By Matt Zapotosky and Lisa Rein

Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 10, 2010

Police removed a body believed to be that of a promising D.C. Council intern from a wooded area in [Congress Heights] Southeast Washington on Sunday afternoon, and family members said they think the young man was shot and killed a day earlier after a dispute with a man over a ride.

Alonte Sutton, 18, seemed an unlikely candidate to be touched by the violence that kills so many of his peers in Washington, family members and friends said. He was a good student at Ballou Senior High School and was set to graduate in June, family members said. Sutton worked last summer in the office of D.C. Council member Michael A. Brown (I-At Large), who was so impressed that he recommended him for a competitive year-long internship this year.

"We were extremely proud of him," Brown said Sunday. "We all knew this was a super kid."

District police have yet to officially confirm that the body removed from a wooded area off the 200 block of Newcomb Street SE, belongs to Sutton, but Brown and family members said the body was the teenager's. Sutton's relatives, gathered at the scene Sunday, said that they had not heard from Sutton since Saturday afternoon -- when he called his grandmother from her house in Bowie to ask when she would be home -- but that they had heard from witnesses that he had been shot on Newcomb Street sometime later.

Family members said witnesses told them that Sutton, who was seen Saturday putting tires on a car on Newcomb Street, had been in a dispute with a man after Sutton refused to give the man's girlfriend a ride somewhere. Sometime after that dispute, family members and friends said, the man returned with a gun and opened fire on Sutton, following him as he tried to flee into the woods.

"They said that they seen him get shot. He jumped over the rail and went down through the woods," said Wayne Sutton, Alonte Sutton's grandfather.

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