In the early hours of Saturday, May 18, 2013, 21-year-old Dontel Jahmal “Don Don” Price, a Black / African American male from Northeast Washington, D.C., was in the Eckington area near the unit block of S Street NE when gunfire cut through the quiet of the night. Around 2:35 to 3:20 a.m., neighbors heard shots and called for help, bringing officers from the Metropolitan Police Department’s Fifth District racing to the narrow block just off North Capitol Street.
They found Dontel lying on the pavement, gravely wounded from at least one gunshot, reported by first responders as a shot to the head. Emergency medical crews rushed him to a local hospital, but despite their efforts, he did not survive and was pronounced dead there not long after.
In the days that followed, the stark facts of the crime were repeated in official releases: the location, the early-morning hour, the plea for community help. Police described the killing simply and bluntly—Dontel had been shot and killed in the unit block of S Street NE, and detectives from the Homicide Branch were trying to piece together what had happened and why. A reward flier circulated across the city, offering up to $25,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible, underscoring how little investigators were able to share publicly about a motive or the circumstances leading up to the shooting. The case quickly joined the roster of major unsolved homicides from 2013, listed among other names whose families were also waiting for answers.
Away from the formal language of police notices, the loss was felt in far more personal terms. An obituary in the Washington Post remembered Dontel Jahmal Price as “Don Don,” a beloved son, grandson, brother, uncle and cousin, the child of Donnell and Valerie Price and part of a large, close-knit family that included four sisters and three brothers. Friends and relatives gathered for a viewing and service at Community United Methodist Church in Northeast D.C. on May 30, 2013, before his burial at Glenwood Cemetery, a traditional city resting place that has seen generations of Washington families laid to rest.
On the block where he was shot, and later a short walk away, grief took on a physical form. A local chronicler of D.C.’s informal street memorials documented a small shrine for Dontel on S Street NE—candles, a teddy bear, and a decorative glass arranged where neighbors could see it as they passed by. Not long afterward, the writer was told that a larger memorial had been built in his honor nearby, a bottle-and–T-shirt shrine in the 1700 block of Lincoln Road NE, suggesting that friends and community members were determined to keep his name present in the neighborhood, even as official accounts reduced him to a date, an address, and a case number.
The investigation itself has unfolded mostly out of public view, leaving a murky picture of what progress, if any, has been made. From the beginning, police asked anyone with information to contact detectives or send anonymous tips, and for years afterward city documents continued to promote the same reward and the same appeal for witnesses. At some point, local media reported that D.C. police had made an arrest in connection with a 2013 homicide whose details match Dontel’s killing—the same May 18 shooting in the unit block of S Street where he was found wounded and taken to the hospital. The brief online summary of that report, however, repeats only the basic facts of the crime and does not name the suspect, specify the charges, or describe the outcome of the case. More recent public records still list Dontel’s death among major unsolved homicides and continue to advertise a reward for information, and independent case summaries describe his murder as unresolved with no publicly disclosed suspect details. As a result, more than a decade after he was gunned down on that short stretch of S Street NE, the story of Dontel “Don Don” Price remains one of a life remembered by family and neighbors, and a killing whose full truth has yet to be clearly documented in the public record.
