On the evening of November 7, 2016, Antina Cindette Pratt, a 40-year-old mother of three, was returning home from her job as a waitress at a Denny's in Washington, D.C. After getting off a bus near her apartment complex on Pomeroy Road in Southeast Washington, she was met by a neighbor, Elliott Avery Starks. Surveillance footage captured the two walking together, with Pratt appearing at ease in his company. They walked towards a bike path adjacent to Suitland Parkway, disappearing from the camera's view. Less than half an hour later, the video showed the man emerging from the woods alone.
The following afternoon, November 8, a passerby discovered Pratt's body in a ditch amidst heavy brush along the Suitland Parkway-Buena Vista Bike Trail. She had been brutally stabbed 29 times in the head, neck, chest, and back. While her cellphone was missing, her identification, backpack, and purse were found scattered near her body.
The scene suggested a violent struggle; defensive wounds and the discovery of male DNA under her fingernails indicated she had fought back against her attacker.
The investigation quickly focused on Elliott Avery Starks, then 34, who lived in a different building within the same apartment complex as Pratt. Authorities discovered that the two had exchanged 65 phone calls in the month leading up to her death. The crucial breakthrough came when the DNA recovered from beneath Pratt's fingernails was matched to Starks, whose DNA was on file from a previous felony conviction. Starks had been released from prison just five months earlier after serving 16 years for a 1999 murder he committed at the age of 16 in the very same apartment complex.
After a nearly year-long manhunt involving D.C. police and the FBI, Starks was arrested on October 4, 2017, and charged with first-degree murder. Though he denied killing Pratt, he admitted to detectives that he had been in an intimate relationship with her and had supplied her with heroin. While a definitive motive was never provided by Starks, prosecutors suspected it was robbery. In May 2018, Starks pleaded guilty to second-degree murder while armed. In August of that year, a judge sentenced him to 15 years in prison. This sentence was in addition to the potential of serving the remaining 25 years of his sentence for the 1999 murder, for which he was on parole at the time of Pratt's killing.
