Do you know who murdered Esaias Alazar? Esaias Alazar, a 50-year-old African-American man, worked long days behind the wheel of a taxicab in Washington, D.C., trying to keep up with his bills even as debt closed in around him. In the weeks before his death, he had fallen behind on payments for his cab, enough that his manager at the Five Star Cab Association, Mengestab Ghebreginsae, went to his apartment and removed the spark plugs and fuel line so the car could not run.
Even then, Alazar still owed the company $320, a burden that hung over him on the first Friday night of March 2005.
On March 4, 2005, he managed to rig his disabled cab back into working condition and drove his 1997 Ford Crown Victoria to the Four Seasons convenience store on South Dakota Avenue Northeast, near the Maryland line. Surveillance footage later reviewed by police shows him arriving outside the store, pausing to speak briefly with someone, and then stepping inside at about 9:17 p.m. He went to the counter and bought a D.C. Lottery instant scratch ticket, checked to see if he had won anything, and then walked back out into the cold night toward his parked cab in front of 4975 South Dakota Avenue NE.
What happened moments later was captured only in fragments. Investigators said the surveillance video ends abruptly with a white flash, cutting off any view of what unfolded just outside the store's doors. Out in the parking area, as Alazar walked toward his cab, two men approached him. According to police, there was a struggle, and in that brief, chaotic encounter one of the men shot him in the chest. It was around 9:27 p.m. when the gunfire shattered the routine of the neighborhood strip of shops. Alazar was rushed to Washington Hospital Center, but the wound was too severe; he died there within about half an hour.
Detectives from the Metropolitan Police Department's Violent Crimes Branch treated the killing as a major case from the outset. The location and time were clear, and data later compiled from District homicides recorded the manner of death as a shooting, with the motive listed simply as an argument, hinting at a confrontation that escalated with terrible speed. The department circulated flyers naming him as a homicide victim, emphasizing the time — just after 9:27 p.m. — and the precise address in front of the convenience store, and appealed repeatedly for anyone who had seen the two men or heard the argument to come forward. Still, no description strong enough to identify the assailants was ever made public, and the case remained classified as open.
The violence did not end with Alazar's death. Twenty days later, on March 24, 2005, 22-year-old Robert “Rob” Alexander Jr. was gunned down in Northeast Washington. D.C. police later said they believed Alexander had been killed so that he could not help authorities identify the gunman in the fatal shooting of the cabdriver outside the convenience store earlier that month. The article recounting his death noted that both killings remained unsolved, underscoring how fear and retaliation can silence crucial witnesses and freeze investigations in place.
Years passed, and Alazar's name settled into the grim lists of unsolved homicides maintained by the city and by organizations that track cold cases. Those records describe him as a taxi driver originally from Africa, shot to death outside the place where he had gone that night in a small act of hope, chasing the possibility of a lottery win that might ease his troubles. No arrests have ever been reported, and the two men who confronted him outside the Four Seasons convenience store have never been publicly identified, leaving his killing, and the questions surrounding it, unresolved on the streets where he took his last steps toward his cab.
