On the morning of December 3, 2006, police were called to an apartment high-rise in the Temple Hills–area section of Prince George’s County, where a man had been found wounded in a stairwell. When officers arrived at the 2900 block of St. Clair Drive, they discovered Charles C. Crenshaw, a 27-year-old man, suffering from gunshot wounds in the building’s third-floor stairwell. He died there at the scene, turning a quiet Sunday morning into a sudden crime scene of flashing lights, taped-off hallways, and neighbors trying to make sense of what had happened.
Investigators worked the scene while the building and surrounding area became the focus of a homicide inquiry. Reporting at the time placed the discovery around 8:30 a.m., and the location—a residential corridor near the D.C.
line—was treated as an active lead in itself, as detectives tried to reconstruct how he ended up in that stairwell, who might have been with him, and whether the shooting began inside the building or elsewhere before he collapsed there.
In the days immediately after the killing, police publicly said they had not identified a motive or any suspects. No arrests were announced in the contemporaneous coverage, and authorities asked anyone with information to contact the Prince George’s County Police homicide unit, emphasizing that even small details—an argument overheard, a strange car, footsteps in the hallway—could matter in a case that had no clear public narrative attached to it yet.
Behind the headlines, Crenshaw’s death landed with the weight that sudden violence always carries: a young man gone, and a family left to move forward without answers. His obituary described him as the son of the late Charles C. Crenshaw, Jr., and Denise Crenshaw, and noted surviving relatives including a brother, Spencer Hamlett, Jr., and a sister, Latosha Crenshaw, along with nieces and nephews. Services were held at Pope Funeral Home in Forestville, as those who knew him gathered to grieve and remember the person he had been beyond the circumstances of his final moments.
