In the early hours of a summer morning in Washington, D.C., a man named Deyon Rivers was shot and killed, the victim of a shockingly trivial dispute that escalated to murder. His death on July 7, 2000, was not the result of a robbery or a long-standing feud, but a senseless act of retaliation over firecrackers. The man responsible was Patrick Franklin Andrews, a serial killer whose violent path began in the late 1990s and continued even after he was imprisoned.
The day before his death,
Deyon Rivers was visiting a woman in a neighborhood near the corner of 18th and C Streets, N.E.. While there, he was shooting off small fireworks known as bottle rockets.. One of the fireworks reportedly came close to the girlfriend of a man named David Braddy.. Braddy angrily confronted Rivers, and though the initial incident ended without violence, Braddy later recounted his anger to his friends, Patrick Andrews and Randall C. Mack.. Fueled by this second-hand account of a perceived slight, Andrews and Mack decided to seek revenge on Braddy's behalf..
At approximately 2:25 a.m. on July 7, Andrews and Mack ambushed Deyon Rivers as he sat in the driver's seat of his car.. They opened fire, riddling the vehicle with bullets. When police arrived, they found Rivers slumped over in his seat, his body struck multiple times.. Investigators recovered sixteen cartridge casings from the scene, evidence of the ferocity of the attack.. Fourteen of the casings were later matched to a Glock 17 semi-automatic pistol, and two were from a Bryco semi-automatic pistol.. The motive, as a court would later hear, was simply that Rivers's response to the complaint about the firework had cost him his life..
The investigation led police to Andrews and Mack. A crucial piece of evidence emerged on July 21, 2000, when police recovered the Glock 17 pistol from a Cadillac that Andrews had recently acquired.. Ballistic testing confirmed it was one of the murder weapons.. On May 15, 2002, a jury found both Patrick Andrews and Randall Mack guilty of first-degree premeditated murder while armed, possession of a firearm during a crime of violence, and several other weapons offenses for their roles in Deyon Rivers's death..
The conviction was not Andrews's first or last. Just a month after the verdict for the Rivers murder, Andrews was also found guilty of the August 4, 1997, shooting death of 18-year-old Robert Ward, with whom he had a "beef.". For these two killings, Andrews was sentenced to a total of 35 years to life in prison.. His capacity for violence, however, was not contained by prison walls. On October 7, 2007, while incarcerated at the high-security United States Penitentiary in Hazelton, West Virginia, Andrews and another inmate, Kevin Bellinger, ambushed and stabbed fellow prisoner Jesse Harris to death, inflicting 20 wounds with a makeshift knife..
For the murder of Jesse Harris, Andrews faced federal charges of murder by a federal prisoner serving a life sentence and second-degree murder.. To avoid a potential death penalty, he pleaded guilty on April 13, 2015.. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, a term to be served consecutively to the sentence he was already serving for the murders of Deyon Rivers and Robert Ward.. Patrick Franklin Andrews is now incarcerated at a federal penitentiary, where he will spend the remainder of his life..
