Crime Scene

A woman was fatally shot and a small girl was wounded Sunday evening as they were boarding a Metrobus in Southeast Washington, authorities said. D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier, who went to the scene, said the woman was thought to be the mother of the child. She apparently was on or near the steps of the bus with the girl in her arms when the shooting occurred about 5:40 p.m. on Minnesota Avenue SE. A police source said the woman was shot in the face. The child was grazed, the source said.

SANFORD, Fla. — The neighborhood watch volunteer charged with fatally shooting 17-year-old Trayvon Martin wants the jury at his trial to be sequestered and for panelists to be able to inspect the crime scene. Zimmerman's attorney filed a motion Thursday asking that jurors be kept in isolation during the trial and that their names and other personal information remain confidential because of the immense attention the case has received. Defense attorney Mark O'Mara also asks that...

Jue Plummer stepped out the back door of his home in Southeast Washington to check on his motorcycle yesterday morning and got a grim surprise: A stranger lay sprawled in the yard, dead. Thinking that the man was a crack-addicted homeless person who had fallen asleep just outside the door, Plummer, 20, asked his mother, "Where's the baseball bat?" That's when he noticed that the man's eyes were rolled back and his leg was bleeding. "I couldn't believe it," Plummer said. "I looked at it, then I didn't want to look at it...

The street sweepers couldn't get past the police tape. So when night fell on the streets around the Boston Marathon's finish line, the messy aftermath of a big race was still sitting where runners had left it. Piles of discarded silvery "space blankets. " Sneaker-smashed banana peels. And, at one marathon information booth, a sheet full of unanswered questions. The sheet was marked "Runner/Family relations triage. " On it, some marathon staffer had taken down information from family members,...

SANFORD, Fla. — The neighborhood watch volunteer charged with fatally shooting 17-year-old Trayvon Martin wants the jury at his trial to be sequestered and for panelists to be able to inspect the crime scene. Zimmerman's attorney filed a motion Thursday asking that jurors be kept in isolation during the trial and that their names and other personal information remain confidential because of the immense attention the case has received. Defense attorney Mark O'Mara also asks that...

SAN FERNANDO, Mexico — At the largest mass grave site ever found in Mexico, where 177 bodies have been pulled from deep pits, authorities say they have recovered few bullet casings and little evidence that the dead were killed with a gun. Instead, most died of blunt force trauma to the head, and a sledgehammer found at the crime scene this month is believed to have been used in the executions, according to Mexican investigators and state officials....

The police came for him just after 4 a.m. Wael Ali was still awake, cramming for exams in the small house that served as his sanctuary from the past. It had been four years since Wael's identical twin brother, Wasel, was found dead in a wooded area near the Mall in Columbia. To escape constant reminders of the crime, Ali had moved 700 miles away, to Marietta, Ga., where he had enrolled in college and was finally rebuilding his life. On Sept. 15, 2011, the...

In the middle of a July heat wave, a circle of students knelt around a hole in the ground in a partly shaded grove at George Mason University, digging for dead bodies. While gnats clung to their sweat, Amanda Guszak and her classmates filled five-gallon drums with discarded soil. Their professors, former crime scene investigators in Prince William County, broke the tedium with stories about their days on the police force — the time one exhumed the soupy graveyard remains of a puppy mill or the...

Yellow crime tape hung along the length of the block from the Bank of Hogan at one corner of the street to the pharmacy, Allmed Drugs, at the other. Each had just been robbed, and FBI agents prowled the sidewalks outside. Alongside them, 38 teenagers swarmed the crime scene, pistols holstered at their hips and notebooks in their hands. The robberies, pistols and crime scene were fake, a simulation set up at the FBI's Hogan's Alley training facility — complete with fake movie...

Sixteen-year-old Markies Ross was riding with a neighbor to Central High School on Tuesday when they came upon police cars and yellow crime-scene tape. Beyond it, he caught a glimpse of a body. It looked familiar. Markies got out of the car and asked officers if he could get closer. They wouldn't let him. But he soon learned that what he had feared was true: His brother, 18-year-old Marckel Norman Ross, had been gunned down that morning on his way to the same Capitol Heights school.

Ernie Jones and Darrell Linville are two ordinary guys who have had extraordinary careers. Jones and Linville retired last month from the Charles County Sheriff's Office after lengthy careers as latent fingerprint experts, working for various law enforcement agencies, including the FBI. Jones, 70, analyzed evidence after the assassination attempt on Alabama Gov. George Wallace in Laurel in 1972, and assessed crime scenes of the Washington and...

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly reported the year Nancy Dunning was found shot to death in her Alexandria home. She was killed in 2003, not 1993. This version has been updated. Elmer "Joe" Roehrs got married when he was 82 years old, about the time he retired from his job as an optician in Falls Church. He stopped driving when he was 90. And at 94, he still exercised on the treadmill in his home each day and took care to eat...

A fingerprint match led police to arrest a suspect in the high-profile slaying of a 19-year-old Falls Church woman that had gone unsolved for 2 1 / 2 years, according to a search warrant. The break in Vanessa Pham's killing came after the 27-year-old Falls Church man was recently arrested in an unspecified crime in Fairfax County and his fingerprints were taken, the warrant said. An analysis matched Julio Miguel Blanco-Garcia's prints to ones collected at...

Friday turned out to be the darkest day of the year. It was a day to hug your kids, or call a parent or a friend, or do something that for a moment might dispel some of that darkness. The news got worse with every bulletin. Shots fired in an elementary school in Connecticut. Three dead. No, many dead. Children shot. Children killed. Kindergartners. Newtown, Conn., became Everytown, America, on this grim Friday. By mid-afternoon, the scale of the horror became clear:...

A woman was fatally shot and a small girl was wounded Sunday evening as they were boarding a Metrobus in Southeast Washington, authorities said. D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier, who went to the scene, said the woman was thought to be the mother of the child. She apparently was on or near the steps of the bus with the girl in her arms when the shooting occurred about 5:40 p.m. on Minnesota Avenue SE. A police source said the woman was shot in the face. The child was grazed, the source said.

After mingling for about 20 minutes at the bar, Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley made his way to a table near the back of the dining room at Casa Lever, a trendy Italian restaurant on Manhattan's Park Avenue adorned by Andy Warhol prints. Over ravioli and red wine, O'Malley (D) made his pitch for help to actor Josh Charles, a Baltimore native, and Charles's friend Brian Ellner, who had run a costly campaign to build public support for same-sex marriage legislation in New York last year.

The strangers in Zoe Ferraris's engrossing new murder mystery, "Kingdom of Strangers," are the exploited and often enslaved immigrant workers of Saudi Arabia. But Ferraris depicts the Saudis themselves as equally estranged, not from their country but from one another. Detective Inspector Ibrahim Zahrani, for example, has never seen his daughter-in-law's face. "Not a single piece of skin was showing anywhere on her body," he notes, "her burqa was an impenetrable slab of black.

Although Great Noise Ensemble has earned a reputation as an ambitious fixture of Washington's new music scene, its performances and repertoire choices vary in quality. Friday night's concert inaugurated the group's residency at the Atlas Performing Arts Center and was themed after the opening piece, Randall Woolf's "Urban Legends," which appealed more in theory than in practice. That Woolf combined taped rappers with chamber orchestra wasn't problematic — classical and hip-hop mergers...

The police came for him just after 4 a.m. Wael Ali was still awake, cramming for exams in the small house that served as his sanctuary from the past. It had been four years since Wael's identical twin brother, Wasel, was found dead in a wooded area near the Mall in Columbia. To escape constant reminders of the crime, Ali had moved 700 miles away, to Marietta, Ga., where he had enrolled in college and was finally rebuilding his life. On Sept. 15, 2011, the 23-year-old was staring at his laptop in...

Paperback Fiction 1. REFLECTED IN YOU (Berkley, $15). By Sylvia Day. A tale billed as erotic, part of the author's "Crossfire" series and sporting a cover in the vein of E.L. James's trilogy. [1]. 2. FIFTY SHADES OF GREY (Vintage Books, $15.95). By E.L. James. The first of a British e-book erotic trilogy that has become a publishing phenomenon. [31]. 3. CLOUD ATLAS (Random House, $15). By David Mitchell . Six interrelated stories describe the fall of man. [4]