Thirteen years after Brendan Lawrence and Christopher Clark's shooting deaths, still no answers

No longer does a candle eternally burn in Rhona Lawrence’s Westbury home.

The flame marked a vigil she promised herself she’d keep until the police solved the shooting deaths of her son, Brendan Lawrence, 20, and his friend Christopher Clark, 22, in Freeport in 2009.

But she stopped. After so many years of not knowing who shot the two on Jesse Street that rainy April Monday night, the candle smoke, billowing near an urn containing her son's ashes, was just blackening her walls.

“I would just like to know — from the person — why did you do it? Just give me a reason,” Rhona Lawrence said last week.

Last Wednesday, Lawrence, along with family and friends of her son and Clark, gathered in Freeport where both were shot on April 6, 2009, to commemorate the loss of two young men and renew interest in the case — two of the more than a quarter-million homicides nationwide since 1965 that remain unsolved. Lawrence's and Clark's families remain frustrated by the lack of progress in the investigation and by what they perceive as police indifference. Still, Rhona Lawrence hopes.

Clark’s mother, Cynthia Linton, who died in 2016, spent much of her time praying for someone to come forward, she told Newsday in 2010.

His stepbrother, Anthony Linton, is also frustrated — at what he feels is an understandable yet misguided street code of “no-snitching” that keeps witnesses in some communities from coming forward, and a sense that police detectives don’t really care about the killings.

“They’re gonna look at it as ‘another senseless murder amongst Blacks on Blacks,’” he said, adding, “If it was one of their children, they’d be on it night and day. To let this just go 13 years without some type of answers, it’s just ridiculous."

Newsday first inquired last spring with the Nassau County Police Department about the cold case, and again last week. Those messages, left for the department’s chief spokesman, Det. Lt. Richard LeBrun, and the press office, weren't returned.

Reached Friday afternoon on his cellphone, Martin Helmke, the homicide detective currently assigned to the case, directed an inquiry back to the press office, saying: “I’m really not at liberty to discuss anything with you, sir.”

After the online publication of this article on Monday, LeBrun responded to an email originally sent last year seeking answers to questions about the homicides and an interview with the homicide squad.

The statement said: “As with any unsolved case, this is still an active open investigation and will continue to be so until an arrest is made. The Homicide Squad proceeds to make inquiries on the investigation on a regular basis and recommends that if anyone has information on the case to call Nassau County Crime Stoppers at 1-800-244-TIPS.”

In the days and weeks after the killings, Lawrence described panic attacks, screaming, shaking and sobbing.

“It’s been 13 years. It doesn’t get easier. You just learn to live every day, and by the grace of God,” said Lawrence, 64. “What Brendan gave me — I had 20 years to love him, and after his death, I realized that the next moment is not guaranteed.”

Both her son and Clark lived in Westbury with their families at the time of their deaths, but were in Freeport at about 9 p.m. when they were shot to death on the sidewalk in front of 77 Jesse St., the police said back then. Clark collapsed onto hedges in front of a home, and Brendan Lawrence near the sidewalk and lawn. Clark and Lawrence had girlfriends in Freeport, but the police said they didn’t know why the men were in the village that night.

Lawrence's car, a red 2000 Honda Civic coupe, was found parked on Lakeview Avenue, around the corner from the shooting site. The men were believed to have been targeted, but the shootings didn't appear to be gang- or drug-related, the homicide squad's Det. Sgt. John DeMartinis said in 2010.

Of the approximately 967,000 homicides in the United States since 1965, an estimated 300,000 remain unsolved, according to the nonprofit Murder Acountability Project. For 2009, the year Lawrence and Clark were slain, law enforcement agencies nationwide reported solving 8,950 homicides out of 15,166 reported. For 2020, the most recent year available, 10,114 homicides were reported solved out of 19,719, according to the project.

That year's nationwide rate of 54% of homicides solved stands as the lowest on record.

In 2020, in Nassau, there were 23 reported homicides, and 12 reported cases solved, according to the project. Suffolk had 33 homicides and 13 were reported solved.

Thomas K. Hargrove, the Murder Accountability Project's founder and chairman, cautioned that the data, obtained through what the departments report to the FBI via state government agencies, could contain “reporting issues, and the data aren’t accurate as we might wish, to put it mildly.”

Neither Nassau's nor Suffolk's county police department, which each handles Long Island's homicide investigations in the respective jurisdictions, responded to requests to provide data directly.

Cases get colder with the passage of time — memories fade, trails dry up, police interest wanes — but those factors are tempered by advances in technology and witnesses’ shifting loyalties, according to Sheryl McCollum, a crime scene investigator with a metro Atlanta-area police department who is also director of the Cold Case Investigative Research Institute.

“Every year that clicks past, it’s gonna be more difficult to possibly solve that case. However, on the other side, technology is being advanced literally every month, and so we’re gonna be able to do things a year from now, 5 years from now, we cannot do today,” she said.

She added: “Relationships change. People talk, people want to make things right before they die. There’s a lot of reasons cases get broken.”

A 2018 Washington Post analysis found that about two-thirds of homicide arrests are within a month, and for cases that remained unsolved after a year, 5% ultimately led to an arrest.

In the 13 years since the Freeport killings, Rhona Lawrence has prayed to God, seen a therapist, maintained a Facebook page about the case, and written blogs and poems — all to rekindle the memory of her son, whom she called “Brenny.”

“He was my more huggy-type child. He would always be dancing with me, dancing behind me, so even if I got mad at him about something he did — especially as a teenager — he would make me laugh in a second,” she recalled.

He was a boy who matured into a generous young man who liked keeping the house neat and enjoyed brand-name clothes, which he usually was gifted by his older sister, who worked in fashion in New York City, his mother said.

A source of struggle: getting him as an older teenager to pursue further studies or find work.

“That was my fight with him always. Either go to school or get a job,” she said. He did a year at a community college in Virginia but didn't like it and came back to Long Island.

Anthony Linton, 37, of Richmond Hill, Queens, said his stepbrother, Christopher Clark, loved football, basketball, R&B music and was “a ladies’ man, definitely.”

Linton cherishes memories: how Clark and their brothers would play fight or wrestle in the house, or play video games. Clark, who liked to work out, had a weight bench in the basement and dumbbells in his bedroom upstairs.

“Everything was all love and jokes and stuff,” Linton said.

Clark and Lawrence weren't employed but planned to enroll at Nassau Community College — Clark to study accounting, Lawrence to become a music producer.

Of the three lead detectives assigned over the years to the homicides, the initial one, Jeannie Fitzpatrick, “was almost like my therapist,” diligent and responsive to the families, Rhona Lawrence said. Her successors were less so, the families said.

At first Lawrence would check in with the police on the 6th day of every month — the anniversary. Then only every few months. Then only once a year.

The answer was always the same: no answers.

When Helmke was newly assigned, he visited the families with another detective once last year, but the families said they haven’t heard from him much since, if at all, and he doesn't call them back.

“Yes, you want to stay and be on the detectives,” she said, “but every time you do it, it’s a little like a knife slice in your heart, or your stomach going up. It hurts more, so after a while, you just try to not.”

Lawrence and Linton want the police to release surveillance video taken at a nearby bodega just before the shooting, showing the two soon-to-be-victims with an unidentified third man. The families also want the police to let them see a video that investigators told them shows the shootings, the families said.

Victims’ families who believe the authorities aren’t taking them seriously can experience a profound sense of betrayal — on top of the emotional pain from the loss itself, according to Dr. Sandra Bloom, a psychiatrist and associate professor at Drexel University who specializes in trauma and grief.

“When they don’t do what we thought they were gonna do, it feels like a betrayal," Bloom said.

Rhona Lawrence she said isn't sure whether she wants to find out who killed her son and his friend. Sometimes, she does. Other times, she’d rather not know.

Her husband, Algernon, 65, said he is still angry over the killings. But she's not.

“I’m not bitter. I don’t have anybody to be angry with, cause I don’t know who did it," she said. "I don’t know if that anger will come out when they find out who did it. Hopefully, it’s not going to be in my lifetime. I believe that every day is closer to the day that I will meet my son again. I’m a Catholic. I’m a Christian. I believe in that."

The night of the anniversary, Rhona Lawrence was up late, texting a reporter photos of her son and poems she’d written over the years — on his birthday, July 1, 1988, on the anniversary of his death.

“All I’ve got left are pictures and memories,” she messaged, at 2:04 a.m.

Throughout the year, whenever she hears about violent crime on Long Island, she wonders whether the perpetrator in each case was involved in her son's killing.

“I don’t think anyone can do anything bad in life and get away with it. I believe, at some point, may not be for me to see, but I believe it could be even for my grandson, or great grand or whatever,” she said. “I believe at some point, somehow, somebody will talk, something will happen, that it will come to light.”

By Matthew Chayes

matthew.chayes@newsday.comchayesmatthew

Matthew Chayes, a Newsday reporter since 2007, covers New York City.