Prince George’s
Sheriff’s cold case unit tracks suspects who have been wanted for decades
By Lynh
Bui, Published: May 25
“It’s like he
vanished and dropped off the face of the earth,” said Cpl. Adam Brown, a deputy
with the Prince George’s County Sheriff’s Office.
Rivera, now 34,
eluded law enforcement for nearly a decade until his case landed with Brown and
his partner, Cpl. Nicholas Romanchick. The two veteran deputies make up the new
cold case unit the county sheriff’s office created in November.
The unit’s
mission is to serve outstanding
warrants connected with
cases that have been particularly difficult to close, some dating as far back
as 1973. The unit is part of the county’s larger effort to chip away at its
backlog of about 41,000 unserved warrants.
So far, the
unit has closed nearly a quarter of the county’s roughly 400 warrant cold
cases, said Capt. William Mints, head of the warrant and fugitive squad of the
Prince George’s Sheriff’s Office. The unit has arrested more than 80 suspected
violent criminals and closed another 34 cases administratively.
“A lot of
different warrant teams may have worked it and have not come up with a body,”
Mints said of the cold cases. Romanchick and Brown are “determined to get to
the bottom of these investigations to come out with justice for the victims out
there.”
The unit
started with four deputies, but has now been reduced to Romanchick and Brown.
The pair usually have stacks of files teetering in their office. From mountains
of folders, they plow through old police notes, scan archived court records and
interview family members of suspects. The threads of information they weave
together — often from disparate sources — eventually lead to arrests.
“This is grown
up hide-and-seek,” Romanchick said as he hovered over three thick manila
envelopes, examples of cases he recently closed.
Some cases lead
the two far outside Prince George’s. For example, Romanchick recently tracked
one man wanted on suspicion of assault and robbery to North Carolina. He was
looking for Terrell Won Wheeler, wanted since 2003, and listed as living in
Odenton, Md. But over two days staking out the address he had for Wheeler, he
never showed up. More digging led Romanchick to Wheeler’s relatives. Wheeler,
the family said, had assumed the identity of another relative, who kept getting
stopped for crimes he never committed.
“They said they
didn’t like Terrell and said they heard he was in North Carolina,” Romanchick
said.
Indeed,
Romanchick found Wheeler with help from officials in North Carolina. Wheeler
had allegedly stolen his cousin’s Maryland driver’s license, grew long
dreadlocks to match the photo on the ID and lived under his cousin’s name.
“He got a
little more freedom running down there,” Romanchick said. But “he must have
felt the walls closing in on him.”
The creation of
the cold case unit is part of the sheriff’s office’s latest efforts to close
its backlog of outstanding warrants and target suspected violent offenders, Mints said.
In 2010 and
2011, the sheriff’s office had come under pressure when county residents
discovered that some accused of murder or committing other crimes had
outstanding
warrants from previous alleged crimes.
In the past
three years, the county has cut 54,000 outstanding warrants down to about
41,000. Of those cases, the number of warrants for suspected felons has dropped
by a third to 394. But even as they close old warrants, an average of 2,000 new
cases stream into the sheriff’s office every month.
“We focus on
the warrants for violent crimes because they represent a present-day danger to
the community,” Mints said.
In the case of
Rivera, every background check and search came up empty. There were no
fingerprints and no witnesses.
So, Brown went
back to the beginning. He reviewed the original case file that detectives from
the Prince George’s County police department created 10 years ago. In it, he
deciphered one detective’s scribbled notes, finding a Social Security number.
Running that bit of information through national databases, Brown discovered
Rivera had been living in North Carolina but under the name Rafael Quinones.
When law
enforcement arrived to arrest Rivera in March, they found him hiding in a
secret compartment built inside an attic closet. He was charged with attempted
murder and assault.
“Digging
through the records and making
the right connections led us to this arrest,” Mints said.
It can
sometimes be frustrating when days of surveillance or weeks of staring at
decades-worth of files yield little progress, Brown said. But then, he and
Romanchick find something like the Social Security number and everything falls
into place.
“You stumble
across it,” Brown said. “It’s a great feeling when you put the connection
together.”
For
more information contact the Communications and Public Affairs Division at
301-780-7354.
###
Upper
Marlboro, MD… The Warrant/Fugitive Division reported
the arrest of Terrance Brawner of Temple Hills, MD on an arrest warrant for
Attempted 1st Degree Murder, which was obtained by County Police on
June 24, 2014. 
According
to the warrant, on June 23, 2014 at a club in the 6000 block of Branch Ave., Temple
Hills, MD, Brawner allegedly brandished a handgun and fired several shots outside
in the club’s parking lot resulting in a
male and female victim sustaining
gunshot wounds to the lower body. The warrant further states that the
altercation stemmed from a verbal argument Brawner had with the male victim
over a music competition the victim won. 
.JPG)
