Family is waiting for murders to be solved
Early on in the investigation into the murders of her daughter and three grandchildren, Victoria West did as Columbus police asked.
“I was told, ‘Be patient, be patient, be patient,’” West said.
“Well, it’s been 14 years.”
On June 21, 2006, West traveled from her home near Youngstown to Columbus’ North Linden neighborhood, where her daughter had moved to put distance between herself and an abusive boyfriend.
Inside the house at 1500 Loretta Ave., she discovered a slaughter.
Her daughter, Jameila West, 27; and her daughter’s three children, 10-yearold daughter, Jameire Ervin, 5-yearold son, Tre’vion Williams, and 3-yearold son, Jakia Howard, were all dead.
Jameila West had been shot, Jameire strangled and Tre’vion and Jakia suffocated.
In a year as bad as 2020 has been for homicidal violence, much attention is paid to the daily and monthly body count.
But with the arrival of each new year, the count starts over and the details of past homicides fade. This is especially true of the unsolved homicides, even when they are as horrific as the quadruple homicide that ravaged West’s family.
The West homicides were never a mystery. The ex-boyfriend was the immediate suspect, and within four months he was charged by Columbus homicide detectives. By then he already was in custody for an unrelated homicide in the Youngstown area.
But as time passed, a rift developed between Columbus police and Franklin County Prosecutor Ron O’brien’s office. Homicide detectives thought they had enough to take Jason T. Howard to trial; prosecutors said they needed more.
The charges against Howard, who is Jakia’s father, were dropped. He is serving a 44-year to life sentence for the unrelated murder.
Jamir Kai, a seventh-grade teacher in Washington, D.C., was a child when his older sister was murdered.
“I was 12 when this happened,” he said. “Now I’m 26.”
He have always talked about the case, but Kai noticed a change in the tone of their more recent conversations. She had not heard from investigators in a very long time.
“She just started expressing a frustration and discomfort with silence, the silence on the end of Columbus officials,” Kai said.
“It’s kind of like staring out into a nothingness.”
A way to push back against that frustration would be to talk about the case again, they agreed.
As they talked, Kai began to feel a kinship with protesters who have taken to the streets in recent months to speak out about the treatment of Black citizens by police.
“I never connected that message and that movement and that public frustration to what was going on in our family,” Kai said.
But as the Black Lives Matter chants grew louder and more persistent, Kai made the connection.
“The justice system in the United States does not respect the lives of Black people enough in order to bring the murderers to justice,” he said.
Research backs up that assertion that the criminal justice system, and society on the whole, view Black victims of homicide differently. A Washington Post investigation published in 2018 found that Black victims, who accounted for the majority of homicides, were the least likely of any racial group to have their killings result in an arrest.
In another study published this fall, researchers at Stanford University and the University of Chicago found that homicide victims killed in Chicago’s predominantly Black or Hispanic neighborhoods received less news coverage than those who died in predominantly white neighborhoods.
Early on, Victoria West felt that detectives were vested in the case. But as time passed, detectives changed assignments and retired, updates grew less frequent and then stopped entirely. She began to wonder. Was it because she lived out of town, or was poor, or her daughter and grandchildren were Black?
“I feel like, ‘Don’t my grandkids matter?’” she said.
O’brien said that Howard was “the primary and only legitimate suspect.” The investigation eventually was transferred to the Columbus police Cold Case Unit, where it remains open. A $10,000 reward offered several years ago yielded little new information, he said.
Sgt. Terry Mcconnell, supervisor of the cold case unit, said the case is due for a review, but whether to prosecute is not their decision to make.
“Short of a confession, I don’t know of anything else that could be done,” he said. “At some point you’ve gotten all you can get.”
With Howard in prison and so many other unsolved homicides on the books, “As much as we want to solve every case, I have to worry about the guys who are still out there,” Mcconnell said. “That’s my priority. I don’t mean to be insensitive at all when I say that. It’s reality, and I have to best use my resources.”
The murders changed the course of the West family’s lives, but Kai wonders too about their toll on the community. Communities shoulder the psychic burden of violence, and of justice not served.
“There’s no way that it’s not known in that neighborhood,” he said. “It’s a part of the narrative in the community. For the community, the story to be told there is, a man murdered a woman and her children, and he got away with it.”
If you have information on the murders of Jameila West and her children, call the Columbus Division of Police Cold Case Unit at 614-645-4036. tdecker@dispatch.com @Theodore_decker