Last month, a 43-year-old Maryland woman scrolling through her Instagram feed noticed a news story about an appalling attack on a public street.
She opened the article and began reading: Two teachers at a Northwest Washington day-care center, escorting 24 preschoolers on an afternoon walk, had been punched and bloodied by a panhandler who exposed himself to the toddlers. Then she saw the accused assailant’s name: Russell Fred Dunkley III, who had gotten enraged when he asked the teachers for money and they warned him to back off, according to police.
“I was floored,” the woman said.
It was Russell, her brother, a homeless man racked by schizophrenia. It was Russell, whom she had tried to save again and again, always in vain. Since their mother’s death in 2017, he had been loitering on the streets of their old neighborhood — a chronic nuisance and looming menace, residents complained — while D.C.’s mental-health-care system had done almost nothing to improve his condition. With psychiatric bed space at a premium, with no record of Dunkley ever brandishing a weapon or inflicting serious injury, and with rules restricting involuntary hospitalizations, there was only so much the system could do.
How many times, in the throes of his illness, had he been taken into custody by police, accused of lewd or assaultive behavior, and locked in psych wards, only to be let out within days? His sister couldn’t keep track.
And now this heinous assault.
“It’s draining,” she said. “It’s exhausting.”
Despite numerous prior arrests and other run-ins with police, Dunkley, 38, has no criminal convictions, court records show. It appears that until the assault on the day-care teachers, his alleged transgressions were deemed to be mitigated by his mental disorder, and he was repeatedly hospitalized instead of prosecuted. But clinicians didn’t view him as a dire threat to the public, so he was never hospitalized for long.
The Oct. 23 attack, near Second and S streets NW in the gentrified Bloomingdale neighborhood, drew gasps across the city. One of the teachers, a college student, spent the night in an emergency room with a battered nose. The frightened children, too young to tie their own shoelaces, were hustled into strangers’ homes on the tidy block as police sirens wailed. With carjackings and killings way up in the District this year, and anxiety over street violence at the forefront of debate from community meetings to the halls of Congress, the ugly incident struck a nerve.
Were even toddlers not safe on their daily strolls anymore?
In a region where homelessness has spiked by 18 percent since pandemic relief programs ended (a census last winter found 8,944 people living on Washington-area streets and in shelters), Dunkley was just another anonymous soul in a vast, faceless crowd before he made headlines and social media feeds Oct. 23 — before he was thrust into the civic consciousness as that day’s avatar of the growing crime scourge.
Yet what police say happened near Second and S wasn’t impossible to foresee.
On Oct. 3, three weeks before the teachers were attacked, Dunkley was accused of exposing himself to two women near Bloomingdale’s Crispus Attucks Park, a few blocks from Second and S, and threatening to hit them when they rebuffed his panhandling, according to a police report from that day. It says Dunkley “shows his private parts to women in public areas even when kids are around” and “becomes violent when [he] asks for change and it is not given.”
He was admitted to the Psychiatric Institute of Washington after his Oct. 3 arrest, and the D.C. Department of Behavioral Health filed a court petition seeking to have him held in treatment for up to a year. But records show he was discharged later in the month, before the petition could be adjudicated. It is still pending.
“I thought he was in an institution, and he was actually out,” his sister said. She didn’t realize Dunkley was free until she saw his name on Instagram the day after the Oct. 23 attack. “Nobody told me,” she said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect her privacy. “I’m baffled that he was allowed to leave.”
Now, charged with two counts of assaulting the teachers plus sexual abuse of a child for allegedly exposing himself and masturbating in front of the toddlers, he is back in the Psychiatric Institute. But who knows for how long? If treatment specialists determine he is stable enough to be released from their care, or when the legal time limit for holding him expires, the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C. will have to decide whether to prosecute him.
Meanwhile, his worried sister waits.
The two grew up in Bloomingdale when the neighborhood was a far less affluent place, overwhelmingly populated by working-class Black families like theirs, before waves of moneyed home-buyers supplanted them and revitalized the area. In recent years, as he roamed those spruced-up streets, cadging for coins, Dunkley was a forlorn vestige of a Bloomingdale that many newer residents might not know existed.
His sister remembers back then. And she recalls a different Russell, the baby brother she nicknamed Boo, a boyhood leukemia survivor who liked to play video games and watch “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” on TV, and who became a productive young man, working as a delivery driver and stocking shelves in a corner market, until his mind betrayed him.
“This is someone I’ve known my entire life,” she said. “I’m asking [the city] to help me help him.”
An illness inherited
The attack, below the turrets of Bloomingdale’s rehabbed Victorian-style rowhouses, has renewed a debate about policing and the intersection of crime, homelessness and mental health treatment in the nation’s capital.
Long before the teachers were assaulted and the children, ages 1 to 3, were traumatized, social workers, law enforcement authorities and specialists in the Department of Behavioral Health documented repeated instances of Dunkley’s disturbing conduct, including his reference to “killing people without a specific target,” according to police and court records. Yet the records show he typically spent no more than a week at a time in psychiatric wards.
The Oct. 23 assault also has given fresh urgency to Behavioral Health’s earlier petition for a court order that would keep Dunkley confined in treatment for up to a year. A hearing on the petition is scheduled for next month. Wherever Dunkley ends up, his sister said, “I want to make sure he’s going to be held there so he’s not lost back on the street.”
She said her brother often calls her from the Psychiatric Institute, a private facility contracted by the D.C. government to provide mental health care in a secure setting. From background noises, she said, it seems her brother uses a phone in a common area. In one recent call, she got the impression that a fellow patient had hit him.
On another call, she allowed a reporter to join the conversation.
After the journalist introduced himself, Dunkley rambled on about mouthwash. He threatened violence against people in the community who he thought were out to get him; he mentioned a “senile soul”; and he spoke of his deceased mother and father as if they were still among us. (His sister said he hasn’t gotten over their deaths, in 2017 and 2019.) As for the attack on the teachers, he replied only, “Saved their lives.”
Then he asked for juice.
His old neighborhood, Bloomingdale, covers 28 square blocks between Florida Avenue and the McMillan Reservoir, two miles northeast of the White House. Where cafes and shops now thrive, there were empty storefronts and open-air drug markets in the 1990s. Dunkley, born in 1985, grew up with his sister and their parents in a spacious old rowhouse on U Street, a 10-minute walk from the scene of the Oct. 23 attack.
The house had been purchased by their father, Russell Fred Dunkley Jr., in the 1960s. The property backed up to a vacant lot that has since become Crispus Attucks Park, a grassy acre landscaped with flowers, benches and shade trees. The elder Dunkley was a truck driver and the siblings’ mother, Jacqueline Dunkley, worked with children in the foster care system, the sister said.
Just as his son would struggle with mental illness, so did the elder Dunkley, beginning in the late 1960s, after his first wife, his father and a grandmother died within months of one another, according to the sister and court records. The elder Dunkley was occasionally confined to a psychiatric ward in the District’s St. Elizabeths Hospital. Court documents recount his battles with paranoid schizophrenia and his frequent travels through the criminal justice system.
Studies show a strong genetic component to schizophrenia. People with family histories of the disorder have a higher risk of developing it. Dunkley’s sister said their father’s symptoms seemed to come and go. Court records also indicate he had a history of abusing alcohol and cocaine, and, despite owning the U Street rowhouse, he sometimes slept in Union Station restrooms.
The younger Dunkley was about 3 when he was diagnosed with leukemia, his sister said. Doctors feared he wouldn’t survive. She said the family took a trip to Walt Disney World, a kind of Make-A-Wish adventure for young Boo. Then his disease went into remission. He got a GED certificate after leaving Cardozo High School and worked as a Pepsi delivery driver and as a stocker at A&L Market, a grocery at First and U streets, near their Bloomingdale home.
The siblings’ cousin Maurice “Moe” Darnaby, who owned A&L, was gunned down in a robbery at the store in 2006, when Dunkley was 21. It was around then that his sister first noticed his mental health deteriorating. The killing devastated her brother, she said, especially because he hadn’t gone to work on the day of the shooting. His job at the market ended, and as far as his sister knows, he hasn’t been steadily employed since.
About a decade ago, their parents divorced and sold the U Street rowhouse. The sister said their father moved in with her in Maryland. Dunkley and their mother also relocated to Maryland, where Jacqueline Dunkley died of heart failure in 2017, her son by her side. After that, the sister said, ownership of their mother’s Maryland house changed hands, and Dunkley, then in his early 30s, was forced to leave.
Plagued by schizophrenia and adrift on the streets, he made his way back to Bloomingdale, the place he knew best.
Before their father died of cancer in 2019, he fretted about his son. “I think he was hanging on because he felt he was all that Russell had,” the sister said.
She said, “I promised my dad on his deathbed that I would look after him.”
Arrests and hospitalizations
On the Bloomingdale streets where he had come of age — where he had played with friends and walked to school and learned to ride his Huffy bike — Dunkley became a danger to be avoided.
The neighborhood had changed dramatically since his youth. In Bloomingdale’s Zip code, the median family income was $25,095 at the start of the millennium. Today, it’s more than $100,000. Rents have skyrocketed and some homes have tripled in value, while the working-class Black families of Dunkley’s childhood largely vanished. As of 2020, census data shows, nearly half of Bloomingdale’s population was White, up from about 5 percent 20 years earlier, when Dunkley was a teenager.
Although he and his sister weren’t regularly in touch after their parents’ deaths, a sibling bond remained. (They would later discover that they’d separately gotten matching tattoos: a Chinese symbol for a soldier — his for having beaten leukemia, hers because she thought the character was interesting.) Again and again, when they were able to speak by phone, she offered to help her brother, but he wouldn’t let her. She would drive from Maryland to Bloomingdale, searching for him on the streets, she said, and when she spotted him, she’d occasionally call police or the city’s crisis hotline, hoping someone would offer meaningful help.
She said nobody ever did.
In 2018, Dunkley was arrested at a McDonald’s. Police said he threatened to kill a woman in the restaurant. Prosecutors decided not to pursue a criminal case against him, and he was briefly confined to a mental hospital, court records show.
The following year, a judge barred him from Crispus Attucks Park. Later, when he allegedly violated the order, police took him into custody. Then, in 2022, he was again arrested at a McDonald’s, this time for unlawfully entering the premises, police said.
His encounters with police and mental health workers became more frequent this year.
In May, court records show, Dunkley underwent psychiatric care for “violent behavior.” Three months after that, a police report says, he punched a Dunkin’ manager, banged on a window demanding coffee, and chased or pushed several customers out of the doughnut shop.
An outreach specialist with the Department of Behavioral Health joined patrol officers at the scene of the disturbance at Dunkin’. Instead of being charged with a crime, Dunkley was classified as a “sick person” and briefly held in a mental ward for evaluation, according to police and court records. He “is responding to voices and not sure if they are telling him to harm others,” the outreach worker wrote in a report. “He continued to talk about killing people without a specific target.”
On Oct. 3, five weeks after the incident at the doughnut shop, Dunkley was accused of threatening and exposing himself to the two women near Crispus Attucks Park when they refused to give him a handout. After arresting Dunkley, a police officer issued him a citation, akin to a traffic ticket, for aggressive panhandling and lewd behavior.
At the same time, the officer filed paperwork seeking to have him committed to a mental ward for a 72-hour evaluation. Dunkley wound up in the Psychiatric Institute. Then, after the 72-hour hold was extended to 10 days, the Department of Behavioral Health petitioned a D.C. Superior Court judge for an additional extension, lasting up to a year.
What happened next in the Oct. 3 case illustrates the revolving-door nature of the mental-health-care system when it came to Dunkley.
A judge scheduled a hearing for Dec. 12 on Behavioral Health’s request for the long-term extension. D.C. law says that once such legal proceedings have begun, a hospital “may” continue to hold a patient until the proceedings are over, even if weeks go by. The Psychiatric Institute could have held Dunkley for however long it took for Behavioral Health’s petition to be adjudicated. But the hospital wasn’t required to do so. And it didn’t.
Officials at the Psychiatric Institute and at Behavioral Health declined to comment on Dunkley, citing privacy rules. In a statement, Behavioral Health noted that “each case is unique, and the law requires that every individual be treated in the least restrictive setting according to their specific needs.” Asked about the sister’s frustrations, the agency responded generally, saying it is aware that “mental illness has a ripple effect on families.”
Dunkley was still confined to the Psychiatric Institute on Oct. 11, eight days after being committed, when he telephoned his sister.
“I was excited to hear from him and learn that he was alive,” she said.
She said she had been planning to seek legal guardianship of her brother. She said a social worker at the Psychiatric Institute assured her that Dunkley would continue to be held there. But he was soon discharged without her knowledge, she said. She said a hospital staff member later told her that a voice mail about his release had been left for her. The sister said she received no such message.
Not until two weeks later, while reading about the attack on the teachers, did she realize he’d been let go.
‘He just started beating me up’
Shortly before 4:30 p.m. that Monday, Oct. 23, nine teachers from Petit Scholars in Bloomingdale were ushering the two dozen toddlers along S Street — some of the tykes were in big blue strollers — when they stopped near a corner to rest, as they often did. Perched on a low brick wall, the boys and girls usually sip juice or water, and smiling neighbors stand on stoops, listening to the little ones’ songs.
They sing “La Vaca Lola” (“Lola the Cow”) in Spanish sometimes, and “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.”
Dunkley walked over, asking for money, police said, and when he didn’t get any, and a few of the teachers told him to leave, he punched two of them in the head. Then, after performing lewd acts in front of the children, police said, he hurried away, only to be quickly arrested.
“He just started beating me up,” said Marleni Etevina Diaz-Villalobos, 20, whose nose was so badly bloodied that she stayed overnight in an emergency room. When a colleague rushed to her aid, trying to pull the attacker off her, that teacher also caught a fist in the face, Diaz-Villalobos said. The toddlers watched, perhaps not all of them comprehending, until strangers came running and took the scared kids into homes.
The founder of the day-care business, La Shada Ham-Campbell, who runs several Petit Scholars preschools in D.C. like the one near Second and S, said she and others worry about Dunkley “being released back into our community.” If the mental health system had confined him long-term after his previous run-ins with police, she said, “this never would have happened.”
Some residents are at a loss for a solution.
“For the past few months, he’s been exceedingly more aggressive,” said Autumn Saxton-Ross, 47, a mother of two who has lived in Bloomingdale for 24 years. She once saw Dunkley meandering around without pants. “I would love for him to get help,” she said. “I don’t think he should be put in jail because he has mental issues. But then what do we do with people we know are a danger to themselves and other people?”
After Dunkley was arrested and transported to Howard University Hospital, he spat on an officer and struck the officer in the head, according to police. He was later taken to the Psychiatric Institute, where he could be held for up to a year if Behavioral Health succeeds in its bid to obtain a court order for a long-term commitment.
Eventually, when the hospital stay ends, the U.S. attorney’s office will have to decide about prosecution. The office declined to comment on the case, as did the D.C. Public Defender Service, which is representing Dunkley.
D.C. Council member Zachary Parker (D-Ward 5), whose district includes Bloomingdale, said he wants authorities to get tougher on Dunkley. He told residents that he contacted U.S. Attorney Matthew M. Graves and “expressed in the clearest and most sincere way that I can that I fully expect that this individual is held accountable for the harm he has caused to the teachers and to the people of this community.”
Calling the attack a “damning reminder of the consequences of not holding perpetrators accountable,” Parker also said the city should develop better ways of dealing with mentally ill homeless people, creating a process more oriented toward public safety.
At a Bloomingdale community meeting last month, Capt. Christopher Moore of the D.C. police cautioned residents that there is no guarantee Dunkley will be hospitalized long-term. He urged them to write to the court in support of Behavioral Health’s pending commitment petition.
“The more letters, the better,” he told the residents.
As for Dunkley’s sister, she hopes this time he’ll finally get the help he needs. People such as her brother “are not in a position to advocate for themselves,” she said, “and there isn’t a system in place to allow their families to effectively advocate for them.”
But she is not optimistic.
“It’s a lose-lose situation,” she said. “I’ve watched billions of dollars poured into gentrification while our city’s natives are discarded.”
This post was originally published on this site be sure to check out more of their content.
