WASHINGTON – A grandmother is speaking out after a man on a dirt bike hit her grandson and sped off, leaving the 10-year-old boy with serious injuries. 

D.C. police are hoping surveillance video helps identify the suspect. Now, that grandmother is pleading for the suspect to turn himself in to police.

What happened :

D.C. police are searching for the driver of the dirt bike that hit two children and fled the scene just before 7 p.m. on Saturday, April 4.

Officers responded to the intersection of 14th Street and Chapin Street, Northwest, for the report of a crash. 

When they arrived, police found the two boys, both injured by the dirt bike rider as they rode an e-bike in the bike lane. 

DC Fire and EMS responded to the scene and took one of the children, who was unconscious, to an area hospital for treatment of serious injuries. 

The second injured child was treated on scene for minor injuries.

Police say the dirt bike operator lifted the bike onto its back wheel just before the collision, and then the driver fled the scene, continuing northbound on 14th Street with a large group of ATVs and dirt bikes.

Hoping for justice:

 The grandmother of one of the boys who was hit is outraged over the teens illegally riding dirt bikes and ATVs on the streets of D.C. 

She says her grandson, 10-year-old Johari Alford and his friend were at a birthday party when they decided to go outside and ride scooters.

That’s when police say the guy crashed into them.

Surveillance video shows a large group illegally riding on the ATVs and dirt bikes.

Officers responded to the scene, finding Johari suffering with serious injuries to his head, spinal cord, arm, and face.

When asked about his condition, Johari’s grandmother, Karyn Alford, said he doesn’t understand what’s going on. 

“He’s asking questions. He’s wondering why this is happening to him.

What do you say to the man who hit Johari and his friend and kept on going?

I want to say you need to have a heart. You need to know that you rolled over my grandson like he was a piece of trash and didn’t care you were out there acting like hooligans in the middle of the street where people pay taxes, and my grandson was affected. So you need to turn yourself in,” Karyn Alford said. 

Johari’s friend was left with minor injuries and is expected to be ok, but it will take Johari several months to fully recover.

What you can do:

Police are offering a reward of up to $1,000 to anyone who provides information that leads to the arrest and indictment. 

An Audi with Maryland tags and 891 tickets in D.C. amounting to $259,214 in unpaid fines remains on the streets, with 18 speeding violations in the nation’s capital just this month. A Hyundai registered in Virginia racked up 689 tickets in the city.

Even as the District’s traffic cameras have multiplied and inspired copycats in other cities, city officials have struggled to get repeat offenders who were caught by that system off the street, particularly those whose vehicles are registered outside the nation’s capital. That may change, though, after high-level conversations among local officials prompted legislation in Virginia and Maryland that would allow cross-border cooperation on the issue.

A data analysis by The Washington Post shows what’s at stake – millions of dollars and the increased public safety that comes with an ability to punish drivers going over 100 mph on residential streets.

Most people who get a speeding ticket in the District never get one again, officials say, and speeds go down in areas where cameras have been placed. But city records show hundreds of people speed again and again in the same locations with little consequence, with the camera installed to prevent such behavior documenting each new violation.

One vehicle with a Maryland license plate got 182 tickets in a single year on an eight-block stretch of Alabama Avenue in Southeast Washington. In the northeastern part of the city, another vehicle with Maryland tags was issued 109 tickets in a year, just where a camera was located at 1400 Bladensburg Rd. A car with Virginia plates got 556 tickets in 12 months, more than any other vehicle in that time frame; it was towed when the fines owed reached $292,780 late last year.

Data analyzed by The Post shows that from 2018 through 2025, more than 80 percent of tickets were issued to people who exceeded the posted speed limit by 11 to 15 mph. The worst offenders – those who exceed the speed limit by at least 30 mph – make up less than 1 percent.

But the more excessive speeders contributed to about 30 percent of all fatal crashes since 2019, D.C. data shows.

The biggest obstacle to better enforcement in the city is that most violators live in Maryland or Virginia. Of the 103 vehicles with the most tickets in fiscal 2025, 67 have Virginia plates, 25 have Maryland plates, and 3 have D.C. plates. Of the 100 top speeds registered by cameras in the past two years, 37 of the vehicles involved had Virginia plates, 35 carried Maryland plates, and 13 featured D.C. plates.

Three employees of the Psychiatric Institute of Washington have been indicted on charges related to the death of a patient, U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro said Wednesday.

At a news conference Wednesday afternoon, Pirro said the three employees — Nelson Kuma, 37, Richard Hounnou, 45, and Norma Munoz-Bent, 68, all residents of Maryland — are charged with one count of criminally negligent homicide and face up to 20 years in prison if convicted.

Kuma and Hounnou work as psychiatric counselors and Munoz-Bent is a registered nurse.

All three employees pleaded not guilty and were released Tuesday pending trial, according to a news release from Pirro’s office. Pirro said her office will be filing a notice of appeal regarding their release.

In April 2020, the patient, referred to as “GW,” was a 58-year-old man who had been admitted to the Tenleytown facility for two days. He had previously had an “emergency event,” Pirro said, and had to be resuscitated.

Because of his health status, GW was meant to receive one-to-one care, where a health care professional was supposed to check on him every 15 minutes and enter information into a record.

According to video taken inside the hospital, the man can be seen lying nude on a mattress on the floor and having labored breathing.

Pirro said a psych tech enters the room, takes note of the man’s labored breathing but does nothing to help “for four minutes. He walks around, does nothing. A second tech enters the room, they fist bump each other, and for seven minutes, they have a very animated conversation.”

Then, a nurse enters the room, “stares at him” but does nothing to help. She returns with a blood pressure cuff but puts it on his forearm, not above his elbow.

“Here’s the bottom line, this trio did nothing to help this patient,” Pirro said. “They finally turned the man over at 12:56, and they gave him a chest compression, 21 minutes later.”

By the time they attempted the life-saving measures, he’d died.

Pirro said the health care employees “violated the most basic standard of medical care.”

“I also want to be clear this was not a close call. This was not a difficult medical judgment. This was basic, entry-level incompetence. This was completely abandoning the health of a human being. They had a legal and an ethical duty to act, and they chose not to,” she said.

The three employees will return to court May 29.

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