Christine Chase, a 48-year-old Black / African American woman, was walking through the Trinidad section of Northeast Washington, DC, late on Friday, May 13, 2022, when the quiet of the 1200 block of Raum Street NE was broken by gunfire. Around 10:47 to 11 p.m., police in the city's Fifth District were dispatched after reports of a shooting in an alley just off the block.
Responding officers found Christine down on the pavement, suffering from at least one gunshot wound, in a narrow cut-through that runs behind the rowhouses and apartment buildings that line the street. She had no fixed address at the time, and the alley was a place where people without stable housing sometimes passed through or sought a bit of shelter from the main roads.
Officers and DC Fire and Emergency Medical Services personnel tried to save her, but by the time medics carefully checked for signs of life, there was nothing they could do. Christine was pronounced dead at the scene under the harsh wash of emergency lights, the alley quickly becoming both a crime scene and a memorial-in-the-making. Detectives from the Metropolitan Police Department's Homicide Branch arrived and began the familiar but painstaking process of marking evidence, photographing the scene, and canvassing for witnesses in the surrounding Trinidad neighborhood, where residents had been jolted by the sound of shots and the sudden arrival of cruisers and ambulances.
In the first days after the shooting, authorities released only the basic details: Christine's name and age, the block where she was killed, and the late-night hour of the attack. There was at least one additional victim that night on the same block, wounded but surviving, underscoring that whatever unfolded in the alley was more than a single, isolated shot. Investigators initially held back any information about a possible motive, and the case joined the city's list of homicides for 2022, another file on the Major Case/Unsolved Homicides roster even as detectives tried to keep it from becoming just a statistic. The department distributed a reward flier and reiterated that up to $25,000 was available for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or people responsible, urging anyone who had seen something on Raum Street that night to come forward.
For months, the public face of the investigation remained quiet, but behind the scenes detectives worked leads that eventually focused on a man from nearby Maryland. On January 5, 2023, nearly eight months after Christine was killed, Maryland Transportation Authority Police officers arrested 50-year-old Reginald English of Bladensburg, Maryland, in Anne Arundel County on a DC Superior Court warrant connected to the Raum Street homicide. A few days later, members of the MPD Fugitive Unit brought him back to the District, where he was formally charged with second-degree murder while armed. Police alleged that English was the gunman who shot Christine in the alley and also wounded another person that same night, turning the quiet back lane into the scene of a deadly attack.
Court records show that in March 2023, a DC Superior Court judge granted a prosecution request to dismiss the local case against English because he would instead be tried in federal court, shifting the venue but not erasing the allegations surrounding Christine's death on Raum Street. Even as the legal proceedings moved into a different system, the outline of what happened to her remained stark: a late-night shooting in a neighborhood already strained by gun violence, a victim with no permanent home whose life ended in an alley, and a suspect arrested after months of investigation and then passed into a more complex judicial path. Christine's name continues to appear in public databases of gun violence victims, a reminder that beyond the legal motions and jurisdictional changes, her story began and ended on that single night in May 2022 in Northeast Washington.
