Ebony DeWitt was a 20-year-old Black female from Prince George’s County, Maryland, whose final hours became tangled in a crime that looked, at first, like it might vanish into smoke. In the early-morning darkness of March 16, 2009, firefighters were called to a car burning in Largo, and when the flames were knocked down, two bodies were found inside the stolen vehicle.
The dead were identified as Ebony and her mother, Delores DeWitt, a nurse who lived only a short distance from where the car was left burning.
The car itself was part of the horror: reported stolen, then driven a few blocks and abandoned like an afterthought, as if the fire could erase everything that happened before it. Investigators began to look backward from the blaze—toward the burglary that preceded the theft, toward the neighborhood that had been rattled by violence, toward the uneasy possibility that the DeWitts’ deaths were not an isolated act. With another mother and daughter killed nearby earlier that year, the pattern felt too sharp to ignore, and fear spread through the same streets where people suddenly started double-checking locks and counting their keys.
As the case moved from shock to scrutiny, one name rose out of the investigation: Jason Thomas Scott, a Prince George’s County man later described in news reports as a suspected serial offender tied to the mother-daughter killings. In July 2010, a grand jury indicted Scott in the murders of Delores and Ebony DeWitt, with the indictment including murder counts and burglary charges. Authorities also signaled they believed he was involved in the earlier killing of another mother and daughter in the same area, tightening the sense that these weren’t random tragedies, but steps in a terrifying progression.
The legal endgame came years later, not with a full trial, but with a plea that still carried the weight of a lifetime. In September 2013, Scott entered an Alford plea in the DeWitt case—meaning he did not admit guilt, but conceded prosecutors had enough evidence to convict. He was sentenced to two life sentences with all but 85 years suspended, and reporting at the time described the killings as strangulations. In exchange, prosecutors agreed to drop charges in three other killings, including the earlier mother-daughter murders, a deal framed publicly as a way to spare families the strain of multiple trials while ensuring Scott would never return to the community.
