With 112 homicides, the most since 1994, Fort Worth confronts a tremor of violence
In the first killing in Fort Worth last year, a man used a pistol from the back of an SUV to shoot his daughter as she drove, according to a police account. The vehicle crashed through a fence, sliced across a business developer’s estate and drove into a tree. The woman’s elderly father got out, police said, and fired into her head to be certain that she was dead.
In the city’s final homicide in 2020, the third killing of the day, a 14-year-old girl was shot dead during an outdoor group fight.
Between those slayings, 110 other people were killed, the most in the city in 26 years. Until 2020, there had not been a triple-digit homicide toll in a year since 1995, when there were 108 victims.
The killings increased across all motive categories. They occurred during drug robberies and were fueled by rage, argument, and gang and domestic violence, police said.
Six toddlers and six teenagers were among the juvenile victims. The youngest was a 1-year-old boy who was killed in October. Police have said that a man took a vehicle in a robbery and struck and ran over Zayden McLean with it as he backed from a parking space. In August, 4-year-old Czara Lewandowski’s mother slit her throat and put the little girl’s body in a garbage can in their backyard, police allege.
The homicide total increased by 59% compared to 2019, when there were 70 victims.
As crack cocaine sales burgeoned in 1986, Fort Worth recorded 202 homicides, its record high.
The city’s population increased by about 460,000 people between 1994 and 2020. The per capita homicide rate was 28 per 100,000 people in 1994 and 12 per 100,000 people in 2020.
A complete explanation of the cause of the pronounced increase last year is elusive. Criminal killings are up across the country. In Fort Worth, the motive categories were in about the same proportions in 2020 as in other years.
“It’s a sad reality we’re in right now,” said Sgt. Joe Loughman, who heads the homicide unit that he joined in 2014. Loughman supervises the work of 12 detectives who handle active cases, two detectives reviewing cold cases and two other investigators.
As cases mounted, the unit’s system for assigning new homicides stopped working. Previously it used a call-back procedure in which a detective on call would take a new case. Some had 10 or more cases, while others had far fewer. To balance the caseload, the unit replaced that system with a different plan, and cases were assigned to detectives who were not already at capacity.
“It got to the point,” Loughman said, that he needed “to pick and choose who got what case.”
Manny Ramirez, the president of a union representing officers, has said that a decrease in proactive policing is a factor. This strategy includes traffic stops of vehicles that could lead to the discovery of guns or drugs. A department spokesman has said it has not directed officers to pull back on proactive measures.
The unit’s homicide clearance rate, calculated without considering cases cleared last year in which the victim died in a previous year and before three new homicides occurred on Wednesday, was about 74%, Loughman said.
In 2017, the clearance rate for homicides in cities with populations near Fort Worth’s was 57%, according to FBI data.
The clearance rate does not include arrests in 2020 of suspects connected to homicides that occurred in previous years. In July, a suspect was arrested in the 2013 drowning death of his girlfriend. Initially, a forensic pathologist ruled that Sarah McKinney, 18, had drowned in an accident. Her body was found in the West Fork of the Trinity River. Justin Azocar, 31, on July 27, 2020, told police that he pushed McKinney from a bridge.
Police arrested in September a suspect in connection with the 1974 killing of Carla Walker, 17. Glen McCurley, 77, confessed during an interview with detectives and his DNA links him to Walker’s sexual assault and death, police have said.
The oldest homicide victim in Fort Worth last year was Sammie Brown, a 73-year-old tenant of an apartment in a house who died in July in a fire that arson investigators said was set by woman who also lived in the residence.
In April, Julia Gregor, a 70-year-old grandmother of three, was shot to death as she drove home from work.
In suspect Jeffrey Watson’s view, her Toyota Camry was moving too slow in the fast lane of West Loop 820, police said. Watson got behind it, and Gregor hit her brakes. He drove past, and she she flipped him off.
Watson, 34, aimed a handgun at Gregor’s car, intending to shoot out her tires, he told a detective. Watson shot Gregor in the head, police allege.
In July, an assailant fired a gun upon Steven Evans, 52, as he sat in a wheelchair in a parking lot along West Camp Bowie Boulevard.
On a Friday night and Saturday morning in October, two men who lived together were separately killed and set on fire near railroad tracks in a park an in alley between houses about three miles away. At least one of the assailants believed that the victims were snitches, according to a police interview with one of three men who detectives allege were involved in the killings of Za Htoo, 23, and Snay Gay, 26.
There was one triple homicide in Fort Worth last year.
In December, Clay Turrentine, 55, and Veronica Jones, 46, were tied with rope, put in the back seat of a pickup truck and driven from an auto dealership where they worked to a building in Palo Pinto County and shot to death. A 65-year-old woman who was an employee of the business was slain in the office. Police arrested two suspects.
In Arlington, there were 23 homicides in 2020. Sixteen people were slain in the city in 2019. The Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office investigated eight homicides in 2020.
There were no cases in 2020 in which a Fort Worth police officer shot a person who died.
In 2019, Fort Worth police officers shot seven people. Six died. In 2020, a Fort Worth police officer shot one person, who survived. The officer shot a 59-year-old man who the police department said pointed a gun at the officer at the time he was shot.
This story was originally published January 1, 2021 at 6:00 AM.
