For eight weeks in the winter and spring of 1993, people in two neighborhoods of Northwest Washington, Columbia Heights and Mount Pleasant, were afraid to walk outside after dark. A man driving a small car was firing a shotgun at pedestrians who were out alone. Fourteen shootings left four people dead and five wounded, according to the AFRO newspaper. The press called the unknown gunman the "Shotgun Stalker."
On April 19, 1993, an off-duty police officer arrested James E. Swann Jr., a 29-year-old part-time security guard from Iselin, New Jersey, shortly after the last fatal shooting. The case did not go to trial. In 1994 Swann was found not guilty by reason of insanity on 32 charges arising from the attacks and committed to St. Elizabeths Hospital, the District of Columbia's public psychiatric hospital. He told doctors that spirits, among them Malcolm X, and voices had urged him to shoot. He has asked the court several times to let him leave the hospital for short periods. The requests reported in 2011 and in 2017 were denied, and in February 2018 he was still held at St. Elizabeths.
Because of the insanity verdict, Swann has no conviction for any of the shootings.
The attacks began on the night of February 23, 1993. At about 8:45 p.m. a young woman walking in Columbia Heights realized that a shot had just missed her. Later the same night a man was shot and wounded, also in Columbia Heights. Three days later, on February 26, a man was shot and killed in Columbia Heights. William O. Ritchie, who then commanded the Criminal Investigations Division of the Metropolitan Police Department, later identified him as the owner of a barbershop.
On March 4 another man was shot in Columbia Heights. On March 17 a woman was shot and wounded. On March 23 Elizabeth Hutson, 28, known as Bessie, was shot and killed while she was out walking her dogs in Mount Pleasant. The AFRO noted that her death by shotgun fire stood out in a city where most shootings were carried out with semiautomatic handguns.
By the AFRO's count, the shootings came in three waves: four in Columbia Heights in less than two weeks, then two in Mount Pleasant, then eight more attacks or attempted shootings back in Columbia Heights. The gunman drove a greenish-blue 1990 Toyota Tercel. He would follow a person on foot and fire from the car, then drive away. CBS News, citing the Washington station WUSA, reported that the weapon was a 20-gauge shotgun and that the people shot were chosen at random.
The last fatal shooting came in daylight on April 19, 1993, when Nello Hughes, 61, was shot and killed in a drive-by shooting in Northwest Washington. He was the last person killed. Four people had been killed and five wounded in all. Reports of the case give few details of the fourth killing.
Most of the people shot were Black, the AFRO reported. Swann is also Black.
The shootings changed daily life in both neighborhoods. "People were looking over their shoulders, not going out at night," Ritchie told the AFRO years later. He said street crime fell during those weeks, because people stayed indoors rather than risk becoming targets.
Wendell Watkins, then commander of the police department's Homicide Division, said the attacks came as "kind of a shock" to residents. Many of them, he said, had seen such things only in films or had thought of them as something that happened in other places.
At first the police did not see a pattern. Detectives treated the early shootings as ordinary street crimes or personal disputes, and they did not link the first two attacks to each other. In the case of the young man wounded on the first night, investigators assumed that he had provoked the shooting, although, the AFRO reported, there was no evidence that he had.
As the attacks continued, the department began to connect them through the places and times of the shootings and through the descriptions that survivors and witnesses gave of the car and the driver. Ritchie said the police used those links to decide where to put officers, adding staff in the area in the hope of catching the gunman in the act. Federal agencies joined the search, among them the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
Once the department made the case public, Watkins said, it received hundreds of tips almost every hour.
The break came almost two months after the first shooting. On April 19, 1993, Officer Kenneth Stewart, who was off duty, saw a greenish-blue Tercel driving north in Northwest Washington. Stewart had been at the scenes of several of the shootings, including the one in which Bessie Hutson was killed. When the car ran a red light, he followed it.
Years later, in a short film made by a New York University film student, Dan Marks, Stewart recalled that the driver had "kind of happy smile on his face." Stewart said he put his own gun on the seat beside him as he drove.
The driver turned into a parking lot. Stewart called to another officer for help, telling him, "I think I have the Shotgun Stalker." The officers boxed the car in, and Stewart handcuffed the driver. He had planned to hold the man at first on the traffic violation, but he told him, "This is not for traffic." A shotgun lay on the back seat. Stewart later recalled that its barrel was still warm.
Detectives worked out that Stewart had spotted the car shortly after Nello Hughes was shot, less than a mile away. The driver was James E. Swann Jr., 29, of Iselin, New Jersey, a part-time security guard who had been fired several times for erratic behavior.
Ritchie was struck by how calm the man was. Swann did not resist, he said, and asked for a lawyer. Ritchie told the AFRO that he could not forget Swann's stare, and that from the day of the arrest he was sure the case would not go to trial. "I looked him in the eye and I knew that he was dancing to a different tune," he said.
The shootings ended with the arrest.
Little is known of Swann's early life. Swann kept driving to Washington to carry out the shootings.
Ritchie gave the AFRO an account of how Swann first came to Mount Pleasant. A friend took him to a barbershop there for a haircut. Later, friends who were working on a job in the city played jokes on him, and he went back to the barbershop several times looking for one of them. It was on one of those visits, on February 26, that he killed the shop's owner, according to Ritchie.
Swann was charged with 32 offenses arising from the attacks, DC Witness reported. The case was resolved without a trial. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity in 1994 and sent to St. Elizabeths Hospital.
Swann described seeing demons and spirits, Malcolm X among them, and hearing voices that urged him to carry out the shootings, the AFRO reported. The Associated Press, reporting in 2011, said that he had heard voices urging him to avenge the killing of Malcolm X. He had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and narcissistic personality disorder, the agency reported. In 2018 DC Witness gave his diagnoses as paranoid schizophrenia, antisocial personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder.
A verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity is not a conviction. Swann was not sentenced to prison; he was committed to a psychiatric hospital.
Swann was admitted to St. Elizabeths in 1994. Judge Fred B. Ugast of D.C. Superior Court summed up his early years there in a ruling in 2011. Swann broke hospital rules, argued with staff and with other patients, and ordered pornographic material, the judge wrote. He also wore a T-shirt, sent to him by his father, that read "The Thrill of the Kill."
By 2003, according to the same ruling, therapy and medication had largely eliminated Swann's psychotic symptoms. The judge found, though, that his schizophrenia was only in partial remission, that the narcissistic personality disorder remained, and that he still showed no sign of remorse.
When the AFRO revisited the case, with Swann aged 49, he was living in a medium-security unit at the hospital, in Southeast Washington.
In February 2011, at 46, Swann went to court to ask for a 12-hour furlough so that he could spend a day with his father. His lawyers brought the request before Judge Ugast at a hearing in D.C. Superior Court, CBS News reported.
The defense told the judge that Swann was "not the same person he was in 1993." Prosecutors, government experts and experts from St. Elizabeths all opposed the request. The Public Defender Service argued for his release.
Ugast denied the request, the Associated Press reported on February 25, 2011. In a 10-page opinion he found that Swann still posed a danger to public safety and that letting him into the community would be premature. "There are no conditions that could be set that would eliminate the risk of harm to Mr. Swann" if he were released at that time, the judge wrote, according to the Associated Press.
Swann kept asking. In 2017, according to DC Witness, a further request for a family visit was filed and denied. On December 28, 2017, his lawyer, Kimberly Clarke, filed a motion for conditional release that would let him hold a job in the community and visit relatives. She told the court that he had completed the hospital's employment readiness program.
The hospital opposed the motion. In a letter dated February 2, 2018, the D.C. Department of Behavioral Health said: "The Hospital is unable to support [Swann's] request to visit his sister and family in the community." The letter added that work in the community "cannot be supported, at this time, as Mr. Swann remains on two-to-one supervision," meaning that he still left the hospital only in the company of two staff members.
Clarke argued the motion before Chief Judge Robert Morin of D.C. Superior Court on February 7, 2018. Swann was then 53. The court set readiness and evidentiary hearings for September 2018, when the motion was to be decided, and lawyers for both sides told the court that they expected the evidentiary hearing to run for several days. No outcome of those hearings has been reported.
In February 2018 Swann was held at St. Elizabeths Hospital.
Accounts differ on some details of the case.
The count of shootings and wounded. The AFRO gives 14 shootings, four people killed and five wounded, and the Associated Press gives four killed and five wounded. DC Witness, in 2018, said that four people died and several others were wounded "during a rampage that lasted several months." The shootings ran from February 23 to April 19, 1993, a span of about eight weeks.
The family visits. The Associated Press and CBS News reported that the 2011 request was for a day with Swann's father. DC Witness, summing up the history in 2018, described the 2011 and 2017 requests as visits to his mother and his father.
The barbershop killing. The account of how Swann came to the barbershop, and the description of the man killed there as its owner, come from the former police commander William O. Ritchie, speaking to the AFRO years after the event. The account was not tested at a trial, because there was none.
The motive. Swann's own explanation, the voices and spirits and Malcolm X, comes from his statements after his arrest as reported in the press. It was the basis of the insanity finding, but it describes his illness, not a motive in the ordinary sense.
February 23, 1993: The first shootings in Columbia Heights. A woman is missed; a man is wounded.
February 26, 1993: A man, identified by police as a barbershop owner, is shot and killed in Columbia Heights.
March 4, 1993: A man is shot in Columbia Heights.
March 17, 1993: A woman is shot and wounded.
March 23, 1993: Elizabeth "Bessie" Hutson, 28, is shot and killed while walking her dogs in Mount Pleasant.
April 19, 1993: Nello Hughes, 61, is shot and killed in Northwest Washington. Shortly afterward Officer Kenneth Stewart, off duty, follows a greenish-blue Toyota Tercel, and James E. Swann Jr., 29, of Iselin, New Jersey, is arrested with a shotgun in the car. The shootings stop.
1994: Swann is found not guilty by reason of insanity on 32 charges arising from the shootings and committed to St. Elizabeths Hospital.
2003: By this year, according to a later court ruling, therapy and medication had largely eliminated his psychotic symptoms.
February 2011: At a hearing in D.C. Superior Court, Swann asks for a 12-hour furlough to spend a day with his father.
February 25, 2011: The Associated Press reports that Judge Fred B. Ugast has denied the request, finding that Swann still poses a risk.
2017: A further request for a family visit is denied, DC Witness reported.
December 28, 2017: His lawyer files a motion for conditional release to allow community work and family visits.
February 2, 2018: The hospital, through the D.C. Department of Behavioral Health, opposes the motion.
February 7, 2018: The motion is argued before Chief Judge Robert Morin, who sets evidentiary hearings for September 2018.
February 2018: Swann is held at St. Elizabeths Hospital.