I care less that D.C. carjackings are significantly down in the first half of 2024 compared with a year ago because I’m so sickened by what happened to Leslie Marie Gaines. She was the 55-year-old victim of an unarmed carjacking at the MedStar Washington Hospital Center on Monday afternoon.
Washington, D.C
Opinion | Anatomy of a D.C. carjacking: Two paths cross and an innocent life is lost
It’s one of those events that stops you in your tracks.
Gaines’s day began at the hospital’s rehab facility on nearby Irving Street NW, where she went for physical therapy at approximately 11:15 a.m. It ended at George Washington University Hospital, where she was pronounced dead at 2:38 p.m.
What happened in between leaves me frustrated and mad as hell because the true justice that her family wants for her is impossible. That is, if justice also means showing mercy and compassion to one another. Were a sliver of that present on Monday, Gaines would be alive today.
Court documents detail some of the key events in this case. The documents also point to reasons D.C. police charged Kayla Kenisha Brown, 22, in connection Gaines’s death.
Where was mercy for Gaines on that day?
According to the court records, Gaines and her daughter pulled up to MedStar’s emergency room entrance because Gaines wasn’t feeling well following her physical therapy. Gaines’s daughter went inside to seek wheelchair assistance for her mother, who remained in the car with the engine running, the documents say. But when the daughter returned to the entrance, both the car and her mother were missing.
A D.C. police news release reported that at about 1:11 p.m., Brown walked away from her family at MedStar just as Gaines and her daughter were pulling up. After Gaines’s daughter went inside for the wheelchair, police report, Brown entered the driver’s seat and drove away with Gaines inside the car.
Where was compassion for an ailing mother?
Documents tell us how it ended.
The car, with Brown at the wheel and Gaines in the passenger seat, was observed traveling at high speed when it failed to negotiate a turn at Sixth and D streets NW and collided with a barrier outside the office of the U.S. attorney. Keys in hand, Brown tried to flee on foot and was caught by the police, while Gaines was found unconscious in the front passenger seat. Police provided first aid until emergency medical services arrived to transport her to George Washington University Hospital.
How did Gaines and Brown end up crossing paths? The answer gets at an important part of this story.
This account is also drawn from court documents: Around the time Gaines and her daughter were arriving at the rehab center, police were responding to a 911 call from a woman screaming and asking for help before the line disconnected. Police and emergency medical technicians went to the apartment that the call was made from, where they were met by Brown and her mother. Brown stared at them but didn’t respond to their questions.
Brown’s mother said that her daughter, as summarized by court documents, had “gone out and gotten some sort of drug while out with a man she met on Instagram.” Brown’s father indicated “she had been acting crazy for about three days,” court documents state.
Emergency medical technicians found that Brown’s blood pressure and heart rate were too high for her age and transported her by ambulance to MedStar, where she arrived 12:40 p.m.
After determining that Brown was not a crime victim, the police left the emergency room around 12:46 p.m. That’s where Brown remained until she walked away from her family.
In D.C. Superior Court on Friday, I saw Brown at the defendant’s table in an orange jumpsuit. And I heard Det. Roberto Torres describe the events surrounding the carjacking and Brown’s arrest. Missing was Leslie Marie Gaines.
At the end of the preliminary hearing, the court found that Brown’s actions were “incredibly dangerous” and that she must be “held without bond” until the next hearing. Still, where’s the justice?
I’m not talking about the carjacking charge against Brown; we’ll see what happens with that. I’m thinking of the words of Brown’s mother and father about their daughter going out with a man to get some kind of drug, and her acting crazy, and ask why, if the parent’s representations are true, should I rethink the drug trade, as reformers want me to? This city is full of people in the drug supply chain. And this city is also full of innocent people who end up on the receiving end of behaviors fueled by the poison that drug dealers push.
Ah, but those sellers are likely to be men and women experiencing poverty and selling drugs for survival. Rethink, I’m told.
Instead, I’ll think of Gaines strapped in her daughter’s car. Think of the shoplifting, car thefts, robberies and turf wars plaguing our streets, all fueled by drug-seeking.
Mercy demands we think of all that, not just the dealer and the users. But we don’t give a second thought to people like Leslie Marie Gaines — “an angel on earth,” her sister Erica Gaines called her — who day in and out fall victim to people with substance use disorders. It’s a torment so commonplace that it is ignored — until a car smashes into a wall and an innocent soul is pronounced dead.
Pray Leslie Marie Gaines is at peace. But where’s the justice?
The Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool is set to be drained again after Donald Trump said on Monday – without providing proof – that five people were arrested for vandalism and five more are under investigation in connection to the algae blooms and peeling paint that appeared weeks after his ill-fated $14m renovation attempt.
“It’s not a lot of damage, but we’ll probably have to let the water out and refix it. They went in there with a knife,” Trump told reporters, describing what he first said was a 290- to 300ft slit in the paint but then later amended to a 350ft slit. He also said someone had put fertilizer into the water, which caused the algae to grow.
Reporters who visited the pool on Sunday could see no evidence of such damage, the Washington Post reported.
The newspaper also interviewed three-time Olympic cyclist David Hearn, who said he had been arrested by US park police on a misdemeanor charge after stopping by the refurbished pool and, out of curiosity, touching one of the pieces of peeling paint liner.
Trump has sought to turn the monument “American flag blue” in time for the for the country’s 250th birthday, which included painting the bottom of the pool a dark shade of navy officially called “Old Glory Blue”.
He awarded a no-bid contract to a company he said had previously done work on swimming pools at one of his golf clubs, and within days of the completion of the work, the water started to appear green from algae plaguing the standing water and the coating of paint applied during the renovation also started to detach.
On Monday, Trump was adamant it was not the pool company to blame for the algae blooms and peeling paint, but “vandals”. When pushed to provide evidence of his claims, he told reporters to call the Department of the Interior and the National Park Service. Neither agency responded immediately to a request for comment, nor did the US park police.
When asked how alleged vandals were able to get so close to one of Washington DC’s most historically symbolic attractions, where there is a heavy police presence, Trump responded that “we didn’t have a lot” of police then.
“Who would think that somebody would go into a pool and take a knife and start cutting it?” he asked.
It’s unclear when the pool will be drained, but a spokesperson with the DC Water Authority said the agency has issued the national parks service a temporary permit to discharge water into a sewer that flows into a local treatment facility. The permit was issued 16 June and expires 2 July, the spokesperson said.
Trump had earlier posted on social media that “there is a 10-year prison sentence for the destruction, or even the attempted destruction, of such things – Which will be fully enforced!”
Destruction of federal property can carry a maximum prison sentence of 10 years.
Former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan delivers the keynote address at the IMF Statistical Forum/Statistics for Policy Making in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 18, 2014. Greenspan died on Monday at age 100.
Paul J. Richards/AFP via Getty Images
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Former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan delivers the keynote address at the IMF Statistical Forum/Statistics for Policy Making in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 18, 2014. Greenspan died on Monday at age 100.
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Alan Greenspan, who steered the Federal Reserve for nearly two decades, through some of the longest economic booms in U.S. history, has died. Greenspan died Monday at his home in Washington. He was 100.
Greenspan was the rare celebrity among central bankers, lionized for his economic stewardship in the 1990s. At a time when it seemed every barbershop had a television tuned to the stock market channel, ordinary Americans hung on the Fed chairman’s every word.
His reputation was tarnished, however, by the global financial crisis which struck a decade later.
Greenspan liked to write speeches in the bathtub, but it was his listeners who were sometimes left feeling underwater by the unfamiliar dialect known as “Fedspeak.”
Greenspan later acknowledged that he would deliberately garble his syntax to avoid saying anything that might move financial markets.
A notorious exception came in 1996, when Greenspan seemed to suggest that stock prices might be getting ahead of themselves.
“How do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset prices,” he asked during a speech at the American Enterprise Institute.
The warning that exuberant investors might not be quite rational sent temporary shivers through global stock markets. But Greenspan’s own stock continued to climb.
Fed Chair Alan Greenspan testifies before the Joint Economic Committee in Congress in Washington, D.C., on June 17, 1999.
Tim Sloan/AFP via Getty Images
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Fed Chair Alan Greenspan testifies before the Joint Economic Committee in Congress in Washington, D.C., on June 17, 1999.
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Greenspan dabbled in jazz
He was married to NBC news anchor Andrea Mitchell, who anounced his death in a statement, and the two made a somewhat unlikely power couple. Comedian Jay Leno once joked during a White House Correspondents Association dinner that Mitchell, not then-First Lady Hillary Clinton, was married to “the most powerful man in the world.”
Greenspan was a talented jazz musician who studied clarinet and saxophone at Juilliard. But it was economics that made him a rock star and a symbol of the widely-shared prosperity at the end of the 20th century.
A master of monetary policy, Greenspan led the central bank under four different presidents, beginning in 1987.
Much of his tenure was marked by falling unemployment. Traditionally, central bankers respond to low unemployment by raising interest rates to ward off inflation. But Greenspan broke with that tradition and kept borrowing costs low.
“He was willing to watch and wait as the unemployment rate drifted lower and lower and lower and lower, and we still had no inflation,” recalled Princeton economist Alan Blinder, who served under Greenspan on the Fed’s governing board.
Former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan and his wife television journalist Andrea Mitchell attend a reception with Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda at the Japanese embassy in Washington, D.C., on April 29, 2012.
Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images
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Former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan and his wife television journalist Andrea Mitchell attend a reception with Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda at the Japanese embassy in Washington, D.C., on April 29, 2012.
Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images
Greenspan oversaw an economic boom
Greenspan’s gamble with low rates paid off, and the economy kept booming for a decade, although critics argue his easy-money policies also helped inflate the dot-com bubble and later fueled the subprime mortgage meltdown.
In addition to low interest rates, Greenspan pursued a light touch on regulation, refusing to use the Fed’s powers to crack down on risky lending. His libertarian philosophy was shaped in part by the novelist Ayn Rand.
Greenspan had been a member of Rand’s inner circle, contributing chapters to her book, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. When Greenspan joined the Ford administration as an economic adviser, Rand attended his swearing-in ceremony.
“Greenspan said that Ayn Rand put the moral foundation under capitalism for him,” said Rand’s biographer, Anne Heller.
Greenspan believed bankers didn’t need heavy-handed regulation because their own self-interest would prevent them from taking undue risks. Only after risky banking helped trigger the global financial crisis in 2008 — two years after he left the Fed — would Greenspan sheepishly admit that he’d been wrong.
“I was shocked because I had going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well,” Greenspan told a congressional committee investigating the financial meltdown.
Then-President Bill Clinton talks with then-Fed Chair Greenspan during the receiving line at the White House in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 31, 1999.
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Then-President Bill Clinton talks with then-Fed Chair Greenspan during the receiving line at the White House in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 31, 1999.
Tim Sloan/AFP via Getty Images
Greenspan long advocated for a light regulatory touch
The idea that bankers will sometimes take dangerous risks if they’re allowed to should not have come as a surprise to Greenspan, however.
Decades earlier, he’d played a bit part in the savings-and-loan crisis, which was a kind of dress rehearsal for the 2008 financial crisis.
As a private economist in the 1980s, Greenspan provided a testimonial for what he called “seasoned and expert” management at Lincoln Savings and Loan, in an effort to ward of regulation of the thrift.
Lincoln later collapsed, costing taxpayers billions. And its boss, Charles Keating, went to prison for fraud.
Economist Vincent Reinhart said it took courage for Greenspan to acknowledge, however belatedly, that self-interest is not always enough to protect taxpayers and investors from the risky behavior of bankers.
“For Alan Greenspan to say, ‘Well, maybe markets don’t always get it right,’ is a reflection on his entire career, not just his tenure at the Fed,” Reinhart said.
Ultimately, Greenspan’s will be remembered as both a maestro of monetary policy and a reluctant regulator. His legacy is shaped by the boom he fostered, and by the bust he failed to prevent.
John Ydstie contributed to this report.
Felony warning issued as arrests reported at Reflecting Pool
Federal officials are warning visitors that taking paint chips, debris or other materials from the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool could lead to felony charges as crews continue cleaning up a major algae bloom that has turned the landmark’s water bright green.
WASHINGTON – Federal officials are warning visitors that taking paint chips, debris or other materials from the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool could lead to felony charges as crews continue cleaning up a major algae bloom that has turned the landmark’s water bright green.
The warning comes after authorities reported multiple arrests Saturday involving people accused of removing material from the Reflecting Pool.
Algae, paint problems plague Reflecting Pool
What we know:
While officials have not released the exact number of arrests or identified those taken into custody, law enforcement agencies said anyone caught taking paint chips or debris from the site could face serious criminal penalties.
Visitors have reported seeing blue paint chips floating in the water as cleanup crews use mobile draining machines to remove algae and restore the pool. The unusual appearance of the Reflecting Pool has attracted large crowds to the National Mall in recent days, according to previous FOX 5 D.C. reporting.
President Donald Trump said on Truth Social that work on the Reflecting Pool would begin immediately and claimed several arrests had been made in connection with what he described as deliberate sabotage of the site.
Authorities have not publicly detailed the specific charges filed in the reported arrests. However, federal officials warned that removing government property from the Reflecting Pool could result in felony charges, and prosecutors could pursue more serious offenses if evidence shows anyone intentionally contaminated the water or caused additional damage.
READ MORE: Reflecting Pool looks ‘like vomit,’ visitors say; crews continue cleaning job
“If there are more serious products that are put into the Reflecting Pool to create more algae or a bigger problem, then we’ll consider more serious charges,” U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro told Fox News. “But make no mistake, making D.C. beautiful is a priority and if you damage, vandalize or do anything to impact something like the Reflecting Pool, you can be prosecuted.”
What’s next:
The Reflecting Pool remains under active cleanup as officials investigate the cause of the algae bloom, according to the president.
According to federal contract data, a more extensive renovation, including potentially draining the pool again, could cost more than $14 million.
The Source: Information from FOX 5 D.C. reporting, President Donald Trump, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro and other federal officials.
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