Retha Rogers’ son, Michael Earl Washington Jr. was shot and killed on Renwood Street on Rochester’s east side 14 years ago.
Since then, there have been no arrests in his death, and few leads. His daughter, who was born a month after his slaying, only knows her father through tales of the man he was.
“She didn’t ever know her dad, we have to tell her what kind of person he was, and what kind of person we think he would be,” Rogers said. “This person took her dad’s life. Where’s your compassion? Where’s your heart? Do you feel any remorse?”
Life has moved on. Rogers hasn’t. In the aftermath of her son’s death, she was racked with paranoia and anger. Today, she laments the hole his homicide left behind, and the closure she hasn’t gotten.
Washington’s homicide is one of more than 500 in the city of Rochester that have been classified as “cold cases.” They remain unsolved, vexing detectives tasked with cracking them and leaving loved ones of the victims in a limbo of unanswered questions.
In this ongoing series, “Rochester’s Cold Cases: Searching for Closure,” WXXI News revisits homicide cases that have gone cold with the hope of accomplishing two things. The first is to encourage anyone who has, or thinks they might have, information about the slayings to reveal what they know. The second is to illustrate the complex relationship between relatives of homicide victims and the police who are working the cases.
More than 2,000 people have died by homicide in Rochester since 1969, the year that the RPD began tracking cold cases. In about a quarter of them, the killer remains on the loose.
A recent rise in the homicide rate has only complicated matters. Many of those cold cases — 129 of them — stem from homicides in the last 10 years.
On one hand, police are solving more homicides than ever before. On the other hand, the proportion of cold cases has grown.
Ten years ago, Rochester’s clearance rate — the term used for homicide cases that have been closed — hovered around 85%. These days, it is around 62%. The city saw a record 80 homicides in 2021. Since then, just 47 of them have been closed.
The declining clearance rate aligns with a national trend. According to a recent analysis of FBI data by the Marshall Project, the clearance rate fell below 50% in 2020 for the first time. Just a generation earlier, in the early 1980s, an estimated 70% of homicides were solved.
The RPD’s Major Crimes Unit, which encompasses homicide detectives, is a relatively small group tasked with an increasing burden. The department’s dozen detectives account for 2% of the entire police force, and just one of those investigators is dedicated full-time to cold cases.
Detective Matthew Klein joined the Major Crimes Unit in late 2019, as homicides were spiking.
“It’s the same amount of (detectives), and it’s just that the volume coming in makes it very, very hard,” Klein said. “It’s not enough at 80 (homicides). If you’re talking 30, sure, that’s reasonable.”
Fellow detective Terry Dearcop, a 27-year veteran of the department, shared that sentiment. She emphasized the intense workload by pointing to a single cold case homicide from 2016.
“This is nearly 400 homicides ago,” Dearcop said of the case. “So, if you look at the volume of cases that we try to keep up on, to get back to an old one from 2016 is difficult, especially if you don’t have new leads.”
The lack of closure on unsolved homicides is a burden on everyone involved in an investigation, but it is heaviest with relatives of the deceased. In some cases, they are certain they will never see justice.
That is what Marcella Cunningham thinks when she contemplates the death of her son, Lewis Puryear. His death received a significant amount of attention, partly due to Puryear also being the nephew of local civil rights leader and founder of United Christian Leadership Ministries, the late Rev. Lewis Stewart.
Puryear was found dead in the early morning hours of Oct. 16, 2016. It is believed he was shot during an argument following a house party on Orchard Street.
“They never found who killed him,” Cunningham said. “Two people were arrested for having guns. The investigators told me they found evidence for different guns, so it was two different guns shooting at each other. But once they arrested them, they closed the case. They were like, ‘No, we don’t think either one of these are the ones that killed him, but we have no way of knowing because there was so much gunfire.’”
Cunningham and Rogers met through a support group hosted by local antiviolence group Rise Up Rochester, where they now serve as outreach coordinator and support group specialist, respectively. They described being consumed by anger in the years after their children’s slayings, exacerbated by an investigatory system they felt had failed them.
They found support, and hope, in each other.
“I’m picking her up, or she’s picking me up,” Cunningham said. “We’re just like a chain, we’re connected.”
Wanda Ridgeway founded Rise Up following the shooting death of her nephew Herschal Scriven in 2006. Her boyfriend was also shot and killed in front of her and died “in her arms.” They were experiences that drove Ridgeway to drink and filled her with rage.
“Hurt people hurt people,” Ridgeway said, repeating a common refrain she uses to describe the importance of Rise Up’s work.
Ridgeway sees the issues in solving homicides as multifaceted. She blames investigators who she sees as sometimes picking and choosing which cases to apply more resources. But she also blames a street culture that denounces “snitching,” as well as systems that she says fail to protect victims and witnesses who want to come forward, but fear retaliation.
She is confident that if the police and courts could ensure witnesses’ safety, more homicides would be solved.
“Some people do want to give information,” Ridgeway said. “But they’re afraid of what’s going to happen afterwards.”
For more in this series:
