In the summer of 2008, Paul Trevon Blackwell, a 26-year-old male, was enjoying a quiet evening playing spades with four friends in the backyard of his family's home in the Capitol Heights area of Maryland. It was just before 9 p.m. on Thursday, July 31st, in the 100 block of East Mill Avenue, a street just a short distance from the Washington, D.C. line.
The friendly card game was abruptly shattered by the appearance of two masked men, one of whom brandished a handgun.
The assailants demanded that Blackwell and his friends empty their pockets and lie on the ground. Thinking it might be a joke at first, the friends quickly complied when they saw the weapon. As he was turning to get on the ground, Paul Trevon Blackwell was shot in the upper body. The two masked men then fled the scene, with a witness reporting they escaped in a white Ford Taurus. The motive for the attack was determined to be robbery.
Inside the house, Blackwell's mother heard four gunshots and ran outside to find her son grievously wounded, a friend holding his head as he cried out that he was dying. Known to his loved ones as 'Tre,' Blackwell was described by his parents as a homebody who preferred the safety of his home to the troubles of the streets. He was unemployed and managed diabetes. His parents had lived in the same two-story brick house for 22 years, the place where their only son's life was tragically cut short.
Despite the investigation that followed, there have been no public announcements regarding any arrests or the identification of suspects in the murder of Paul Trevon Blackwell. The case is considered to be one of the many unsolved homicides in Prince George's County from that period. The perpetrators who ended a young man's life during a robbery in his own backyard seemingly vanished, leaving a family to mourn and a community with unanswered questions.
