Stanley Rowe is no stranger to the perils of sleeping outside in Washington. He’s done it countless times since he was evicted from his Deanwood apartment six years ago.

Like many people experiencing homelessness in the District, Rowe prefers sleeping outdoors during the warmer months of the year over staying in a shelter. And one of his preferred spots to find some shut-eye is downtown, where well-lit streets and a heavy police presence offer something of a sense of safety.

So on a recent Friday afternoon, as he sat in James Monroe Park near the World Bank’s headquarters, the 61-year-old couldn’t help but wonder how anyone could have died on a bench right across the street, just a few weeks earlier. “The homeless up here, they don’t do nothing stupid—just sit on a bench, maybe go to sleep,” he said. “But how did two guys get hit over there? I’ll never understand.”

Fifty days after an SUV hurtled into James Monroe Park close to midnight, crushing two people who were sitting—or perhaps sleeping—on park benches, details around the crash are still shrouded in mystery.

Part of the secrecy around the crash is tied to the fact that it happened on federal land. The green square, bifurcated by Pennsylvania Avenue at the intersections of 21st and I streets, is among the nearly 7,000 acres of D.C. parkland that is managed by the National Park Service and served by the U.S. Park Police.

It took more than a month for the Park Police to release the names of the victims. Neither had fixed addresses, which made it difficult to notify their relatives, according to agency officials, and it is protocol for USPP to notify next of kin before disclosing the names of victims to the public.

Jesus Antonio Llanes-Datil, 63, and Thomas Dwight Spriggs, 42, died at the scene of the crash, according to Park Police. DCist’s attempts to contact their families were unsuccessful.

At a vigil last month, another man who has slept on those same benches, Robert Gregory, said he knew one of the men—he often saw him around, playing music through a speaker—but DCist was unable to verify much about their lives.

The circumstances around the crash itself are just as unknown. Both the Park Police and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia have declined to answer repeated questions about the case.

In the immediate aftermath, Park Police said that speeding may have been a factor in the crash, and that results from a toxicology report were forthcoming. But on Tuesday, spokesperson Sergeant Eduardo Delgado could not confirm whether the driver was speeding, give a timeline for when toxicology results would be released, or even if the driver had been arrested.

Delgado added that DCist’s Freedom of Information Act request for a crash report is unlikely to be fulfilled until prosecutors make a decision on the case. “I believe that the response that you’ll get will be that no information can be turned over until the case is adjudicated,” he said.

On the legal side, federal prosecutors have been completely mute. “There are no publicly available court documents regarding this case, so I cannot provide a comment at this time,” said Kadia Koroma, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. Koroma declined to say whether any charges were brought or are forthcoming against the driver.

It isn’t the first time in recent memory that officials have declined to disclose details about a major incident on federal parkland in the D.C. area.

In 2017, U.S. Park Police officers fatally shot Bijan Ghaisar during a minor traffic incident. In the months after the shooting, most of what the family learned came from footage released by the Fairfax police department or through a wrongful death lawsuit. Nearly two years after the shooting, authorities say it remains under investigation by the FBI.

The crash in James Monroe Park will also evade the scrutiny of D.C.’s Major Crash Review Task Force. Established as part of the Bicycle and Pedestrian Safety Amendment Act of 2016, the task force reviews every crash investigated by MPD’s Major Crash Unit. Its purpose is to recommend “changes to the District’s statutes, regulations, policies, and infrastructure that the Task Force believes would reduce the number of crashes in the District resulting in serious injury or death.”

However, crashes investigated by Park Police do not fall within the task force’s “jurisdiction,” according to Eileen McCarthy, a retired lawyer who serves on the panel as the co-chair of the city’s Pedestrian Safety Council. “It’s a little frustrating,” McCarthy said.

McCarthy was careful not to jump to conclusions about the crash in James Monroe Park, but she said that some things about it stood out to her. “It seems like speed had to be an issue for the car to have gone as far as it did,” she said. “And the fact that it was an SUV probably added to the danger.”

Law enforcement agencies often avoid disclosing information about a crash to avoid jeopardizing a case in the event it goes to court, McCarthy said. But authorities could be more transparent with the public by putting out press releases when investigations come to an end, as is customary for murder investigations, she said. “A lot of these crashes get forgotten,” she said. “We just lose them, and we don’t know what happened ultimately with the investigation.”

Meanwhile, the sudden death of two people experiencing homelessness in a downtown park has drawn little attention from city officials. Around 50 people, including a handful of ANC commissioners, showed up to a vigil for the victims a few days after the crash. But no one from the office of Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans. And while a member of Mayor Muriel Bowser’s administration was present, they did not make public remarks.

Patrick Kennedy, a commissioner for ANC2A who is running for the Ward 2 D.C. Council seat, told DCist that he was disappointed that more government officials hadn’t shown up to the vigil. Local authorities should “keep the pressure” on the U.S. Park Police to release more information about the crash, he said. “I really don’t want to lose focus on this or lose sight of the two lives that were lost.”

Evans met with DDOT officials after the crash to discuss ways to improve the safety of Pennsylvania Avenue, according to Joe Florio, a spokesperson for the councilmember. “The way we honor the memories of the victims is to complete this project, continue the city’s focus on supporting Vision Zero, and ending homelessness,” Florio told DCist over email. Evans declined to comment directly on the case.

After the crash, safe streets advocates renewed their calls for the city to implement temporary safety fixes on Pennsylvania Avenue as the District Department of Transportation works on redesigning the busy downtown thoroughfare.

So far, there have been 16 traffic fatalities in the District this year, according to data from the Metropolitan Police Department. In 2018, the city recorded 36 such deaths, including a man who was killed by a hit-and-run driver as he was leaving an emergency shelter in Ivy City last May. A wheelchair-bound man on his way to a homeless shelter in Congress Heights was also seriously injured by a driver who fled the scene in October.

The tragedy in James Monroe Park “is not just a matter of bad roadway design—it’s a symptom of the people that we’re leaving behind,” Kennedy said. “What disappointed me is the sense that this might be forgotten about just because of who these people were, and what their station of life was.”

Last year, 54 people experiencing homelessness died without a home last year, according to a count by advocates.

“I’ve seen all kinds of stuff out here,” Richard Paul told DCist, as he sat in a park down the block from the crash site. “When I first heard it, I was wondering if it was somebody I knew.”

The 56-year-old says he has been sleeping in downtown D.C. whenever it’s warm enough for the last fifteen years. He regularly meets with a counselor at a nearby non-profit and is hopeful he will get permanent housing soon. But he’s seen people wait years before finding a place to call their own.

“Folks are older now, you gotta take life a little more seriously,” he said. “Some of these guys, they were teenagers when they came out here.”

This story has been updated to reflect that a member of Bowser’s administration was in attendance. 

Previously:
Park Police Identify Two Victims Killed By SUV Driver In Park
Questions Linger As Community Holds Vigil For Two People Killed By Driver In Downtown Park
Two Pedestrians Were Killed By An SUV Driver Who Barreled Into A Northwest D.C. Park