Police arrested a suspect in the shooting death of an 18-year-old woman at a hotel in Friendship Heights — Washington, D.C.’s first reported homicide of 2024.
Paramedics responded to the report of a shooting on the seventh floor of the Embassy Suites Hotel on Military Road NW about 1:15 a.m. Monday. They were told on arrival that the victim was in cardiac arrest.
Ashlei Hinds, of Clinton, Maryland, was pronounced dead at the scene, the Metropolitan Police Department said. She was a freshman at Louisiana State University, the school confirmed.
The victim's mother, Tiffany Falden, said her daughter was home on holiday break, and that she was the student government president in her senior year at Dr. Henry A. Wise Jr. High School in Prince George's County, Maryland.
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"Just loving, caring, a great heart, loves children, loves her family. [She was] just an all-around good girl. Never been in trouble a day in her life," Falden said.
Police arrested 18-year-old Jelani Cousin of Northeast D.C. on Tuesday and charged him with second-degree murder while armed.
A law enforcement source familiar with the investigation said about 10 people were attending a party inside a hotel room when a shooter opened fire.
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Falden said her daughter had decided to go with a friend to a New Year’s Eve party at the hotel. Family members heard some uninvited people may have crashed the party.
Guests at the Embassy Suites said they heard two gunshots and then screaming.
It's not clear if Hinds was the shooter's intended target.
"She's lived an amazing life and this wasn't for her. This wasn't her," the victim's mother said. "She's not a street person. She doesn't do that. She is around family or her friends all the time, but not a partyer or anything like that."
Hinds' grandmother, Sandra Thomas, said her granddaughter was a churchgoer and had recently asked her grandfather, a pastor, for her own Bible. It arrived a day before she was killed.
"Ashlei was amazing. I mean, there was nothing that she didn't want to try, you know. She was always willing to help everybody. And sometimes she would tell me, 'I'll do that for you, Nana,' or, 'Let me get that,' 'Need me to help?' She was always willing to help," Thomas said.
Police said as many as six people left the room before police arrived.
Video shows police vehicles near an entrance to the Embassy Suites less than a block from the Friendship Heights Metro station on the D.C.-Maryland line. Hotel management said they were cooperating with police in the investigation.
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Hinds was killed just after D.C. ended the previous year with 274 homicides. According to preliminary figures released Monday, homicides in 2023 were the highest in more than two decades — since 1997, when there were 302. Homicides were up about 35% from 2022, according to D.C. police data.
D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser says she is working to reverse this trend with new legislation that has yet to be passed.
Anyone with potentially relevant information is asked to contact police.
