Girls, 13 and 15, charged in death of Northwest Washington man last fall

Both teens were charged as juveniles and were not identified by the police in a news release. The Washington Post generally does not identify suspects in criminal cases who are charged as juveniles.

The two girls are expected to appear in D.C. Superior Court on Friday for their initial hearing.

Prosecutors say the two teens were among a group of girls who approached Brown in the 6200 block of Georgia Avenue NW early Oct. 17, knocked him to the ground and beat and kicked him, slamming his head into the concrete pavement. D.C. police detectives testified at the March hearings that Brown and his attackers did not know one another.

In March, police charged two 13-year-olds girls and a 12-year-old girl in connection with the beating. The 12-year-old has since turned 13. All three girls — despite efforts by their attorneys at recent hearings in D.C. Superior Court to have them released home to the custody of their parents — have been held in detention by the city’s Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services as they await trial.

After their initial hearing, prosecutors upgraded the charges for the three teens to first-degree murder. A trial for the three is scheduled to begin in August.

As the two newly charged teen suspects appear at their initial hearing Friday, down the hall in the same courthouse, the three other teens are scheduled to appear in a pretrial hearing.

At their initial hearings in March, prosecutors played a graphic, minute-long cellphone video clip that showed a group of five girls chasing Brown into a Northwest alley. As Brown tried to climb up a chain link fence, the girls pulled him down and stomped his head into the pavement. They pulled his pants down around his ankles, removed his belt and beat him with it. Then, as Brown lay on the ground in a pool of blood, the girls became jubilant, laughing and chatting. “He’s leaking,” one of the girls cheered, referring to Brown’s bleeding from his head.

The cellphone video, prosecutors say, was recorded by one of the girls during the attack.

Brown was diagnosed with schizophrenia, one of his sisters said in March at the time of the three initial arrests. Brown, his family said, had lost six fingers to amputation because of lupus, a disease of the immune system. He also experienced chronic blackouts, the sister said. Once, after losing consciousness, he collapsed to the pavement and injured his skull so badly that a surgeon had to put a metal plate in his head.

In recent years, Brown had been diagnosed with cancer, his family said. Brown’s family said he often took long walks at night after hours of chemotherapy. The late-evening walks, his family said, helped him to sleep through the night.