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Marlo McQuillar died here--why? THE SUSPECT FATAL NIGHT UNFOLDS

September 12, 2008 12:16 am

The call came in at 11:43 p.m.

Shots fired in the Forest Village apartment complex.

Fredericksburg police officers Gray Hopkins and Joe Young were chatting with locals up the road at the Bragg Hill 7-Eleven.

They raced down Fall Hill Avenue toward Forest Village, pulling into the complex less than 60 seconds later.

"We got there as absolutely fast as we could and didn't pass a soul on the road," said Hopkins, now a detective.

The complex, usually bustling on a Friday evening, was silent on July 27, 2007.

Then Cpl. Bill Hyer spotted a man on the sidewalk in front of the 1200 building. Sprawled on his back, he wasn't moving.

Several miles away, Joann Gordon's phone rang. Half asleep, she picked up the receiver and heard her sister's voice.

"Joann, you need to get up. Marlo's been shot."

STEPPING UP

Nine months beforehand, Marlo David McQuillar had stood in a Stafford County courtroom, his eyes on Circuit Judge J. Martin Bass.

He'd made mistakes in his life, he told the judge. And he was sorry for them. Now that he was a father, he pledged to do better.

McQuillar, four weeks shy of his 24th birthday, was facing 10 years in prison for conspiracy to sell cocaine.

He pleaded guilty but also provided "extremely valuable" testimony against Samuel T. "Capone" Ensley, one of the operation's top men, said Stafford Detective John Hughes.

Ensley was sent to prison for 10 years. McQuillar, along with several other defendants in the case, received a suspended sentence. He promised Bass he'd stay out of trouble.

"I refuse to let my son go down the same path of negativity that I went down," McQuillar said.

Hughes has heard plenty of defendants swear to turn their lives around. McQuillar's pledge struck him as sincere.

"I thought that if anybody had a chance, it would've been him," Hughes said.

Walking away from that life wasn't easy, but by most accounts, McQuillar was trying hard to keep his word.

He worked as a cook at Bob Evans in Massaponax and helped care for his infant son. He talked about going back to school to become a heating and air-conditioning specialist.

"He really was making those steps," said fiancee Nicole Smith. "He started to really grow up and see what he needed to do."

THE WRONG CROWD

McQuillar hadn't always made the right choices, said his mother, Joann Gordon.

"I think really what got him off track was his associations. That fast money thing--you know how peer pressure can be," she said.

She called her oldest son--the second of her five children--"papa bear" since he sometimes laid down the law if his younger siblings stepped out of line.

He loved to rap and had burned CDs for family and friends. Each Thanksgiving, he'd buck tradition and whip up lasagna.

He attended Chancellor High School, then served in the Army for 20 months. Then he started to get into trouble, Gordon said.

"I said, 'You don't need to be popular with all these people. They know people you don't know, and these people--you don't know what they're going to do,'" she said. "He was just like, 'Mom, I know what I'm doing. I'm a man now.'"

After testifying in the Stafford drug case, McQuillar, his fiancee and their baby moved to Richmond to make a fresh start.

But they missed their families in Fredericksburg and soon returned, moving into the Forest Village apartment complex off Fall Hill Avenue.

'GOD, WHY MY CHILD?'

It was after midnight and Gordon, barely awake, was struggling to wrap her head around her sister's news.

Marlo was hanging out with a friend who saw him get shot, her sister said. Rather than call 911, the friend panicked and called Marlo's cousin in New York.

That cousin called Gordon's sister, who was now calling Gordon.

Praying it wasn't true, Gordon phoned her daughter, Keisha Anderson, who lived in the same Fredericksburg complex as her son.

Eight months pregnant and the mother of a toddler, Anderson was watching Marlo Jr. Her brother's fiancee planned to pick up the baby after work.

Her brother, home first, had called to say he'd check on the baby and pick up a computer hard drive from her before running an errand with a friend.

But before he came over, she heard shots outside and hustled the youngsters to the rear of her apartment.

After hearing from her mother, Anderson approached the police outside her building with a photograph of Marlo and a question: Is that my brother?

Officers asked Anderson to wait in her apartment. When they returned 20 minutes later with heartbreaking news, she called her mother.

"She sounded like my 2-year-old all over again. She says, 'Mommy, it's my brother out there,'" recalled Gordon, who also heard from a detective.

"I dropped to the floor with the phone in my hand. I said, 'God, why my child?'"

A WITNESS

Though a crowd had gathered, no witnesses stepped forward.

Their victim had a name and a checkered past, but detectives weren't sure why someone had killed him.

Was it because he'd testified against a drug dealer? Did he owe money? Had he argued with someone?

"This case, it's like an octopus," lead Detective Tim Garrett said a year later. "It has a lot of different arms. I've been sent in a lot of different directions."

When McQuillar's fiancee arrived home from work, she told police he'd text-messaged her earlier to say he'd be spending time with his childhood friend, John--the same man who called McQuillar's cousin to report the shooting.

Now detectives wanted to talk to him. Reached on his cell phone, the man detectives still refer to as John Doe sounded terrified. He wanted their badge numbers so he could verify they were actually police officers.

"He was so afraid, he wouldn't meet with us unless we had a marked police car escort us," said Garrett, who spoke to the man at a home in Spotsylvania.

John, a friend of McQuillar's since middle school, told detectives he'd recently moved back to the area from New York.

He, McQuillar and a witness police call Jane Doe had planned to smoke pot together, he told detectives. But McQuillar needed to stop by his sister's apartment first.

John drove the three of them around the corner from McQuillar's apartment to his sister's place, pulling into a space next to what he described as a "retired police car," a white Ford Crown Victoria or Chevy Caprice.

A man near the car, with well-kept dreadlocks, stared at John and his passengers, who stared back.

"I'll never forget his face," Jane Doe, who was in the back seat, later told Garrett.

John said McQuillar didn't seem fazed by the man's attention.

He told his friends to wait in the car and was text-messaging his fiancee as he walked toward his sister's building.

The man with the dreadlocks followed McQuillar and shouted, "Hey, Lo," using his street name.

When McQuillar turned around, John said, the man shot him in the head.

John said he threw the car in reverse and sped out of the complex so fast, his tires squealed. As he left, he saw the man shoot McQuillar twice more on the ground.

John told detectives he sped up Fall Hill Avenue--toward the Bragg Hill 7-Eleven where Officers Hopkins and Young were. The white car trailed him for a bit, he said, but appeared to have engine trouble and ultimately disappeared.

By the time officers received the 911 call, both cars were gone.

Detectives have not ruled out the possibility that John Doe and Jane Doe were involved in McQuillar's death, Garrett said.

He's hoping anyone with information about the shooting will come forward.

"If they come to me, they're witnesses," he said. "If I go to them, they're co-defendants."

A YEAR LATER

Marlo McQuillar proposed to Nicole Smith with one knee in the sand on Myrtle Beach.

The couple should've been married on Aug. 4, 2007, in a small ceremony at his mother's home.

Instead, Smith mourned the loss of her fiance, the mother of her son, killed eight days before.

His killer has not been caught.

Smith is studying to become a nurse and caring full time for her son, who turned 2 in June.

He has his father's good looks and outgoing personality, said Smith, who hopes to have answers by the time her son is old enough to ask.

"It's like a hole in my heart that can never be replaced," she said.

Joann Gordon spent 16 years in the Fredericksburg area, but after her son's death, she moved to Florida. When her younger sons go out, she worries.

Marlo visits her in dreams, she said, urging her to be at peace. She would like to be.

"Whoever did this to him destroyed the dream of a family," she said.

She talks regularly to Detective Garrett, who has amassed two volumes of notes, interviews, photos and leads.

"I'm not quitting. This case is never going away for me," he said. "You have a young man shot down in the prime of his life, a grieving mother, a grieving fiancee and a little bitty boy who's going to grow up to be a man and want to know what happened to his dad.

"Somebody is going to have a conscience, and that's how we're going to solve this," he said. "They're going to say, 'That boy deserves to know what happened to his father.'"

Edie Gross: 540/374-5428
Email: egross@freelancestar.com