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Philadelphia Police Charge Juan Covington in the Videotaped Killing of X-Ray Technician Patricia McDermott

Tips that Covington resembled a police sketch led detectives to him, and hospital cameras showed him arriving at work in matching clothes after the shooting.

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Illustration of two detectives walking along a block of brick rowhouses in Philadelphia past a parked unmarked car. Not an actual scene from the case.

Cameras recorded Patricia McDermott's killing on a Philadelphia sidewalk, but for two months no one was charged. On July 14, 2005, police announced the arrest of a man who worked at her hospital.

McDermott, 48, an X-ray technician from Elkins Park and a mother of two, was shot before dawn on May 17 as she walked from a downtown bus stop to her job at Pennsylvania Hospital. Cameras on several buildings captured the gunman catching up with her, walking beside her for a few seconds and firing; he did not appear to rob her or speak to her. Police released parts of the footage and a composite sketch, and tips that a man resembled the sketch led them to Juan Covington, 43, of the city's Logan section. Detectives learned that Covington, a former city bus driver, worked at Pennsylvania Hospital as a subcontractor, and the hospital's own video showed him entering shortly after the shooting in clothes matching the gunman's.

Covington was charged with murder, reckless endangerment and weapons violations. He had been picked up two days earlier carrying a handgun with paperwork that was not in order, which allowed police to hold him for questioning. "I don't know if (the victim) even knew this gentleman," said Capt. Richard Ross of the homicide unit.

At a hearing the following week, Covington's confessions to McDermott's killing and to the 1998 killing of his cousin, the Rev. Thomas Lee Devlin, were read in court, and a judge ordered him held for trial on both murders. He had also confessed to killing Odies Bosket, 36, at a subway stop in March 2005, a case in which another man had been arrested, though Covington had not been charged in it. His lawyer said Covington was schizophrenic.

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