A Southeast D.C. man has been sentenced for the March 2022 shooting death of a father, attacked in the District while walking with his children.
Twenty-eight-year-old Jarrell David Harris received 13 years in prison after pleading guilty to the March 4, 2022 killing of 42-year-old Sedrick Miller in Northeast D.C.’s Langdon neighborhood.
According to a plea agreement, Harris admitted confronting the victim within the 2300 block of 18th Street NE and shooting him nearly a dozen times. Miller had been walking through the area with another adult, an infant carried in a car seat, and a 5-year-old child whose hand he was holding when the attack took place.
Miller’s wounds included four gunshots to the face and neck, and he died at the scene. His children and the other adult with him were uninjured. Harris escaped by car and was labeled a fugitive, but was arrested just over two months later on one charge of voluntary manslaughter while armed.
At the time, D.C. police Cmdr. William Fitzgerald called Miller’s killing “one of the most horrible things we’ve had here in the Fifth District in several years.”
Court documents outlined Harris’ “significant criminal history” before murdering Miller, including prior convictions for unlawful firearm possession, robbery and assault throughout D.C. and Prince George’s County, Maryland.
In pleading guilty, Harris told prosecutors he regretted his actions and sought to spare Miller’s children from the trauma that would result from a trial.
“The defendant’s actions with regard to this case are devastating not only because they led to the loss of Sedrick Miller’s life, which weighs heavily on his family. But also because they led to the traumatization of (his) children,” prosecutors said in a sentencing memo.
“The government remains extremely concerned with the particularly brazen and dangerous nature of the defendant’s crime, which not only involved the loss of a person’s life, but also involved the defendant shooting in a residential neighborhood, in the presence of children, in the early morning hours of a school day.”
The U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia recommended a 13-year prison sentence followed by five years of supervised release, citing Miller’s history of violent crime and to “afford him an opportunity to seek rehabilitation that he desires.”
Judge Rainey R. Brandt accepted the plea in court on Wednesday.
