The car that backed into Richard Jameswhite's Honda at a shopping mall in DeKalb County, outside Atlanta, on the afternoon of Thursday, April 28, 1994, was driven by a man named Anthony Maclin. "There was an argument, and then he shot him numerous times in the torso," Sergeant Ron Eunice of the DeKalb police said. Maclin died. The shooter was twenty, stood about five feet tall and looked years younger, and when the Georgia detectives ran his name they found that the New York City police had been hunting him for three years for six killings in Brooklyn.
Brooklyn knew him as Babyface. In September 1993, when he was nineteen, the city's Chief of Detectives, Joseph R. Borrelli, had asked police in several other cities to help find him. With his slight build, detectives said, he looked about thirteen. A Brooklyn homicide sergeant, Steven Sheehan, said later that he had stood out because "he looked so young and was so violent."
By the account he gave people around him, it started with his brother. The brother was killed in East Flatbush in January 1991, and in February Jameswhite was arrested for trying to kill Kevin Smith, the man he blamed for it. He made bail, jumped it, and disappeared into the Parkside Boys, a crew of about half a dozen young men who worked the streets south of Prospect Park in Flatbush and made their money robbing drug dealers. He told people that a witch doctor's blessing made him invisible to the police. When officers searched his apartment they found more than two hundred action videos.
Detectives attributed five Brooklyn deaths to him by the fall of 1993. Javier Avila, twenty-two, was killed on March 29, 1992; Omark Dee, twenty-seven, on August 24, 1992; Fitzroy Reid, twenty-one, on January 6, 1993. On April 16, 1993, Jameswhite and four other gunmen ambushed an armored car on Church Avenue in Flatbush and got away with $101,000; in the exchange of more than twenty-five shots with the guards, a Transit Authority worker on his coffee break, Robert Singleton, was hit in the head by a stray bullet and killed. On May 1, at St. Paul's Court and Ocean Avenue, Jameswhite rode down the street on the handlebars of a bicycle, the police said, a semiautomatic pistol in each hand, while an accomplice pedaled. Four men were hit. Ryan Cambridge, eighteen, and Dodson Sparman, twenty-one, died.
Borrelli said some of the killings were revenge or disputes inside the gang and others were over drugs. Informants gave detectives a cruder motive for at least one: Babyface had heard that another man in the neighborhood had more killings to his name and wanted to catch up. The police also held him responsible for wounding five other people.
On September 3, 1993, the police said, he and others went to an apartment to rob drug dealers, found two teenage girls there instead, and raped them. When he later saw detectives out with one of the girls looking for him, he opened fire on them and got away in a car. That was the incident that brought the public appeal.
He was gone for seven more months. New York authorities said he had killed several people elsewhere on the East Coast while he was on the run, and later reference works put the total at fifteen across New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Georgia; the reporting on his arrest names none of the killings outside Brooklyn and Georgia.
Georgia tried him for Maclin's murder, and his sentence there was life imprisonment, recorded as imposed on December 12, 1994. Whether he was ever brought back to answer for any of the Brooklyn deaths is not established by the reporting found.