Suspects beat, robbed man before fatal Montgomery Co. hit-and-run: Police
By William Vitka | @vitkaWTOP
June 23, 2018 12:59 pm
WASHINGTON — The suspects involved in a fatal Montgomery County
hit-and-run crash beat and robbed a man before he was struck and killed, police said Saturday.
Gregory Jonathan Atwood, 40, of Silver Spring, died at the intersection of Georgia and Hewitt avenues around 4 a.m. Friday, June 8, after the assault and robbery. ... Police say the suspects did nothing to help him as he crawled away. And the drivers who struck him did not stay at the scene.
On Tuesday, June 19, detectives arrested Mohammed Salous, 17, and charged him as an adult with assault-related offenses. ... The next day, police arrested Kenneth Sahr Kpakima (also spelled Kapakima), 21, and charged him with assault and armed robbery.
A 15-year-old female suspect was also identified but she has not been charged yet.
Public Safety
Police: Hit-and-run victim had crawled on to roadway after being severely beaten
By Dan Morse June 22 Email the author
To the investigators who first arrived, the scene looked like a standard, if brutal, hit-and-run. ... Greg Atwood, 40, lay dead on a six-lane road in suburban Maryland just before 4 a.m. The driver who’d struck him was long gone. ... Then the investigators noticed the trail of blood. ... Rather than matching the direction of the traffic, the trail went right, across a sidewalk, and into a shallow, wooded ravine. Investigators clambered down and found a walking stick, beloved by Atwood, covered in blood.
The clues, described in court filings and hearings in Montgomery County this week, led to a chilling accusation about what had happened to Atwood, an eccentric, likable artist who in recent years had lived in a residential shelter and then a group home.
Investigators say that shortly before Atwood was run over on June 8, he was accosted by three attackers — ages 21, 17 and 15 — who robbed him of his backpack and forced him into the ravine. The older two followed him.
Greg Atwood shown in a photo taken around 2010. (Family photo)
“They beat him with sticks, beat him with his own walking stick, knocked him unconscious,” Assistant State’s Attorney Mark Anderson said in court Thursday. ... Then, as Atwood crawled from the ravine and onto Georgia Avenue, where he collapsed, the prosecutor said the three did nothing to help him. They “watched him get run over by a car,” Anderson said in court, recounting what investigators said one suspect described to them. “Mr. Atwood was dead. And they left him.”
....
Dan Morse covers courts and crime in Montgomery County. He arrived at the paper in 2005, after reporting stops at the Wall Street Journal, Baltimore Sun and Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser, where he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. He is the author of "The Yoga Store Murder." Follow
https://twitter.com/morsedan
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