Something Happened at DC9. Who Did it Happen to?
Exploring the life of a young man who wasn’t supposed to die outside a nightclub.
By Rend Smith
About 2:30 a.m. on Oct. 15, EMTs responded to an emergency call at 9th and U streets NW. Moments later, a patient was loaded into an ambulance. In court filings, police officers said the patient “had a contusion and abrasion on the forehead as well as a laceration to the upper and lower lip, with significant bruising to his forearms.” The man was rushed to Howard University Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
That much, at least, is clear.
Almost everything else that happened early that morning outside the DC9 rock club, on the other hand, remains subject to significant confusion. In a radio transmission to Howard, an EMT supervisor had identified the patient as a 45-year-old black male. In fact, Ali Ahmed Mohammed was in his late 20s. The supervisor described his condition as “Traumatic cardiac arrest after a fight. No obvious trauma that we could see, but he…he’s in arrest basically.” But medical examiners would eventually suggest there was much more to it than that.
By the morning after Mohammed’s death, conflicting accounts of what happened to him were already emerging. What most agree on is that Mohammed, after being denied entrance to DC9, threw at least one brick through the club’s window, and that he was pursued into the street by club employees. Hours later, five of those people—William Spieler, 46, Darryl Carter, 20, Reginald Phillips, 22, Evan Preller, 28, and Arthur Zaloga , 25—were arrested and charged with murder.
But even the official accusations became muddled. Charging documents initially cited an eyewitness who claimed to have seen the five tackle, punch, and kick the 27-year-old immigrant until he was unconscious. Metropolitan Police Department Chief Cathy Lanier called the alleged beating a “savage” act of “vigilante justice.” Other habitués of the nightclub, though, insisted that no such savagery had taken place. They said the men, none of them known as brawlers, merely restrained Mohammed while awaiting the police.
Authorities eventually downgraded the charges against the five, then dropped them all together—albeit with the knowledge that they could re-file after autopsy results came in. But even the much-anticipated medical examiner’s ruling deepened the mystery. While the manner was declared “homicide,” the cause of death was ruled “excited delirium associated with arrhythmogenic cardiac anomalies, alcohol intoxication and physical exertion with restraint,” which would seem to corroborate the non-savage version of events.
Prosecutors are still investigating. No new charges have been filed.
In the meantime, lawyers, cops, activists, and reporters are poring over every detail of what did or didn’t happen that terrible night. But in the fervor over the unsolved mystery, the city has learned very little about one key piece of the story: The man who wound up dead.
What’s Tweeting Courtland Milloy?
The Washington Post columnist tweaks D.C.’s newcomers as “myopic little twits,” but is he the crotchety grandpa the city needs?
By Rend Smith
With slicked back hair and a dapper sport coat, Courtland Milloy could be confused for a preacher. Which, in some ways, he is: Blatantly reproachful from his pulpit—which just happens to be a Metro section column in The Washington Post—he’s demure and polite in person.
Milloy’s surprisingly tender flock-tending style is on display as he chats people up one November afternoon at the Children of Mine Youth Center in Anacostia. Kids from the center, a visiting lawyer, some Maryland Episcopalians picking up trash—they all get taken in by the man with the good-natured baritone that cracks and squeaks whenever he laughs.
Milloy listens raptly, wrinkles deepening. A handsome, straight-featured black man, he shows no hint of writerly condescension as he works a room full of all those ordinary citizens that media strategists are so perpetually keen on reaching. At moments like this, you’d never guess how ruthless Milloy’s dark side can be. While some kids shoot a sleepy game of basketball on the center’s colorful asphalt court, the 59-year-old gets the lowdown from Hannah Hawkins. Back in the 1990s, in order to feed the children of Southeast, Hawkins chased raccoons and homeless men from a house at 2263 Mount View Place SE, allowing her to move her nascent program there. Now, to feed more children, Hawkins says she needs to expand. She needs to renovate an adjacent and dilapidated house on the property grounds.
Milloy has declared he’s working on a column about the center. He isn’t taking notes, though.
“I’m just here to get a feel for the place,” he says. It doesn’t matter anyway; the most significant exchange to happen that day will be easy to remember. It’s when Milloy asks Hawkins how much she needs for the renovations. “I could do it with $7 million,” she replies. The writer doesn’t flinch. After thinking about it for a while, Hawkins decides she could do with more: Ten million.
A Milloy column could help some of that money materialize. For the last 27 years, his work has highlighted black life in the District. Milloy can bring attention to a problem, which can lead to dollars in the form of donations and city money. The potential chain reaction leads local social worker and activist Ella McCall to call Milloy whenever she sees a dire need emerging. “You’re my mouthpiece,” she’s told him.
Milloy insists he’s no such thing. But if he’s not quite a mouthpiece for a black agenda in the District, he’s the closest thing to it at the Post—or anywhere else in the local mainstream media, for that matter. Milloy’s column cuts against the usual conventional wisdom in journalism these days, giving readers a mirror of an urban, poor D.C. instead of the wealthy suburbs advertisers would probably prefer. And while the newspaper lavishes attention on its new iPad incarnation, and courts Facebook and Twitter like a desperate teenaged boy chasing after a crush, Milloy almost gleefully stays away from the trend.
Like the late Herb Caen in San Francisco, he’s an old-school journalist doing an old-school job: the Metro columnist writing about, and for, the city’s downtrodden. For decades, that was a generally quiet, low-impact job. But following a mayoral campaign that pitted rich against poor in dramatic new ways this fall, Milloy’s knack for reducing post-modern problems to their race-and-class roots has suddenly made him a controversial, buzz-generating columnist—the man that the supposedly liberal class of newcomers to D.C.’s gentrifying neighborhoods love to hate.
In the steadfastly non-gentrified neighborhoods that Milloy covers, though, he’s rarely seen as incendiary. Community broadcast journalist Jerry Phillips, who’s known the columnist since the 1970s, says Milloy is basically a black Norman Rockwell. “Norman Rockwell always had a subject that was American in some way,” he says. Milloy writes the story of America, “but for the black community.”
“The District of Columbia doesn’t care about me,” Hawkins half shouts while taking a walk around the building so she can show off the center’s small vegetable garden to Milloy. She senses that if she has any hope of airing that accusation, Milloy is her guy.
The city has been growing less interested in what people like Hawkins—people fighting for “quality of life” in places where that means more than bike racks—are up to. But Milloy is. Even though there’s nothing coming up in it, Milloy gazes at the garden’s dirt mounds a long time and manages some reverential awe.
Here’s the official national narrative about Washington, D.C., in 2010: Mayor Adrian Fenty was ousted in large part thanks to the bold reforms exemplified by his public schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee. It’s not hard to find examples of the narrative, which holds sway in magazines like The Atlantic and The New Republic, not to mention the editorial page of the Post.
Who You Calling a Bama?
People from D.C. know “bama” is just another word for fool.
A 32-year-old white guy, Costa says he was training to be a waiter at the eatery when things went awry. “I was trying to do my thing,” he says. Sitting in a booth at the end of his shift, Costa was shocked when two enraged coworkers burst out of the back and began screaming at him. He had set a table wrong. “I think I used too many spoons,” Costa recalls. Apparently, standards at the Italian restaurant chain are so high, his two fellow employees—who he calls kids in their early 20s—couldn’t abide it. “They’re just all up in my face,” Costa says. Spoon placement wasn’t that big a deal to Costa, so he yelled back. “You two are acting like a bunch of ’Bamas!”
The phrase hushed the room. “What is that?” one of the infuriated colleagues asked. Costa didn’t feel the need to explain. “You’re just acting like a ’Bama,” he said. “Fuck you, man,” said one of his co-workers. “I’ll take you outside!”
It never came to that. Costa managed to defuse the situation, and everyone went home. He forgot about it.
Two days later, Costa arrived at work, only to be ordered to clear out. The reason why? “I heard you called him a ’Bama,” a manager told him. The manager asked if it was a racial slur.
A confused Costa explained he wasn’t being a racist. Later, when he thought about the people he had called ’Bamas—a blonde white guy and a light-skinned Salvadoran—he was even more confused. (A supervisor at the restaurant confirmed that the incident happened but had no further comment.)
What had happened, apparently, had only a little to do with race, and a lot to do with geography and local culture. As an insult, ’Bama originated in the District’s black community—but it doesn’t only refer to black people, and unlike a certain word starting with “N,” it’s not the kind of thing white folks shouldn’t be throwing around. If you’re from around here, you probably already know ’Bama is just another way of calling someone out; a ’Bama is a fool, a punk, a herb, someone who simply doesn’t get it.
Unfortunately for Costa, it seemed the people in charge at Buca di Beppo didn’t know any of that.
