James Madison Mcgee, a 26-year-old Black male, served as an officer with the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Department. On the night of February 7, 1995, while off-duty and dressed in civilian clothes, Mcgee witnessed a taxi driver being robbed at gunpoint at the intersection of 25th Street and Good Hope Road SE. He intervened in the robbery, drawing his own weapon to detain one of the suspects.
In a tragic turn of events, uniformed officers arrived at the chaotic scene.
Unaware that Mcgee was a fellow police officer, one of the responding officers, Michael A. Baker, perceived him as a threat and ordered him to drop his weapon. When Mcgee did not immediately comply, Officer Baker fired his weapon, fatally wounding him. The two suspects involved in the initial robbery fled the scene during the confusion.
The two men, identified as Richard D. Gibson and Ronald A. Garnett, both 29 at the time, were later apprehended. Initially, prosecutors intended to charge them with felony murder in connection with Officer Mcgee's death. However, it was later determined that the robbery had concluded by the time the shooting occurred, and therefore, the legal grounds for felony murder were not strong enough.
Ultimately, the murder charges against Gibson and Garnett were dismissed. The two men, who were admitted drug addicts, pleaded guilty to robbing the taxi driver of $40 with what was later discovered to be a pellet gun. In court, both men expressed remorse for the chain of events their actions had set in motion. They were each sentenced to five to fifteen years in prison for the armed robbery. The officer who fired the fatal shots, Michael A. Baker, was cleared in a subsequent investigation of any wrongdoing.
