Teen sentenced to a year in connection to fatal shooting ruled self defense

Washington Post

13-03-2025

A D.C. Superior Court judge on Thursday sentenced a 17-year-old to a year in the custody of the city's youth detention center for a firearms conviction related to the 2023 fatal shooting of a woman inside a Southeast Washington carryout.
But officials with the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services told Judge Kendra D. Briggs that the department could not accommodate the teen due to needs stemming from the injuries he sustained in the same shooting. The teen, who is now paraplegic and uses a wheelchair, would be better cared for at home by his mother, the officials told the judge in a letter.
Authorities said the youth was 15 when, on the evening of Jan. 17, 2023, he pulled a handgun out of his waistband and returned shots at an unknown assailant near a Southeast Washington market where 54-year-old Dale Henson had picked up food from her favorite Chinese carryout for a grieving family member.
Prosecutors argued one of his bullets struck and killed Henson. Authorities initially charged the teen with second-degree murder, but at trial last year, Briggs agreed with the teen's public defenders that the youth was acting in self-defense and dismissed the murder charge. She found him guilty of carrying a pistol without a license.
The downshift troubled Henson's loved ones, especially as more information surfaced in court about the teen's past troubles. Briggs at the hearing Thursday said he had 10 prior arrests and was being supervised by the youth rehabilitation department for carrying a firearm at the time he shot into the carryout.
'This is not justice at all,' said Henson's daughter, Tameka Keyes. 'He shoots and kills my mother and after all of this, he gets to go home. How is this even fair? How can this even happen?'
She sat in the front row of the courtroom Thursday and shook her head as she learned the teen ultimately would live at home, while being monitored through visits from the city's youth detention agency.
'He was 15 years old and had been arrested 10 times,' Keyes said.
'And now you have allowed this youth to return to the very agency that had oversight over him at the time of the shooting,' added Keyes's husband, Johnny Keyes. 'This is the problem in the city with these kids. They are out here committing crimes with boxes on their legs,' he said, referring to teens who have active criminal cases and are wearing court-ordered, GPS-tracking ankle monitors.
The Washington Post typically does not identify suspects charged in juvenile court.
At the hearing, the teen's public defenders asked that the youth be put on probation, arguing that he had matured emotionally and mentally since the shooting. 'He is a different young man,' his attorney, Erica Arensman, said.
But Briggs countered the attorney's statement by reading from the report from a psychologist who interviewed the youth earlier this year. In the report, the teen denied he needed additional therapy and defended his decision to carry a gun.
The teen told the psychiatrist that he lived in 'the underworld' and that he carried 'guns to protect myself.'
Briggs said the teen was 'clearly in need' of therapy.
The judge then asked the teen, who was watching the proceedings over video with his mother and other family members, if he had anything he wanted to say before his sentencing. 'I don't want to say nothing,' he said.
In an interview with The Post in February regarding the case, DYRS spokeswoman Turnesha Fish said the agency could house detained youths who use wheelchairs. But on Thursday, Fish said the agency has since determined the teen had additional medical needs that the agency could not meet in-house.
'It was determined because of his daily medical needs it would be more appropriate for him to remain in his mother's care, and we will provide him services there,' she said.
The Moon Star Carry-Out on Benning Road, a fixture for residents in Southeast Washington for more than 20 years, never reopened after Henson's death.