Lawrence King wants to keep the District’s cold cases alive.
His 22-year-old son was walking home from a friend’s house late one summer evening in Northeast, when five men surrounded him and beat him, stabbing him in the neck and leaving him sprawled on the sidewalk to die.
Nine years later, police have made no arrests in the death of Damion “Dirty” King.
In 2005, after investigators stopped actively working the case, Lawrence King started a Web site, snitchonmurder.com, to keep unsolved cases from gathering dust in police files.
King’s site began by featuring his son’s and two other cases. Now it shows newspaper clippings and police reports from dozens of D.C.-area cold cases that King hopes he can revive with the public’s help.
“People should get involved,” he said. “We hope more people get involved in trying to solve [my son’s] case — or any case.”
King is convinced his son’s aggressors are still hanging around his neighborhood, free to trample over Damion’s concrete deathbed on the 2800 block of Myrtle Avenue.
“They were neighborhood boys,” King said, “a few years younger than Damion.” King said his son knew the men who attacked him.
He contends there was some sort of dispute, possibly involving money, that ended in Damion’s death.
Days after his son’s slaying, a few neighbors came forward with a “pretty good idea” of who the aggressors were and gave police names.
A detective on the case told King he was “90 percent sure” that the named individuals were guilty of his son’s murder, according to King.
But a grand jury hearing found there was not enough evidence to arrest anyone.
“Not having an eyewitness was the only reason that has kept the case from going closed,” King said.
King and his wife have three other sons, two of whom were younger than Damion at the time of his death.
The family still lives in the neighborhood where their second son was killed, hoping that one day clues t
