Washington’s entrails are on display every day in the halls and courtrooms of DC Superior Court, as nasty divorces, embezzlement schemes, drug deals, robberies, bribery scams, and homicides unspool.
“This is where I live,” Amico says. “You spend time in court, you are flooded by stories.”
The first time Amico walked into Superior Court—in October 2010—she introduced herself to the prosecutor. “People don’t realize there’s a Pulitzer to be won in these halls every day,” he told her.
Amico had a more modest goal: to cover every homicide in DC.
One Friday this past October, Amico plans to sit in on a sentencing, a presentment, another sentencing, and assorted status hearings. “Busy morning,” she says.
First stop is Courtroom 302 for the sentencing of Oma Crawford. He has pleaded guilty to shooting Ralph Thomas in the parking lot by McKinley Technology High School’s football field on June 3.
Amico pushes open the first set of courtroom doors and steps into a side room where Thomas’s family has gathered. His wife and children, mother, brothers, sisters, and in-laws have come to tell Judge William Jackson why Crawford should do hard time.
Amico introduces herself and asks: “Have you seen my Web site?”
“Oh, yes,” says Thomas’s sister, Regina. “We made sure you had the right information.”
“I’m here if you want to say anything,” Amico says.
She’d published the basic facts of the case, drawn from police reports and charging statements: Ralph Thomas was helping manage a minor-league football team; Crawford was a player. The men began arguing in the school parking lot Friday evening, June 3. Crawford, 25, had accused Thomas, 36, of having an affair with his wife. Thomas was an Iraq veteran, a father of four, and married. He said Crawford was mistaken.
They seemed to have come to terms when Crawford went for a gym bag he’d placed by the parking lot’s entrance. He unzipped it and pulled out a handgun. Thomas ran. Crawford chased him down and shot him in the head.
“We’re going to go on,” she said. “We have kids who have to be raised. We will heal as a family.”
News that a man had been shot flashed across the wires. Amico identified Thomas when one of his friends posted to her site:
“The deceased is 36 yr old Ralph Thomas. He will be greatly missed. . . .”
Ralf Thomas’s family was seated in Courtroom 302 when Oma Crawford was escorted in by US marshals. Crawford wore his hair in dreadlocks that fell over the collar of his orange jumpsuit. Shackles linked his hands and feet. He fidgeted. The marshals held his arms.
Judge William Jackson had asked Thomas’s family members to speak. First up was his son, Damarcus Thomas, 17, who cried under his red hoodie. Next came his sister, his sister-in-law, his mother, and finally his older brother, Derrick Adair.
“My brother served his country well, his mother well, his family well, with laughter and humility,” Adair said. Everyone called Thomas “Sug,” he told the court, because his mother said that when she first kissed him after he was born, he tasted like sugar.
Adair looked at Crawford and said: “The court should have no mercy on him whatsoever. Society should be tired of being preyed upon by people like Mr. Crawford.”
Adair asked the judge to give Crawford the maximum penalty.
Judge Jackson said sentencing was the hardest part of his job. “Nothing can bring Mr. Thomas back and make his family whole.” Crawford, the judge said, had a long criminal history and was a “danger to the community.” Jackson gave him 20 years, the maximum under a plea deal.
Laura Amico was the only journalist covering the case. She followed Thomas’s family into the hallway.
“Is there anything you would like me to include in the story?” she asked Adair.
“It did not turn out well for either side,” he said. “They lost. We lost.”
She turned to Thomas’s sister, Regina: “How are you going to deal with this?”
“We’re going to go on,” she said. “We have kids who have to be raised. We will heal as a family.”
By that evening, Amico had written a story and posted it on Homicide Watch. One of Ralph Thomas’s relatives got the last word: “Finally my Uncle Sug can rest in peace.”
Amico’s hometown of Santa Rosa—north of San Francisco, in Sonoma Valley’s wine country—is a diverse city of working- and middle-class families, home to the wine industry and commuters heading to the Bay Area.
“My experience with crime was minimal to nonexistent growing up,” she says.
She attended the University of California at Santa Cruz, spent her junior year in South Africa, and returned to take a writing course with Martha Mendoza, an Associated Press reporter who had won a Pulitzer. Mendoza became her mentor.
“When I tried journalism, I found a way to tell stories that immediately rang true,” Amico says.
After graduating, she landed a job covering education for the Register-Pajaronian in Watsonville, south of Santa Cruz. When the school beat allowed, she tagged along with the paper’s photographer. “He was a police-scanner junkie,” she says. “I never wanted to cover cops, but I did get my first taste.”
Next she went to Madagascar for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer. When she returned to Northern California, she called the editor at the Santa Rosa Press Democrat,then owned by the New York Times.
“Not interested,” he said. She pleaded with him to read her clips. He called back and offered her a temporary job filling in for a staffer on paternity leave. Then the police reporter left.
Amico covered car wrecks and robberies. Some fires. She reported a story about a man who followed women home on country roads and attempted to sexually assault them. She delved into the case and wrote a series. Based in part on her reporting, police arrested a suspect. The New York Times Company recognized her with a Chairman’s Award.
“I got a nice check for $250,” she says.
In the spring of 2009, she became intrigued by a murder case in Fort Bragg, a small town north of Santa Rosa. Aaron Vargas had been arrested for shooting his former neighbor Darrell Rae McNeill. Amico discovered a Facebook page, Save Aaron Vargas, started by the suspect’s sister.
“Why aren’t we writing about this?” Amico wondered. She convinced her editors to let her venture into the case.
Vargas’s family told her that he had been molested by McNeill when he was a child and that McNeill had continued to harass him after the boy became an adult. Vargas married and had a daughter. McNeill still stalked him; Vargas finally shot him. When Vargas’s story of sexual abuse surfaced, more than half a dozen other alleged victims of McNeill spoke out. One had reported the abuse to the police, who had failed to take action.
Amico was one of the first reporters to cover the case, which has since drawn national attention. Vargas was convicted and is serving time, but Amico came away with a deeper understanding of murder.
“A homicide affects more than just the killer and the victim,” she says. “It changes things for families on both sides, friends of each, and sometimes entire towns.”
Next: “You are the first person who’s asked me what happened.”
