Prince George’s County State’s Attorney Aisha Braveboy shared updates Friday on two murder cases that she said “rocked the county” when they happened.
Braveboy said her office vowed to get justice and ensure accountability for these two cases, which both took place in 2021.
The first case involved 18-year-old J’Lyn Quinones, who was pregnant when she was shot and killed. She was crossing Queen Street in Capitol Heights, Maryland, with her friend, who was also shot but survived.
“I remember this case, because I thought about the fact that she was a young, pregnant woman who was just a child in so many ways herself, she was a young woman,” Braveboy said. “And so what I knew is that her mother, her family, they did not expect to not have her around to raise her child.”
On Friday, 21-year-old Malik Johnson was sentenced to 55 years in prison for killing Quinones. Assistant State’s Attorney Shauna Coleman said Quinones believed Johnson’s brother was the father of her unborn baby, which Coleman described as a motive for the murder. The suspected father, Michael Johnson, and 23-year-old Bianca McDuffie are also charged in connection to the shooting.
“Baby Jane Doe now is suffering lifelong disabilities because she was delivered at 27 weeks and spent the first few months of her life on an incubator and has never felt the warm embrace of her mother and will forever live with these traumatic scars from being born so prematurely,” Coleman said, adding that she related to the case as a new mother.
Also on Friday, a former senior living resident pleaded guilty to killing two employees at the facility in Capitol Heights.
Sixty-three-year-old Roy Batson pleaded guilty to shooting and killing two Gateway Village employees.
The victims were Temple Hills resident Mackeda Evans and Capitol Heights resident Michelle Boateng, both 46 years old.
Braveboy said her office is seeking a life sentence for Batson and described the scene she saw only an hour after the shooting happened.
“I saw family members of the victims sprawled out on the ground crying, inconsolable,” she said. “It was just unreal. It was unreal … the raw emotion of someone finding out that their mother was killed at a place that she worked, when she was delivering services to the elderly.”
