WASHPO: Part Two: The Southeast Washington drive-by shootings: Deadly retaliation

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Excerpt:
By Paul Duggan

Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 3, 2010; 12:49 AM


Sixth and Chesapeake streets SE was Orlando Carter's little realm, where police said his peculiar charisma and entrepreneurial zeal made him a natural leader of the crack and marijuana trades.


There, late at night, when Harry's Wings 'N Things, Dee's Barber & Beauty Salon and Chesapeake Big Market are shut behind iron grates, a furtive economy thrives in the alley and parking lot behind the businesses.


You'll find scores of enterprises just like it in the poorer parts of the city: young men with their heads on swivels, talking incessantly on cellphones and rarely standing still, addressing customers with nods and hand gestures, then retreating to other dark places, returning shortly with the goods. It's efficient and lucrative.


All in all, detectives said, Carter, 20, seemed comfortable in his domain.


Then someone walked up and shot him in front of Dee's -- almost killed him.


Right there in his own house, so to speak.


It was Tuesday evening, March 23, less than 48 hours after Carter; his brother Sanquan Carter; and two other men, Jeffrey Best and Nathaniel Simms, allegedly wreaked lethal havoc on some people outside an apartment building in a beef over a missing bracelet. A young man named Jordan Howe, who had a lot of friends, had been killed in that indiscriminate spray of gunfire. And now Orlando Carter was bleeding from bullets himself.


No one familiar with the retributive cycles of street violence in the District thought it was a coincidence, including homicide detectives. They said the shooting in front of the barbershop, amateurishly inept, brought massive retaliation a week later: a drive-by attack that killed three people and wounded six.

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