Early on the afternoon of March 28, 1990, Sheila Brown told police, two men knocked on her door in Northeast Washington, looking for her boyfriend, Norman L. Rich. At the time, Brown said, she was on her way out to shop for groceries and run other errands.
When she returned home that day, Brown told police, she found Rich, 34, dead inside their bedroom, shot multiple times.
This week, 34 years after the killing, Brown, now 66 and a resident of Annapolis, was charged with second-degree murder in Rich's slaying. She pleaded not guilty Thursday in D.C. Superior Court. Judge Robert Okun, citing Brown's "minimal" criminal history, released her from custody, allowing her to return home to await further proceedings in the case.
Her next hearing is scheduled for June 28. Meanwhile, she was ordered to stay in touch regularly by phone with the court's pretrial services office, which monitors released defendants.
D.C. police announced the arrest at a news conference Thursday but provided few details about the investigation. Inspector Kevin Kentish of the homicide division attributed the arrest to advances in DNA technology and to the fresh perspective that a new generation of detectives brought to the case. Kentish said investigators had interviewed Brown "multiple" times over the years.
For more than three decades, Rich's sister Sekeithia Tyler, a paralegal who works with lawyers in domestic violence cases, urged D.C. homicide detectives to continue working on the unsolved killing of her brother, who went by the nickname "Semo."
And she worked on the case herself.
Tyler said she interviewed people in her brother's neighborhood for years and gave investigators the names and responses of each person she spoke with. Tyler said the people she interviewed all told her the same thing: "Semo's old lady did it."
"I prayed to God to keep her alive," Tyler said in an interview this week, referring to Brown. "If she died, we wouldn't have known the answers to the questions."
Rich and Brown were parents of three children, all under age 12 when Rich was killed. They are now adults with children of their own, Tyler said. She said she feared the case would never be solved, especially after previous homicide detectives retired without making an arrest.
"We went through six lead detectives on this case," Tyler said. "Each time there were new detectives, I would be told that they couldn't find this document or they couldn't find that document. But I kept copies of everything, and I gave them everything they needed."
Tyler said she kept pressing detectives for updates on her brother's case, fulfilling a promise she had made to her mother, who died a year after her brother.
"She told me to stay on this, that whatever happened to her, I was to stay on this," Tyler said. "I wasn't going anywhere. ... I was determined to be a thorn in their side until an arrest was made."
She praised the most recent detectives on the case, Michael Fulton and Gus Giannakoulias, who made the arrest this week.
"He refused to give up," Tyler said of Fulton.
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/03/28/cold-case-norman-rich-arrest-sheila-brown/
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