Loressa Rose Little, 43, a Black woman from Baltimore, was found dead inside a home on the 5200 block of Denmore Avenue after police were called there shortly before 1:30 a.m. on October 7, 2014, for what was described as suspicious activity. Detectives said the front door was open when they arrived, and when they went inside they discovered two people who had died from apparent gunshot wounds, turning a quiet row of houses into a sealed-off crime scene under the glare of patrol lights.
In the first hours of the investigation, authorities released few specifics beyond the basic outline: the victims lived at the address, the deaths appeared to be a shooting, and homicide detectives were trying to reconstruct what happened before that open door and the sudden silence inside the house. With so little made public, the case quickly became one of those neighborhood tragedies where the hardest facts—who had been there, what had been taken or argued over, whether the gunfire was heard—remained locked in the memories of the street and the case file, while police urged anyone with information to come forward.
Years later, the killings were repeatedly discussed alongside an earlier, separate violence tied to the same block and the same surname. Maryland court records describe a January 28, 2014 attack in the 5200 block of Denmore Avenue in which two men were shot, one of them also stabbed; one victim, Derrill Crawley, died, and the other, Steven Melton, survived. In that case, Avery Little was convicted in Baltimore City of second-degree murder and related firearm offenses.
Reporting that followed cast Little’s death as part of a grim chain of events around that earlier case, portraying her as a reluctant, endangered witness whose fears proved well-founded. In that later account, her name appears as “Loretta” rather than “Loressa,” and the story describes her being forced to her knees and shot “execution-style,” with her husband, Leroy Agnew, also killed in the home; it further states that no one had been charged in connection with the double homicide at the time of publication.
