during the years when homicides in the District have soared to record-breaking levels.
Daly, 51, was shot to death yesterday in his third-floor office when a gunman opened fire in D.C. police headquarters at 300 Indiana Avenue NW. Two FBI agents, Martha Dixon Martinez and Michael John Miller also died as did the gunman. Two other people, FBI agent John Kuchta and a 15-year-old were wounded.
“He was a tremendous homicide detective,” said former D.C. police Chief Isaac Fulwood Jr., breaking into tears when he heard of Daly’s death. “And he told me a few months ago he was just about to retire.”
“He knew how to talk to people and he was an outstanding crime scene man,” Fulwood said. “In the face of all the horror you see on the street, Hank Daly could walk up to a crime scene and put the thing together.”
Tony Daniels, an assistant director in charge of the FBI Washington field office, said “the law enforcement community here in Washington has lost three close members of its family.”
“These are times you pray will never happen,” Daniels said.
Martinez, 35, who received a degree in biology from the University of Pittsburgh, had been an FBI agent for seven years. She recently married fellow agent Jorge Martinez and lived in Springfield.
Miller, 41, was an eight-year member of the FBI. Eight years after getting a law degree from Georgetown University, he joined the bureau and had served in Oklahoma and Washington. He lived with his wife and two children in Upper Marlboro.
Kuchta, 31, who lives in Sterling, joined the FBI three years ago after receiving a law degree from Duquesne University in Pennsylvania. He remained in critical condition last night at Washington Hospital Center. FBI Director Louis J. Freeh was among those who went to the hospital last night.
The father of two grown children – Elizabeth, 25 and Steven, 23, Daly lived with his wife and high school sweetheart, Mary Ann, in Fairfax County. Mary Ann Daly was at work as the appointment secretary for Rep. Bruce Vento (D-Minn.) when the shooting occurred.
About two years ago, Fulwood tapped Daly to command his new “Cold Case Squad,” a group of veteran detectives and FBI agents assigned to concentrate on homicides cases that remained unsolved for three months or more.
Daly’s fellow detectives described him as a dedicated man who could have retired from the force at any time, but chose to continue working as a detective.
Former D.C. police detective V.I. Smith, who worked with Daly when they were patrol officers in the 6th Police District, remembered him yesterday as “the kind of guy who never went to sleep.” “He was always out in the street, looking and searching,” Smith said. “He was a good officer. He was very well-respected. He did his job and he did it well.”
“Hank was a stabilizing force,” said William O. Ritchie, the former head of the D.C. criminal investigation division. “Rarely did you see him in a high-stressed demeanor. He took things in stride.” Ritchie said Daly’s death was going to be hard on the homicide squad.
“The guys are going to be devastated,” he said. “People look at the macho homicide detective. But they too are human beings. Their space has been violated by the bad guy.”
At a news conference last night, D.C. Police Chief Fred Thomas called Daly “an outstanding detective.” “He was a family man,” Thomas said. “You couldn’t find a better person or police official.”
Daly, whose father was in the Army, was born in Kassel, Germany. He served for about six years in the Marine Corps and then joined the D.C. police force, according to his brother, Lt. Michael Daly, a Metro transit officer.
He spent 13 years in the homicide squad. At his desk in the cluttered office of the cold-case squad, Daly would grumble about the “mud” coming out of the coffee machine, and he filled up ashtray after ashtray in the non-smoking Municipal Building.
“He’s been here so long no one can believe he’s gone,” said Lt. Charles Bailey, commander of the D.C. forensic science section and a friend of 18 years. “Everyone thought he was invincible. He was a great detective.”
Several neighbors said last night that Daly, who loved hunting and belonged to the Fairfax Rod and Gun Club, had told them he would soon retire.
“He and his son would clean deer in the back yard,” neighbor Michelle Oliver said. “He was very strong-minded, very firm.
Another neighbor, Garnette Strickland, 77, said, “I can’t believe it. … You would think you would be safe inside a police department.”
On Saturday, Bailey said that he and Daly went to the Fairfax Rod and Gun Club to shoot skeet. “I said, ‘Why don’t you retire from the police department, Hank?” recalled Bailey, who was with Daly’s family last night. “He said, `I can’t. I love it.’ ”
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WASHINGTON POST ARTICLE DATED NOVEMBER 26, 1994, PAGE C1
Police Headquarters Security Tightened Up
Workers began installing security equipment at entrances to D.C. police headquarters yesterday, and the department began consolidating its offices on four floors of the building to restrict the public’s access to officers, Police Chief Fred Thomas said.
The moves to tighten security with metal detectors and X-ray equipment came in the aftermath of Tuesday’s bloody rampage, during which, police said, Bennie Lee Lawson walked into police headquarters at the District’s Municipal Center and killed three law enforcement officers.
Lawson, 25, also died during the attack. Law enforcement sources said yesterday that they think Lawson fatally shot himself in the head with the gun of one of the mortally wounded officers, FBI agent Martha Dixon Martinez. The sources said Lawson shot himself with Martinez’s gun after being shot and wounded at least twice in the lower torso by other officers in the room.
Meanwhile, more than 1,100 friends, family members and law enforcement officials, including U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI Director Louis J. Freeh, paraded through St. Phillips Roman Catholic Church in Falls Church during a wake for D.C. police Sgt. Henry Joseph “Hank” Daly.
Reno and Freeh both spoke during the service.
The husband of slain FBI agent Martha Dixon Martinez said yesterday that he last talked with his wife hours before she was killed. He called her to ask whether she wanted to go to lunch, but she had already eaten. Jorge Martinez spoke to reporters during a wake for Martha Martinez at Church of the Nativity of Our Lord in Burke.
He sat in a small room with a statue of the Virgin Mary behind him. He held a handkerchief. He wiped his face once. He didn’t cry, but his eyes were wet as he talked about how excited his wife was about cooking Thanksgiving dinner.
“She was a great, great, great woman. It always gets me upset when I hear my colleagues, especially the males, say she was a good female agent,” Martinez said. “She was a good agent.”
Thomas said yesterday that the autopsy on Lawson had been completed, but he declined to comment on it.
Bayyinah Tariq, an attorney for Lawson’s family, said that family members had not seen autopsy results and that comment would be withheld until they have reviewed the report. Lawson’s father has said he doesn’t think his son would have committed suicide.
Daly and FBI agents Martinez and Michael John Miller were killed when, according to police, Lawson walked into third-floor offices used by a homicide task force and opened fire with a compact assault weapon. Two others were wounded in the melee: FBI agent John David Kuchta, who remains in critical condition at the Washington Hospital Center, and a 15-year-old youth who was in the offices with another teenager. The 15-year-old was wounded in the leg, treated at D.C. General Hospital and released.
Thomas said police hope to “completely secure” all entrances to the building by next week. Visitors to the building will have to pass through security checkpoints.
Security at police headquarters has been inadequate for decades, Thomas acknowledged during a news conference in a room down the hall from where the shootings occurred. He said it was a “sad commentary” that it took the deaths of three law enforcement officers to put the spotlight on building security.
The problem stems in large part from the varied uses of the building, which houses city offices that issue driver’s licenses and motor vehicle tags and, until recently, some city tax collection agencies’ offices. “This is a municipal center,” Thomas said. “It’s not like police headquarters in Fairfax County.”
Most police department units have been consolidated on the third, fourth, fifth and sixth floors of the building. The consolidation will be complete when offices that remain on lower floors, including the firearms unit, records section and public information, are moved.
The District has asked the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security to conduct a comprehensive security survey of the six-story Municipal Center and to offer recommendations within 10 days. The bureau is in charge of security for the State Department’s domestic facilities as well as U.S. embassies overseas.
Although uncertain what the improvements will cost, the police chief said city officials have agreed that security needs to be upgraded. “I don’t think there will be a problem getting the money,” Thomas said.
The State Department lent the District five walk-through metal detectors, five X-ray machines and 10 hand-held metal detectors. By yesterday afternoon, three of the walk-through metal detectors were in place. One was installed at the main police entrance on Indiana Avenue NW, another at the main entrance to the Motor Vehicles agency on C Street NW and a third on the third floor, where offices for homicide detectives and other investigators are.
The shootings occurred on the third floor, in the offices of the “Cold Case Squad,” a special unit of D.C. detectives and FBI agents that investigates unsolved slayings.
Law enforcement sources yesterday said that FBI agent Kuchta, who was critically wounded in the barrage of gunfire, fired about 12 rounds in an effort to defend himself and his fellow officers. One of Kuchta’s shots hit the magazine of Lawson’s weapon, causing the ammunition to tumble out and rendering it useless, the sources said.
Lawson’s gun was found partially beneath the body of Martinez, the sources said, and Martinez’s gun was found near Lawson’s body. It was unclear whether Lawson struggled with Martinez to get it, the sources said.
“We have to take some inspiration and hope from all of the things that Hank represented,” Freeh said in his comments at Daly’s wake. “He took hundreds of risks to do what was most important to him: protecting human lives.”
“If he had one last wish, I know it would have been for the {survival of the} law enforcement officers who also died that day,” the FBI director said.
“Being a police officer is probably the most noble job there is,” Reno said. “Hank Daly was the epitome of what a police officer should be.”
Miller’s wake was at the Beall Evans Funeral Home in Bowie. Funerals for Daly and Miller are at 10 a.m. today, Daly’s at St. Phillip’s and Miller’s at Village Baptist Church in Mitchellville.
Martha Martinez’s funeral will be in Pittsburgh on Monday.
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WASHINGTON POST ARTICLE DATED NOVEMBER 27, 1994, PAGE B1
A Tearful Farewell to `Heroes’; Families and Comrades Honor Slain D.C. Officer, FBI Agent
Henry J. Daly, a storied homicide detective with nearly three decades on the D.C. police force, and Michael J. Miller, an FBI agent who turned from practicing law to enforcing it, were carried to their graves yesterday in separate funeral processions, each miles long and awash in grief for two victims of a gunman’s unexplained rage.
Daly, 51, known as “Hank,” was “a larger-than-life character,” as his brother, Michael, put it yesterday – a 28-year member of the force who could have retired long ago, a dogged investigator who loved his work and a hero and mentor to younger detectives. Hundreds of mourners, including Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly, crowded his funeral in Falls Church, four days after Daly died in a spray of gunfire in D.C. police headquarters.
Meanwhile, in Mitchellville, Miller, 41, was eulogized at his funeral as a dedicated husband and father who resigned from the FBI to practice law and spend more time with his family, then rejoined the bureau because “law enforcement was in his blood. It was his calling,” the Rev. Bruce C. Salmon, of Village Baptist Church, told hundreds of mourners, including FBI Director Louis J. Freeh and Attorney General Janet Reno.
In Falls Church, St. Phillip’s Catholic Church was filled to capacity with relatives and friends of Daly and with police officers from as far away as Philadelphia and Norfolk. Dozens of others stood outside in the chilly air, listening to the ceremony through loudspeakers. Before Daly, a former Marine, was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, the funeral procession of nearly 500 vehicles, led by more than 50 police motorcycles, rolled into the District for a ceremonial drive-by of the slain officer’s last duty post – police headquarters at 300 Indiana Ave. NW. That was where he, Miller and FBI agent Martha Dixon Martinez, 35, were slain Tuesday.
In Pittsburgh, where Dixon Martinez is to be buried tomorrow, friends and relatives – including her parents and eight siblings, six of whom still live in their hometown – gathered for her wake.
For her burial, her family bought her a delicate, cream-colored lacy dress, a departure from the business suits, jeans and sweat pants that made up most of her wardrobe for court appearances and undercover surveillances.
Like dozens of other law enforcement officers at the funeral home, Jorge Martinez wore a patch of black tape across his badge as a symbol of mourning.
Martinez said he last spoke with his wife at 12:30 p.m. Tuesday, a few hours before she was slain. He said she had told him she planned to leave work early to pick up a home pregnancy test because she thought she was pregnant. Martinez said he asked the medical examiner after the autopsy not to tell him whether she was.
Dixon Martinez had been an agent for seven years. Martinez, 36, a Chicago native who joined the agency in 1988, is the supervisory special agent for interstate theft.
They met, Martinez said, after he had gone through a divorce and after his future wife had mentioned to mutual friends that she could find no decent men to date.
The three slain officers were members of the department’s “Cold Case Squad,” a task force of D.C. homicide detectives and FBI agents assigned to investigate long-unsolved slayings. Police said Bennie Lee Lawson, 25, of Northeast Washington, entered the squad’s offices and opened fire with a compact assault weapon. Lawson, who also died, apparently shot himself, law enforcement sources have said.
A longtime friend and colleague of Daly’s, police Capt. William Hennessy, the commander of the homicide unit, described Daly as a legend.
“There is no greater challenge or responsibility than to investigate the death of another human being and when that death involves foul play, bringing the responsible party to justice,” Hennessy said at the funeral. “Hank was one of the best investigators. To many, he was a father figure; to others he was a big brother. We all looked up to Hank. We all leaned on him.”
In St. Phillip’s Church, where nearly 30 D.C. police detectives served as honorary pallbearers for Daly’s coffin, the Rev. Salvatore Criscuolo told mourners that District officers with whom he has spoken since Tuesday were confused and angered by the shooting but felt proud for having known Daly.
“They want to know where you can be safe, if not safe at work,” said Criscuolo, a D.C. police chaplain. “I am not here to answer any questions today. I am going to talk about life today and eternal life.”
Police Chief Fred Thomas said of Daly and the slain FBI agents: “It is not how these officers died that made them heroes, it is the way they lived.”
Daly, who joined the police department in 1966 after his discharge from the Marine Corps, was the driving force behind the cold-case squad’s creation in 1991, officials said.
His brother, Michael Daly, a Metro transit police lieutenant, said his brother’s wife, Mary Anne, and their son and daughter, Steven and Elizabeth Anne, were honored that hundreds of people attended yesterday’s funeral. He said his family was “standing tall and proud” for the man who was a husband, father, son and brother.
As Michael Daly was returning to his seat, he turned toward his brother’s coffin, placed a hand over his heart and paused for a moment.
Miles away in Prince George’s County, an honor guard of 15 police officers stood outside Village Baptist Church while hundreds of other law enforcement officers, some from as far as Kansas, bid farewell to Miller, a father of two school-age children.
The crowd of mourners also filled a nearby church, where the funeral ceremony was carried on closed-circuit television. Miller was buried in Resurrection Cemetery in Clinton.
In his eulogy, Salmon, the minister, described Miller as a loving husband to his wife, Wanda, and to their children, Micky and Dale – and a man who took satisfaction in closing unsolved murders.
“Do you see the compassion in that? Do you see the love in that?” Salmon asked those at the funeral. “He knew there were hurting families out there who were waiting for justice.”
Miller, who lived in Upper Marlboro, was born in Cheverly and grew up in Prince George’s. He was active in the community, coaching youth basketball, soccer and baseball and working with the Boy Scouts.
“Mike didn’t think there was anything he could not do,” Salmon said. “He had only to do something once and he would be an expert.”
The service was attended by dozens of Miller’s relatives, who sat stoically at the front of the church, fighting back tears. Miller’s sister, Lisa Miller Delity, sang “The Lord’s Prayer.” His brother, Bryan, read from a poem, “Leaves of Grass,” by Walt Whitman, a favorite of Miller’s.
“A child said What is the grass? … And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.”
FBI Director Freeh called Miller a “young man of extraordinary talents … who could have done anything in life but chose to be a special agent of the FBI.” He said Miller died doing a job that he loved.
“His ability to make that choice is the bright light that shines through in this,” Freeh said. “He believed in liberty, freedom and the protection of lives, and that is the greatest legacy he could have left. … At a time when we could become cynical and angry, it is important to remember that he was committed to saving lives. Mike was a true American hero who represented the hopes of all of us to be safe and to be free.”
At the close of the funeral ceremony, Salmon urged mourners to give thanks, even as they grieved. “His life was ended far too soon, but he crammed a lot of living into those 41 years,” the minister said. “We will miss him. We draw assurance from the fact that he is now home and at rest with his father in heaven.”
At the cemetery, Miller’s 10-year-old son, Micky, biting a lip to hold back tears, helped other pallbearers place his father’s coffin over the grave. The tears came when the boy got to his chair and bowed his head.
“It was just so senseless,” said Martin Combings, 44, of Northwest Washington, who did not know Miller but attended the burial. “We don’t have many heroes anymore. And it seems like the few we do have left are always taken away too soon.”
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WASHINGTON POST ARTICLE DATED NOVEMBER 29, 1994, PAGE B3
Slain FBI Agent Remembered as `Wonderful and Caring Person
Slain FBI agent Martha Dixon Martinez was buried today with bittersweet remembrances of her life and work at least temporarily overshadowing the memory of the violent rampage that ended it.
“Thank you for sending this nation Martha Martinez,” Attorney General Janet Reno told mourners at St. Anne Church in this Pittsburgh suburb. “Thank you for sending us a splendid law enforcement officer. Thank you for sending us a wonderful and caring person.”
Martinez, 35, fellow agent Michael John Miller, 41, and D.C. police Sgt. Henry Joseph “Hank” Daly, 51, were killed Nov. 22 by a gunman who walked into their offices at D.C. police headquarters and opened fire with a compact assault weapon. Another FBI agent was seriously wounded. The gunman also died.
Among the 1,000 family members, friends and colleagues who paid their respects was Martinez’s boss, FBI Director Louis J. Freeh.
“In a type of work that could be considered hopeless, she brought the light of hope and truth,” Freeh said. “We can never become so cynical that we look upon the death of Martha … as being something that doesn’t have an impact. It had an impact on everyone.”
After the two-hour service, the flag-draped coffin bearing Martinez’s body was given a military escort to the cemetery. A 21-gun salute echoed across the hillsides as pallbearers lowered her coffin into the ground.
Friends and colleagues said her courage and compassion would live in the hearts of those who knew her.
One of eight children, Martinez grew up in this area and played varsity girls basketball at Mount Lebanon High School. In 1982, she graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a degree in chemistry.
She joined the FBI in June 1987 and was assigned to the Knoxville, Tenn., office. She transferred to Washington in January 1992, where she worked on the “Cold Case Squad,” a task force created to help D.C. police review long-unsolved homicide cases.
Castle Shannon Mayor Thomas P. O’Malley remembered when Martinez attended St. Anne’s School and played softball and basketball with his daughter, Noreen.
“She had a charming personality,” he said. “She was an outstanding athlete. Just a model kid – one of the kids you’d like to have as your own daughter.”
The Rev. Jerry Dixon, Martinez’s uncle, had performed the wedding ceremony for his niece and her husband, FBI agent Jorge Martinez, on Sept. 10. He said in the funeral homily that although the “senseless death and inexplicable tragedy” had left many people groping for answers, they could find strength and solace in prayer.
As family friend Patricia Smith left the service, she said Martinez came from a “wonderful” family.
“She was a totally dedicated young woman and a very spiritual young woman,” Smith said.
FBI Agent John Harting said she “was one of the gutsiest women I’ve ever known.
“I’ve known her since training at Quantico {in 1987}. She was a great agent and a better person.”
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WASHINGTON POST ARTICLE DATED DECEMBER 8, 1994, PAGE C1
Mourning a Husband’s Lost Future; Wife of Slain Detective Recalls a Man Ready for Quieter Life After Years at a Job He Loved
The days when Mary Ann Daly worried about her husband’s safety were past. As a police officer for 28 of the 29 years they had been married, he patrolled dark streets. He broke down drug dealers’ doors. He searched for murder suspects. But Henry Daly was closing in on retirement and investigating old homicides, which seemed safer to her somehow. If anything, she worried that he smoked too much and needed more exercise.
Still, the television report she and her colleagues were watching in her Capitol Hill office put Mary Ann’s “stomach in knots.” There had been a shooting about 30 minutes before inside D.C. police headquarters. On Henry’s floor. In Henry’s office.
Mary Ann dialed the number. No answer. She paged him. No answer. On television, she and her colleagues saw videotape of officers rushing a stretcher to a helicopter. Henry could be busy dealing with the victims, she thought.
Mary Ann called Washington Hospital Center. She identified herself and asked who had been admitted. A woman told her to hold. Then she came back on the line and said, “Please hold, and do not get off the phone.”
A call came into her office from Henry’s brother Michael, a Metro transit police lieutenant, who said he had to talk to her.
“What’s going on, Mike?” she asked.
“It’s bad,” he said.
“Is he dead?” Mary Ann blurted out. There was a pause. “Yes,” he said.
Mary Ann dropped the phone.
“I felt like my heart had been ripped out,” she recalled.
It has been two weeks since veteran D.C. detective Henry J. “Hank” Daly, 51, was gunned down in his office. It has been 10 days since hundreds of friends and relatives and people the detective never knew crowded his funeral, since 50 police motorcycles led a 500-vehicle procession to Arlington Cemetery, since the visits by the police chief, the mayor and the FBI director, since the call from President Clinton.
Mary Ann went back to work Monday as office manager for Rep. Bruce F. Vento (D-Minn.). But she is not really there. Exhausted from sleepless nights reliving what she imagines of her husband’s last moments alive, she is haunted by what-ifs.
What if her husband hadn’t gone to work that day? What if he had been down the hall at the moment a gunman walked in and sprayed the room with bullets, killing the detective and two FBI agents before allegedly shooting himself to death? What if she and her husband had not come back from their vacation out west three days before?
“It’s been hell,” Mary Ann said.
The only solace comes from Henry’s police friends who say he died instantly. She prays that one media report – that he fought for his life while police officers tried to resuscitate him – was wrong.
Piled high on the dining room table in her Falls Church home are hundreds of condolence notes. Touched and overwhelmed by the outpouring of cards, calls, food and flowers, Mary Ann wants to acknowledge every one.
But for now, the slender soft-spoken woman who turned 51 the day after her husband was killed, is reliving the memories of the man she knew most of her life.
She could even smile Monday evening as she reminisced in her living room with Elizabeth, 25, an office administrator, and Steven, 23, who works for a software company, about the day she met their father.
It was the spring of 1959, and they were both 15-year-old Army brats living in Wurzburg, Germany. She ventured into the base’s snack bar, and there was Henry Daly (she never called him Hank as his police buddies did): thin, handsome, with sandy hair and blue eyes, cocky and self-assured.
He was much like the police sergeant he would become, except that his hair turned white, his complexion ruddy, and his belly round.
They dated on and off for six years. Henry joined the Marines and was posted to North Carolina, Hawaii, the Dominican Republic and Guantanamo Bay during the Cuban missile crisis. In the meantime, she went to secretarial school and then went to work on the Hill.
When they were 21, the two eloped – sneaking off to a church in Southeast Washington – and then settled in the area.
One year later, in 1966, during a nationwide recruitment effort in the District, Henry joined the force. “It didn’t sound like a good idea to me at all,” Mary Ann said. “I worried about his safety. But he was really excited.”
Over the years, as Henry moved up the ranks as a patrolman in Northeast Washington and then a detective, he shielded his family from his world. His wife asked to ride along. His daughter wanted to see the morgue. Henry said no.
“He said, `I don’t think you should see these kinds of things,’ ” Elizabeth said.
“We lived in two completely different worlds,” Mary Ann recalled.
When Henry joined the homicide squad in 1981, he worked six-day weeks. Sometimes he stayed up all night following leads and, like many detectives, didn’t come home for a few days at a time. He was a member of the Fairfax Rod and Gun Club, but he had little time to hunt and shoot skeet.
After hours, the chain-smoking detective liked to go to bars around town, where he drank Bacardi rum and Coke. A regular at bars such as La Tomate in DuPont Circle, he was known as a congenial storyteller. Every night, owner George Koropoulos still sets out Henry Daly’s favorite drink.
“He had many a watering hole,” Mary Ann said. “It sometimes annoyed me, but he did what he did.”
She continued to work on the Hill and raise the children, often seeing her husband in the morning – as she was leaving for work and he was getting home.
Henry loved the life. At his funeral, a longtime friend and colleague, police Capt. William Hennessy, the commander of the homicide unit, described Henry as a legend who was a hero and mentor to younger detectives.
“There is no greater challenge or responsibility than to investigate the death of another human being and when that death involves foul play, bringing the responsible party to justice,” Hennessy said. “Hank was one of the best investigators. Too many, he was a father figure; to others, he was a big brother. We all looked up to Hank. We all leaned on him.”
The gruff, tough guy he was at work carried over to home. He was strict with his children, especially Elizabeth, who upset him no end when she went through her punk phase, wearing black and dyeing her hair yellow and then, her brother recalled, “light bulb white.”
Elizabeth remembered when her father ran a boyfriend’s license through the police computer to see whether he had a criminal record.
She once told her father she went to a dance when she and her friends were elsewhere. Ever the intuitive and dogged investigator, he asked about the dance for days, grilling them for details until they confessed.
“He would forget, and handle family members like we were criminals,” Mary Ann joked.
Three years ago, he was sent to command a new unit that investigated old homicides called the Cold Case Squad. He loved the camaraderie and high-profile cases.
At the top of his game, Henry still spent most of his time pursuing leads on the street, but he had dinner at home more often, and Mary Ann began to sense he was relaxing. They talked of retiring, maybe moving out west or building a log cabin in the country.
Above the Daly’s’ fireplace is a photograph Mary Ann took of Henry the week before he was killed. The couple had taken their four-wheel-drive vehicle out to visit a retired homicide detective in Nebraska.
Wearing sunglasses and jeans, hands in his pockets, Henry is standing on a rock in the South Dakota Badlands with a big, blue sky in the background. A pack of Carlton 120s is in his shirt pocket.
Mary Ann reached up and took the photograph down from the mantelpiece. “He was so mellow that day, so happy,” she said.
“I look at this picture, and I can’t believe he’s not here,” she said. “I would never have come back if I thought that was going to happen to him. But now there’s nothing I can do.”
She took a deep breath, her eyes filling with tears. “Sometimes I think I’m okay. Then I get to thinking I have the rest of my life here. He just evaporated into the air.”
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WASHINGTON POST ARTICLE DATED DECEMBER 22, 1994, PAGE J1
Detectives Bearing Up to 4 Triple Homicides
The four triple homicides that occurred in the District in a recent six-week span would overload investigative units in many cities. Not so in the District.
Because of the high level of violence in the city and the nature of each of the recent triple slayings, the multiple killings did not tax the resources of the D.C homicide squad any more than usual. In each of the last six years, D.C. homicide detectives have handled more than 400 slayings. And each of the recent triple slayings occurred in a relatively small space, in either an apartment, house or office, which made it easier for police technicians to gather physical evidence at the scene.
And because none of the incidents endangered the general public, large numbers of detectives were not assigned to any individual case.
If several bystanders minding their own business are killed in a drive-by shooting, “you’d probably have half the homicide office on it from Jump Street because that’s a greater threat to the community than three acquaintances killed inside their home in a drug-related attack,” said William O. Ritchie, who retired in August as chief of detectives for D.C. police.
In addition, a reorganization of the homicide branch has made it less likely that any one team of investigators would be burdened with more than one multiple killing in such a short period of time, especially since the attacks did not all occur in one geographic area. Since July, detective teams have been split up according to police district. There are six homicide squads: Five are assigned to slayings in one of the seven police districts, and one covers the 2nd and 3rd districts, which have the lowest homicide rates in the city.
Before the reorganization, teams of detectives were assigned to investigate slayings that occurred during their shift, regardless of where they took place.
Two of the triple homicides occurred in the 1st Police District, one in the 4th, and another in the 7th. Because the investigative workload has been spread out, no squad has been overburdened, said Capt. William Hennessy, commander of the homicide unit.
Police made an arrest in one of the triple slayings, but prosecutors dropped the charges. And a second case, in which police say a gunman killed a police sergeant, two FBI agents, then himself inside police headquarters, is considered closed. The other two remain open, though detectives have promising leads, Hennessy said.
Hennessy and investigative experts said triple homicides are not necessarily more difficult to close with arrests than slayings involving one or two victims. In recent years, D.C. homicide detectives have investigated dozens of double homicides.
When a triple homicide occurs, “there is a psychological sense of a greater urgency to solve the case, but you go through the same investigative process,” Ritchie said. That would involve trying to answer a number of questions, investigators said: Was there more than one killer? Were all the victims’ targets or was there one primary target? Were the others killed because they were witnesses? Who might have wanted to do the killing? What does the physical evidence tell you? What do surviving witnesses have to say?
In the District, most multiple killings that are committed indoors involve one primary target, detectives said. In such cases, other victims are killed because they resist or are witnesses.
The triple killings occurred between Oct. 26 and Nov. 22. Detectives think each case involved people with ties to drugs, either as dealers or as bandits who rob dealers or users.
+ At about midnight on Oct. 26, two or three gunmen wearing ski masks entered a home in the 5400 block of Second Street NW and shot three people to death. Among the victims were an 89-year-old man who struggled with the gunmen as they went out the back door and one of his granddaughters. Detectives believe that the third victim, a 22-year-old man who lived nearby, was the primary target and that the attack was over drug money.
+ Early in the morning on Nov. 7, the bodies of a man and two women were found fatally stabbed in an apartment in the 800 block of Fourth Street SW. The male was involved in drug trafficking, federal investigators said.
+ On Nov. 22, Bennie Lee Lawson, 25, shot and killed D.C. police Sgt. Henry J. “Hank” Daly and FBI agents Michael J. Miller and Martha Dixon Martinez, and he seriously wounded FBI agent John David Kutcha. Lawson killed himself with the gun of Martinez, investigators said. Homicide detectives had questioned Lawson about the Oct. 26 triple homicide.
+ On Dec. 10, two men and a woman were stabbed to death in a suspected crack house in Anacostia. Last week, two men were arrested and charged in the murders. Although charges were dismissed by the U.S. attorney, a grand jury is continuing to investigate the two men.
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WASHINGTON POST ARTICLE DATED SEPTEMBER 22, 1995, PAGE B3
Clues in Deadly Attack on Police Sought After Crackdown on Gang
In the 10 months since Bennie Lee Lawson walked into the District’s police headquarters and shot to death a police sergeant, two FBI agents and himself, law enforcement officials have been nagged by one question: Why?
Those officials hope that the arrests yesterday of nine alleged associates of Lawson’s, accused of being members of the First and Kennedy Street Crew in Northwest Washington, will provide insight into his brazen and suicidal attack on police. As one source said, a theory bandied about — that Lawson was trying to prove his manhood and assure his comrades that he was no snitch — remains “pure speculation.”
Police and FBI officials say they want to be sure that Lawson truly acted alone Nov. 22 when he killed Sgt. Henry J. “Hank” Daly and FBI agents Martha Dixon Martinez and Michael John Miller, and wounded agent John Kuchta.
Although law enforcement officials describe the crew as ruthless and link members to violence and murder, the nine suspects are charged only with drug and gun offenses. But the penalties for those offenses are stiff enough for authorities to use to pressure crew members to tell them whether Lawson was encouraged, or even ordered, by the gang to carry out the attack, law enforcement sources said.
Police said 14 people were or will be charged in the crackdown, including two men who were arrested with Lawson in 1990 in a raid that yielded guns and sent Lawson to prison. The two men — Jermaine Graves, 23, and Kobi Mowatt, 24 — were accused in court papers of committing a triple homicide with Lawson last October, an event that police think led to Lawson’s assault on police headquarters.
Nine of the suspects were arrested yesterday during early morning raids on several homes in the District and Maryland. Two other suspects are in jail and will be charged in the case. Warrants were issued for three others, including Mowatt, a close friend of Lawson’s, who the FBI thinks fled to Africa shortly after Lawson went on the rampage at police headquarters.
The arrests culminate a nearly two-year investigation by the Safe Streets Gang Task Force, a group made up of FBI agents, D.C. police officers and officers of the U.S. Marshals Service and Department of Housing and Urban Development.
W. Lane Crocker Jr., who runs the FBI’s Washington office, said the task force first began looking at the First and Kennedy Street Crew in late 1993 when D.C. police began hearing about heavy crack trafficking in that area of Northwest Washington.
The investigation intensified in October 1994 after the slayings of an 89-year-old man, his daughter and a visitor, who was the target of the crew’s shooters. Police said they think that Graves and Mowatt committed the crimes and that Lawson held a gun on the victims but did not do any shooting. In fact, police said, Lawson became sickened by the killings and vomited, leading crew members to tease him relentlessly about his manhood.
Police investigating the triple homicide took Lawson to police headquarters in early November for questioning. When police wanted to question him again, his alleged accomplices accused Lawson of being a snitch. To prove them wrong, officials say, Lawson may have gone back to police headquarters with a gun tucked under a heavy coat. But he went to the wrong office; instead of homicide, he wound up in the “cold case” squad room.
Graves, 23, who is jail on another federal gun charge, will be charged in the drug crew case. Police also plan to file charges against Gregory Ray, a suspected leader of the crew, who is in jail on other charges. Warrants were issued yesterday for his younger brother, Dorian M. Ray, 21, and Antoine F. Boyd, 23, who police could not find yesterday.
The nine who were arrested yesterday are: Jesse Bell, 21, of Suitland; Craig Brandon, 20, of Longfellow Street NW; Mark Bundy, 22, of Kennedy Street NE; Maverick Comartie, 37, of 59th Street NE; Robert Ford, 26, of Lanham; Terry Johnson, 24, of 17th Street NE; Juan Nino, 19, of Silver Spring; Marcel Washington, 22, of Longfellow Street NW; and Jean Souverain, 23, of Hamilton Street NW.
Most of the nine suspects have arrest records for violations ranging from crime and drug offenses to property crimes. But most of them have not been convicted, according to court records
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WASHINGTON POST ARTICLE DATED OCTOBER 19, 1995, PAGE C3
Renamed Building Urged
Interim Police Chief Larry D. Soulsby told a committee of the D.C. Council yesterday that “there would be no greater tribute to the members of the department” than to rename the Municipal Building after the late Sgt. Henry Joseph “Hank” Daly, who was slain there in November.
Soulsby and several other law enforcement officials spoke for the change to the council’s Public Works subcommittee.
The 51-year-old Daly and two FBI agents, Martha Dixon Martinez, 35, and Michael John Miller, 41, were shot to death in their office in the building at 300 Indiana Ave. NW on Nov. 22 by an alleged drug crew member who was a suspect in a triple murder. The assailant, Bennie Lee Lawson, 25, also seriously wounded FBI agent John David Kuchta before killing himself.
The Municipal Building includes offices for the police department, the Department of Motor Vehicles and the D.C. Parole Board. It has long been known as police headquarters.
D.C. Council member Harry Thomas (D-Ward 5) said that he supports naming the building after Daly and that legislation changing the name will be put on the “fast track.” He said that under D.C. law, the name change does not become effective until two years after the death of the person for whom the building is being named.
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WASHINGTON POST ARTICLE DATED AUGUST 5, 1996, PAGE B1
Suicidal Act Seen as Key To Gang Case; Prosecutors Try to Link Men in Triple Slayings
Federal prosecutors in the racketeering trial of the District’s so-called First and Kennedy Street Crew want the ghost of Bennie Lee Lawson — the man who authorities say killed a sergeant, two FBI agents and himself nearly two years ago at D.C. police headquarters — to be a crucial part of the upcoming trial.
In what may be a first nationally in federal criminal trials, Assistant U.S. Attorneys William M. Blier and Patricia M. Haynes are asking a federal judge to allow them to use details of Lawson’s attack on police headquarters as evidence against two men accused as his accomplices in an earlier triple homicide.
Blier and Haynes insist in court papers that they do not want to go into all of the gruesome details of Lawson’s Nov. 22, 1994, assault on police headquarters during the trial, which is set for Jan. 10.
Instead, they argue, they want to show that Lawson had a “guilty conscience” and committed suicide over the Oct. 26, 1994, triple slaying that he and the two other men allegedly carried out. And because Lawson felt guilty about it, the prosecutors want to ask a jury to conclude that Lawson’s alleged accomplices, Jermaine Graves and Kobi Mowatt, are guilty of the slayings.
Defense attorneys say the novel theory shows the desperation of the prosecutors to link their clients to the headquarters shootout. U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth will decide whether the prosecutors’ complex theory would be too prejudicial and inflammatory to present to a jury.
Authorities say that when Lawson walked into police headquarters that November day, he believed that he and his accomplices were the prime suspects in the triple homicide that had occurred less than a month before and that they were about to be arrested. And for that reason, according to authorities, Lawson went into the “cold case” homicide office, pulled out a gun and shot and killed D.C. police Sgt. Henry J. Daly and FBI agents Michael J. Miller and Martha Dixon Martinez, and seriously wounded FBI agent John David Kuchta.
The prosecutors admit they could find no other instances where a co-conspirator’s suicide was used to show “consciousness of guilt” and then used as evidence against living defendants. If Lawson were alive and on trial, prosecutors probably would have no trouble getting in evidence about “other bad acts” of the defendants. But Lawson is not a defendant. He is dead. However, Lawson is an unindicted co-conspirator in the First and Kennedy Street Crew case.
Defense attorneys say the prosecutor’s legal theory would inflame and prejudice a jury against their clients.
“To allow the jury to speculate that one person’s suicide demonstrates consciousness of guilt {of others} makes a mockery of the judicial system,” said attorney G. Allen Dale, who represents Mowatt.
If anyone should be feeling guilty, Dale said, it should be the homicide detectives who falsely told Lawson on Nov. 4, 1994, that police were analyzing blood from a car Lawson was driving on the night of the triple slaying, as well as a sample of vomit from the scene of the killings. Police say they believe Lawson became ill after the slayings. “This may well be what pushed Lawson to do what he did,” Dale said.
But there could have been many other reasons why Lawson killed himself in a suicidal attack on police, Dale said. Lawson had been raped in prison while serving time on an unrelated weapon conviction, Dale said, and he vowed that he would not go back. He also was concerned about being viewed as weak and as a snitch.
“If — and if is underlined — he killed himself, he could have done so for any number of reasons,” Dale said. “He was a dead man the moment he opened fire at police headquarters, and he knew it.”
Graves, Mowatt and five others are charged with being part of a violent crew that sold crack near First and Kennedy streets NW beginning in 1988. They allegedly dressed alike, wearing jackets and hats with the Los Angeles Raiders logo and the same kind of shirts with the number 100 across the chest, a marijuana leaf and gun imprints. They also allegedly used force, threats and death to protect their drug organization from rivals.
A rival drug dealer was one of the three people (the others were an 89-year-old man and his daughter) killed in October 1994. Within two hours of the slayings, Lawson, Graves and Mowatt were pulled over by police during a traffic stop. An officer searched Graves and found a broken gold chain in his pocket; Graves allegedly took it from the female homicide victim. The three men were not arrested and were allowed to leave.
Lawson, who was driving the car that was stopped, was interviewed by homicide detectives and became obsessed with the belief that he, Graves and Mowatt were going to be arrested, especially after officers told him that blood and vomit were being analyzed, according to court papers filed by the prosecutors.
In discussions with several others, Lawson said he would not go back to prison, according to court papers. He said that he would “take some police out” and that the police would have to “take him out” before that would happen. When Mowatt allegedly asked Lawson what he planned to do, he said he was “gonna go down and handle my business.”
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WASHINGTON POST ARTICLE DATED DECEMBER 19, 1996, PAGE J1
In Honor of a Fallen Officer; Municipal Building Renamed for `Cop’s Cop’
Two years have passed since D.C. police Sgt. Henry J. Daly, known to friends as “Hank,” was murdered in a spray of bullets along with two FBI agents at police headquarters, where the 28-year veteran was thought of as a permanent figure.
On a rainy afternoon last week, city officials made the perception a reality: changing the name of the Municipal Center to the Henry J. Daly Building and placing a bronze likeness of Daly in the building’s lobby. For those who knew him, the dedication was a fitting tribute to a hard-working “cop’s cop” who served as a mentor to young officers and never stopped believing he could make a difference.
“When Hank was alive, he was like a fixture in that building,” said FBI Special Agent John Kuchta, who was seriously wounded in the 1994 shooting, during last week’s ceremony to honor his slain colleagues.
The ceremony was a solemn one, with gospel hymns and little clapping as local and national leaders praised Daly, as well as special agents Martha Dixon Martinez and Mike Miller, for fighting to lock up criminals and making the “ultimate sacrifice.”
The slayings shook law enforcement agents, many of whom never imagined someone would walk into police headquarters and attack officers.
“It is as though our home has been violated,” said Police Chief Larry D. Soulsby. “It is unthinkable that an armed criminal . . . would kill an officer in our own home. We must never let it happen again.”
On the fateful day, Nov. 22, 1994, Bennie Lee Lawson, 25, walked into police headquarters, pulled a compact assault handgun from his waistband and turned a small, third-floor office into a shooting gallery. More than 40 shots were fired, killing Daly, Martinez and Miller and critically wounding Kuchta, who has now recovered. After being wounded by other officers, Lawson killed himself with Martinez’s weapon.
The incident pointed out serious problems with security at the Municipal Center, which also houses city offices that issue driver’s licenses and motor vehicle tags. Days after the shooting, workers set up metal detectors at entrances to police headquarters and consolidated offices on four floors to restrict public access to officers.
Attorney General Janet Reno said each of the slain officers was a hero, especially for the work they did as members of the Cold Case Squad, which investigates homicides that are more than a year old.
“They were investigating brutal acts of violence that others had been unable to solve,” Reno said. “The evidence might be old, but this group would never quit until a case was solved. These people represent the best of law enforcement, and of America.”
Daly, 51, was an ex-Marine who had been on the police force for 28 years. In 1992, he took command of the newly formed Cold Case Squad, often working long hours. His wife, Mary Ann Daly, said her husband always kept his law enforcement career separate from his home life. Daly said she knew her husband was well-respected, but not quite how much.
“This event has been a source of amazement to me and our family,” she told a packed auditorium at One Judiciary Square, before receiving a standing ovation. “This is more than we imagined.”
After the speeches were complete, Assistant Police Chief Max Krupo, who moderated the program, reminded the officers in attendance that the Hank Dalys of the world “take ’em so one of us don’t have to. One of us was going down that day. Never forget that.”
Krupo said he scoured books looking for the right quotation that might sum up the occasion but decided against quoting any of the great philosophers. Instead, he ended the program like this: “Hank, this one’s for you, baby.”
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WASHINGTON POST ARTICLE DATED MAY 14, 2006, PAGE C2
UPDATE: For Former D.C. Captain, Fairfax Police Shooting an Uneasy Reminder of ’94 Attack
W. Louis Hennessy was at home Monday night when he turned on the television and saw the live news reports describing the aftermath of the ambush-style shooting at a Fairfax County police station.
Hearing that one officer was slain and another critically wounded, and that the gunman was dead, Hennessy’s mind turned to another shooting of law enforcement officers — one in which he was the intended target.
Nov. 22, 1994: Hennessy was captain of the D.C. police homicide squad. He was out of the office for the day when a homicide suspect walked into the cold case unit’s room at police headquarters.
The suspect, Bennie L. Lawson, opened fire with an assault weapon. He killed D.C. police Sgt. Henry J. “Hank” Daly, 51, and FBI agents Michael J. Miller, 41, and Martha Dixon Martinez, 35. FBI agent John David Kuchta, then 31, was critically wounded.
Lawson, 25, then shot himself to death with an agent’s gun.
A week or so earlier, Hennessy and some detectives had questioned Lawson, a suspect in a triple homicide. After the bloodshed at the headquarters, police found a handwritten note in Lawson’s bedroom that read, “Wanted Dead Captain Hennessy & staff.”
Hennessy, who retired from the force and is a Maryland District Court judge in Charles County, has difficulty describing the grim scene he encountered in the cold case room that day. He said the attack redefined his life.
“It made me realize how fragile life is,” Hennessy said. “You just can’t take it for granted. The scene was almost surreal. It was one of the most violent scenes I have ever been exposed to.”
D.C. police still house their cold case unit in that room. Detectives display plaques and photographs on the wall to honor Daly and the agents. Police headquarters — then known as the Municipal Center — was renamed the Henry J. Daly Building in 1996. A memorial service was held in November 2004 for the 10th anniversary of the shooting.
Kuchta, who was shot at least five times, including in the heart, recovered and stayed on the job. He works in the bureau’s Tampa field office, FBI officials said.
Hennessy said he worries that Fairfax police officers will never get over the rampage at the Sully District station in Chantilly that left Detective Vicky O. Armel dead and Officer Michael E. Garbarino critically wounded. Some D.C. detectives experienced emotional problems in the years after the shootings, and at least one had to seek inpatient help for alcohol problems, he said.
Most never sought help or counseling, though. Even today, they don’t feel comfortable discussing what happened.
“You don’t talk about stuff like that,” Hennessy said. “You can’t. Otherwise, everybody would be crying in their beer.
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