DC crime victims tell Congress harrowing stories of violent attacks: ‘Just evil’

Three victims of crime in Washington, D.C., testified before Congress on Thursday about their dissatisfaction with their attackers’ sentences, underscoring concerns about the uptick in violent crime rates in recent years in the nation’s capital.

A business owner, Gaynor Jablonski, brought jarring surveillance footage of his assault, showing he was attacked in his restaurant in June by a DoorDash driver with a loaded gun in front of his young son.

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Jablonski said he repeatedly followed up with the district attorney’s office about the incident, eventually learning his attacker received eight months in jail.

“He gets eight months, and I’m left with explaining to my 5-year-old why I had to fight this man, and my 5-year-old tells me when I drop him off at school every day to be safe,” Jablonski said.

Jablonski said he has been a bar owner for more than two decades but that “in the last two to three years, the brazenness of the violent acts that are going on in this city … if nobody’s going to do their job and prosecute and hold people accountable, what’s the point?”

Mitchell Sobolevsky, who was robbed at gunpoint in 2020, told a harrowing story of how he was approached while running an errand in a busy area near the White House.

“I was headed to get groceries and did not realize I would soon face a loaded barrel,” he said.

Sobolevsky had noticed a suspicious man looking at him but said he felt “assured” because other people were around. However, the man approached him and pressed a pistol against his forehead.

“I’ll never forget our interaction, line by line, he told me, ‘Do what I say, and you ain’t gonna die tonight,'” Sobolevsky recalled, adding, “I remember looking into his eyes and seeing no life, no thought, no empathy, just evil.”

He said the judge gave the offender 24 months in jail and suspended a year of the sentence because the judge “believed his judgment was still forming.”

“This light sentence was given despite my criminal robbing six victims and two businesses,” Sobolevsky said. “That’s right, one year for multiple armed robberies. Within weeks of my criminal’s release, he would go on to rob two more people at gunpoint.”

Myisha Richards, a firefighter paramedic, testified that in 2020 when she responded to a 911 call about a woman in respiratory distress, she was punched repeatedly and concussed by two women on the scene.

Richards said the district attorney’s office called her and told her “nothing was going to happen to the two women.”

One would, however, receive community service because of other crimes, Richards testified.

The stories came as part of the House Judiciary Committee’s series on violent crime in urban areas. The committee has held hearings in New York City and Chicago and now on its home turf in Washington as part of its effort to raise awareness about grim violent crime statistics plaguing major cities.

In Washington, more homicides are on pace to occur this year than in two decades, according to city data. Carjackings have doubled since last year, and data show that 75% of the 773 carjacking incidents this year involved guns.

Lindsey Appiah, the deputy mayor for public safety and justice in Washington, appeared as a witness for Democrats on the committee. She agreed criminal prosecution is “vital” and “holding people appropriately accountable for their behavior is critical to future deterrents.”

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But, Appiah said, 11 judicial vacancies exist in the superior court system and that Washington suffers several complexities, including the “uniqueness of the district’s criminal justice system structure, one that’s a mixture of local, federal, and independent agencies, most of which are not under the authority of the mayor.”

“We know more must be done, and I echo what the mayor testified in May: Our public safety agencies here in D.C. and across the country need the support of Congress,” she said.