Jearmar Oswald Lee, a 31-year-old Black man, was fatally shot during an armed robbery in the 700 block of Neptune Avenue in Oxon Hill, Maryland. Shortly after 10:00 p.m. on December 20, 2012, Prince George’s County police officers were dispatched to the residential block after receiving a report of a shooting. When officers arrived, they found Lee suffering from an apparent gunshot wound. He was rushed to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Although the shooting occurred late on December 20, Maryland’s official death index records Lee’s date of death as December 21, 2012.
In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, homicide detectives had not publicly identified a suspect or established a motive. Investigators continued working the case, and authorities later determined that Lee had been shot and killed during an armed robbery rather than in a random unexplained shooting. The robbery investigation eventually led police to three men they identified as suspects in his killing.
Two suspects were taken into custody relatively soon after the homicide. Police identified them as Jason Deon Jones, who was 22 at the time and lived in the same 700 block of Neptune Avenue where Lee was shot, and Steven Bly, then 24, of Southeast Washington, D.C. Prince George’s County police later confirmed that both men had been arrested in connection with Lee’s murder, although the publicly available police announcement did not provide the specific charges filed against Jones or Bly or describe the individual role investigators alleged each man played in the robbery and shooting.
The investigation remained active well beyond those initial arrests. On March 13, 2014, more than a year after Lee’s death, police announced the arrest of a third suspect, Deandre Cornelius Jenkins, then 24, of Northeast Washington, D.C. Jenkins was arrested at his home and charged with first-degree murder in Lee’s killing. At the time of the announcement, Jenkins was being held in the District of Columbia while authorities awaited his extradition to Prince George’s County to face the murder charge.
The arrest of Jenkins showed that detectives continued pursuing the case after Jones and Bly had already been taken into custody. By 2014, police were publicly describing Lee’s death as a homicide committed during an armed robbery and had identified all three men as suspects connected to the case. The online police and news reports located for the case document the arrests of Jones, Bly and Jenkins and the first-degree murder charge against Jenkins, but they do not provide a verified later trial result, conviction, acquittal, plea agreement or sentence for any of the three men.
