A 17-year-old boy was charged Tuesday in the murder of a 15-year-old boy shot in front of his mother and two sisters Saturday on a Metro station platform.
Maurice Bellamy, the suspect in the death of Davonte Washington, was charged with second-degree murder. He was shackled in the D.C. courtroom where he appeared Tuesday afternoon and was charged as an adult.
"That's the man. That's the man who shot my baby," Washington's mother cried when she saw Bellamy.
Washington's loved ones filled three whole rows of seats in the courtroom.
Washington was shot after a young man approached him in the Deanwood Metro station and asked why he was looking at him, witnesses told police. He had been headed with his mother and sisters to get a haircut for Easter.
The shooting death of the teenager was senseless, D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier said Tuesday morning at a news conference.
"Of all the tragic things that we see when it comes to violence, nothing is more senseless than this case, in my opinion," she said. "There's no reason for it. "
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Washington, a ninth-grader and Air Force junior ROTC member at Largo High School, was sitting with his family in a Plexiglass shelter on the Metro platform when a young man tapped on the glass, Victor Leonard, Washington's grandfather, said Washington's mother told him.
The stranger asked Washington why he was looking at him and if he knew him from somewhere. Washington replied "What?" The young man then shot him twice in the chest and ran away, witnesses said.
The teenager was rushed to a hospital, where he died.
Police have no information indicating Washington and Bellamy knew each other, Lanier said.
Bellamy was identified as the suspect after police compared video surveillance footage from the Metro station to a database of juvenile offenders, court documents say.
Washington's little sisters are devastated by their brother's murder.
"We have to talk to my granddaughters every day. We have to hold them and calm them down every day because they're reliving it," Leonard said.
