Police in Detroit have arrested a 27-year-old suspect after the discovery of three elderly men brutally slain and left in the basement of a home on the citys west side.
Officers were dispatched to the residence on Edsel Street around 1 p.m. Wednesday on a missing-person report when they were approached by a man who claimed he had just been assaulted at a nearby house. According to The Blaze, that encounter led officers to enter the Edsel property, where they uncovered what investigators are describing as one of the more disturbing crime scenes in recent memory.
When units finally got inside, the minute you opened the door, you can see the blood, it's just a horrific scene, First Assistant Chief Charles Fitzgerald told reporters. Not to go into too much detail on it, but we believe at this point they all met the fate of blunt-force trauma. There were some stab wounds on a couple of them, he added.
The victims, all senior citizens, were found in the basement, partially concealed. They were left in a basement area covered in old, dirty clothing, and one person was covered in a carpet, Fitzgerald said, underscoring the callousness of the crime.
Family members identified one of the dead as 66-year-old Norman Hamlin, a Marine veteran who served in the Persian Gulf War and owned the home where the bodies were discovered. The other victims were named as 65-year-old Mark Barnett and 72-year-old William Barrett, both of whom, like Hamlin, should have been living out their later years in safety rather than in a neighborhood plagued by crime and drugs.
Neighbors said the house had long been known as a drug location, a familiar story in cities where lenient policies and weak enforcement have allowed narcotics activity to flourish. There's some speculation, that I don't like to get into too much, that possibly some drugs were used in the location, Fitzgerald acknowledged, while noting that officers did not recover narcotics at the scene.
Police said the suspect, described as a 27-year-old black man, was taken into custody on Thursday and had prior convictions for carjacking, armed robbery, felony firearm, and fleeing from police. It was a brutal scene inside, just awful, Fitzgerald said, as questions mounted about why a repeat violent offender was free to roam the streets.
One neighbor, Joel Bond, said Hamlin had been a decent man who had slipped into addiction and tried to create what he thought was a controlled environment. He got involved in the wrong way and actually seemed to have set up a safe environment for people to come over and use, Bond told WDIV-TV. Of course, as we know, thats dangerous. You dont know whos coming into your house.
The man who initially approached officers reported being struck in the head twice with a hammer, though investigators currently believe that assault is unrelated to the triple homicide. As Detroit police continue to piece together what happened in that basement, the case highlights once again the deadly intersection of drugs, repeat criminal offenders, and vulnerable communitiesan intersection conservatives have long warned would only grow more dangerous in an era of soft-on-crime policies and eroding respect for law enforcement.
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