Malika Stover, 35, a woman who was Black/African American, lived in Southeast Washington, D.C., and was known to family and friends as “Meka.” In the early morning hours of Saturday, June 22, 2013, she was in the 1300 block of Stevens Road SE when gunfire erupted. At approximately 2:06 a.m., Metropolitan Police Department officers responded to a report of a shooting and found Stover suffering from multiple gunshot wounds. D.C.
Fire and Emergency Medical Services transported her to a local hospital, where she died from her injuries. Contemporary reports said she had been shot several times, and police immediately classified the incident as a homicide investigation.
Stover had deep roots in Southeast Washington. She had lived on Alabama Avenue SE in a house that had belonged to her grandmother and had spent much of her life around the Barry Farm area, where she was raised. Her aunt, Diane Davis, told reporters that Stover had struggled with school when she was younger, leaving before the ninth grade, but later earned her high school diploma. At the time of her death, she was working as a MetroAccess driver, providing transportation for people with disabilities. Before that, she had driven rental cars between offices along the East Coast. Family members remembered her as outgoing, funny and affectionate, and her obituary identified her formally as Malika Diane Stover, “Meka.” Funeral services were held July 3, 2013, at Cedar Hill Funeral Home in Suitland, Maryland, followed by burial at Cedar Hill Cemetery.
The circumstances immediately surrounding the shooting were never fully resolved in the early public accounts. A later Washington Blade report stated that police believed the killing followed an argument with a neighbor and that the dispute did not appear to be connected to Stover’s sexual orientation. Stover was openly lesbian and was known in Washington's lesbian community. Her aunt gave investigators and reporters a different understanding of what had happened, saying Stover had been in her old neighborhood that night playing dice and gambling. Davis believed that Stover was killed during a robbery connected to the dice game and said she did not believe the motive was related to her being lesbian. That robbery theory came from the family and was not presented by police as an established conclusion. The reporting also indicates that authorities did not classify the killing as a hate crime.
Stover's death occurred only about an hour after another fatal shooting elsewhere in Southeast Washington in which Quentin Lavar White, 28, was killed on East Capitol Street SE. The two killings happened during the same violent night, but police said there was no known connection between them. In the immediate aftermath of Stover's shooting, police had no identified suspect information. The Metropolitan Police Department issued a homicide reward notice seeking information from the public and offered up to $25,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible. The case was assigned to the department's Homicide Branch, with detectives Thomas Smith and Charles Fultz listed as contacts on the original police reward notice.
The publicly available records and news reports located for the case do not identify anyone who was arrested for Stover's killing, nor do they identify a named suspect who was charged in connection with the homicide. There is no reliable online record in the material reviewed showing that anyone was prosecuted, tried or convicted for the shooting. A July 2013 report described the homicide as still under investigation, and the Metropolitan Police Department's public 2013 homicide materials continue to list Stover's case as one for which investigators sought information. The surviving public record therefore leaves the identity of the shooter or shooters unresolved, with no documented arrest, criminal charge, trial or conviction located for the killing.
