On April 14, 2007, Carlos Eduardo Milian, a 33-year-old man, was standing at a bus stop on the 7900 block of New Hampshire Avenue near Lebanon Street in the Adelphi/Langley Park area when two men approached and pressed in close with demands for valuables. The pair went after the gold chain he was wearing, and when he resisted, one of the robbers fired a single shot into his chest. He was rushed to Washington Hospital Center, but he did not survive.
Not long after the shooting, the escape began to unravel in a trail of small, sharp details: witnesses saw the two men run from the bus stop and climb into a Ford Focus, and a bystander across the street managed to catch part of the tag number. Police were already hunting that same Ford Focus—stolen earlier that day from a gas station after the owner left the keys inside—and by that evening officers stopped the car and arrested the driver, Henry P. Angulo-Gil, along with the passenger, Misael Pena. Inside the vehicle, investigators recovered a loaded. 38-caliber Rossi revolver from the floorboard behind the driver’s seat, and they found additional live. 38-caliber rounds in Angulo-Gil’s pocket.
As the case moved from street corner to courtroom, the story of what happened at the bus stop was rebuilt through witness accounts and the shifting loyalties of the people arrested. Selvin Lima, who had been waiting with Milian, described how the robbers tried to take the chain and how the taller man fired the fatal shot while the smaller man grabbed for the jewelry. Pena later testified that Angulo-Gil directed him to snatch the chain and then shot Milian when he fought back; Pena also told jurors that after the shooting they drove into Washington, D.C., before returning to Prince George’s County, where police ultimately caught up with them. Prosecutors dropped certain murder charges against Pena in exchange for his cooperation, and Pena entered a plea agreement in which he would plead guilty to conspiracy to commit robbery with a deadly weapon with a maximum exposure of twenty-five years.
Angulo-Gil was indicted on multiple charges tied to the killing and the attempted robbery, and his case proceeded through separate trials. In February 2009, a jury convicted him of first-degree felony murder and conspiracy to commit robbery with a deadly weapon, along with other verdicts that included involuntary manslaughter and second-degree felony murder while acquitting him of first- and second-degree murder. On June 22, 2009, he was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for first-degree felony murder, with a concurrent twenty-year term for the robbery conspiracy and a concurrent five-year term for the theft case connected to the stolen Ford Focus.
