On a Saturday night in November 2022, 18-year-old Akira Wilson told her mother she was going to the movies with a friend. Hours later, the promising high school senior was found fatally shot inside a room at the Hilton Garden Inn in Northeast Washington, D.C. Police were called to the hotel around 9:50 p.m. on November 19th after a report of a gunshot.
When they arrived, they discovered Wilson deceased from a gunshot wound.
Akira, a student at Jackson-Reed High School who also took courses at Trinity Washington University, was described by her family as an ambitious and hardworking young woman. She was an entrepreneur who sold candy to raise money and had aspirations of studying mortuary science to one day open her own funeral home. Her family was left devastated and searching for answers, believing she had been invited to a party at the hotel by a coworker. They suspected the friend's boyfriend was involved in the shooting. As the investigation unfolded, the Metropolitan Police Department released surveillance images of a person of interest, but weeks turned into months with no arrests, fueling the family's frustration.
In February 2023, Wilson's family held a news conference, publicly naming two teenagers they believed were responsible for her death. Their frustration grew as they voiced suspicions that the investigation was stalling. A significant development in the case came in June 2023, when police informed the family that the person of interest they had been investigating, 18-year-old Calico Ford, had been found shot and killed in Southwest D.C. A law enforcement source confirmed Ford was a suspect in Akira's murder, and a grand jury had been hearing evidence in the case.
Following Ford's death, police arrested 20-year-old Jeremiah Evans and charged him with first-degree murder for Ford's killing. While court documents did not directly link Evans to Wilson's death, it was revealed that witnesses interviewed in connection with her murder were also interviewed in Ford's case. One witness in the Ford homicide was also reportedly a witness in Akira Wilson's murder investigation. No one has been charged directly with the murder of Akira Wilson.
