Broadway Hill Park (Image: CHS)

Before Jonathan Caradonna was stabbed and killed on a Saturday morning last month on Capitol Hill’s 13th Ave E, he had mostly called the neighborhood’s Broadway Hill Park his home.

Some living nearby remember Caradonna as a peaceful resident in the neighborhood even through uprooting events like city clearances of the small Capitol Hill park.

Wood

Caradonna

11 years earlier, a woman walking her dog around sunrise spotted Zachary Lewis sprawled out in a vacant lot on the corner that is now Broadway Hills. He had been beaten to death. More than a decade later, the investigation into Lewis’s killing remains open.

If last month’s two killings of gay men living homeless on Capitol Hill fade into Seattle Police’s cold case files, they will join a sad list of unsolved murders of victims living on the edges on the neighborhood’s streets.

Caradonna, 32, died Saturday, March 19th after suffering multiple stab wounds in an assault near 13th Ave E.

Brent Wood, 31, was found beaten to death on the pavement behind the Broadway Rite Aid early on the morning of Thursday, March 3rd.

SPD detectives continue to investigate the March murders and the other cases including Lewis’s stretching over the past decade remain open, a department spokesperson tells CHS.

SPD Open Capitol Hill Homicide Cases

• Jonathan Caradonna, March 19th, 2022
• Brent Wood, March 3rd, 2022
• Necia McKendrick-Mendez, around May 23rd, 2021
• Darek Darewski, January 17, 2012
• Zachary Lewis, March 6, 2011

McKendrick-Mendez (Image with permission to CHS)

Nearly a year has now passed since the murder of Necia McKendrick-Mendez. Detectives determined McKendrick-Mendez was last seen April 30th, 2021 — a month before her body was found in a small stream below Interlaken Park by a homeowner who called 911.

Her Texas family said the 45-year-old artist who went by Q spent some of her time selling art on the street on Broadway near Dick’s Drive-in. The spring of her killing, family members tried to connect with the crowd of friends and acquaintances Q had gotten to know along Broadway to try to find out more about what had happened to their loved one. They met street performers, homeless kids, fellow artists, and people on the edges of those communities including community outreach workers and street preachers who may have known McKendrick-Mendez. But a year later, SPD has announced no arrests and the case remains unsolved and open.

Darewski

Darek Darewski was also someone who came to Seattle for a new life. He was the only person murdered on Capitol Hill in 2012, shot and left to die on a freezing Harvard Ave sidewalk behind Seattle Central. The 49-year-old Darewski was a native of Poland and a sometimes Alaska fisherman. He was shot to death behind Seattle Central late on the night of January 17th just two weeks after serving a single day in jail following a guilty plea in a 2010 harassment case. His last known address at the time of that November 2010 incident was a low-income housing facility in Pioneer Square. Court documents showed he also carried an Alaska driver’s license.

Those who knew him say Darewski was not an aimless drifter and said the fisherman was looking forward to getting his life back on track following two years of probation that had prevented him from returning to work on the Alaskan fishing boat. Darewski was reportedly waiting for a job in Alaska to open up and was ready to head north with his probation behind him.

Despite murky surveillance video showing what police believed was the suspect’s vehicle and the muzzle flash from the shot that killed Darewski, no arrests were made in the case and the investigation remains open ten years later.

Zachary Lewis (Image: SPD)

A year earlier, Zachary Lewis was found beaten to death in the empty lot at Federal and Republican. Like Darewski’s case later, police had evidence to work with. But they also had a case complicated by Lewis’s few social connections after struggles with addiction and mental health. He was living at 1811 Eastlake, a housing project for alcoholics at the base of Capitol Hill that allows residents to continue drinking. The night before his body was found at the future Broadway Hill Park, Lewis had a run-in with police. Around 11 PM on March 5th, officers responded to Broadway and E Republican regarding a fight two blocks from where Lewis’s body would later be found. Four men, including Lewis, were interviewed by police and released. Lewis said he was trying to break up the scuffle.

An hour later, video surveillance footage shows Lewis returned to his apartment for about ten minutes and then left. One of the men involved with the fight later told police that he had met back up with Lewis that night. He said he was fighting with the two other men and denied having any problems with Lewis. The two walked along Broadway and then went their separate ways, he said.

Eighteen months after Lewis was beaten to death, there was a promising development in the case. The Washington State Patrol crime lab notified SPD that trace DNA not belonging to Lewis was found on his body. Technicians found DNA matching one individual in fingernail clippings, penile swabs, and neck swabs. Trace DNA belonging to a second individual was also found on Lewis.

Detectives wanted to test the DNA for a match against Lewis’s last known contact before his death. But they learned that man, the one who met Lewis after the fight, was dead. He had died of natural causes two months earlier.

Because the man was a convicted felon, his DNA information was stored in a national database. In March 2013, detectives filed for a warrant to obtain his DNA profile and match it against the DNA found on Lewis.

The homicide investigation remains and open and its contents sealed, a SPD spokesperson confirmed this week. Detectives could have closed the case if they believed the DNA testing clearly identified a suspect. Instead, the murder of Zachary Lewis remains unsolved.

This spring, near the lot where Lewis was found that has become Broadway Hill Park, neighbors are remembering Caradonna and worried the case will fade away. Caradonna has been living and struggling with homelessness in Seattle for four years since arriving here from Texas and, before that, Louisiana. He listed the Compass Housing Alliance facility in Pioneer Square as his home address but mostly lived around Broadway Hill and also frequented the Capitol Hill library.

But he was not alone. Hope for solving March’s cases can be found in these connections.

“He had many friends who came to visit him especially on lunch days at the church nearby,” a neighbor wrote in CHS’s comments. “J was always organizing & keeping the area of the tents clean. He was one of the only folks that stayed & camped all winter and he seemed content and peaceful.”

Wood is also remembered by those who befriended the artist. Wood had an “unwavering artistic view of the world around” and “immediate compassion and love for everyone he met,” one friend told CHS.

Wood also found connections here doing work at neighborhood businesses including Twice Sold Tales. The book shop’s owner Jamie Lutton tells CHS Wood regularly showed up with bruises and injuries and believes they were being targeted by someone who knew it was difficult for someone struggling on the streets like Wood to go to the police.

There is hope of a reward to help identify Wood’s killer through the Crime Stoppers of Puget Sound organization that has made a business of organizing reward funds and being part of crime shows produced by the local Fox Television affiliate. So far, Crime Stoppers hasn’t included Wood in its coverage.

What progress SPD has made in either March case is unknown. Homicide detectives don’t typically release information on active cases to the media and a spokesperson said the department is still urging anyone with information in either case to call the department’s Violent Crimes Tip Line at (206) 233-5000.

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