From a surge in Dallas homicides to a fugitive finally captured, the crime stories that defined 2020

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In a year when it felt at times as though the entire world had stopped, crime never seemed to follow suit.

Homicides in Dallas far surpassed the number from a year earlier, when they topped 200 for the first time in more than a decade.

But authorities also made arrests in cases that had been open for years, naming a suspect in a series of 1980s rapes and finding a fugitive accused of killing his daughters in 2008.

And after a summer when protests called attention to systemic racism in policing, a white officer in a small Hunt County town fatally shot an unarmed Black man.

Here’s a rundown of some of the highest-profile cases in 2020, along with updates about where they stand now:

The fatal shooting of Rory Norman

One of Dallas’ first homicide victims of 2020 was also one of the youngest.

Rory Norman, who was weeks away from his second birthday, was fatally shot early Jan. 5 when someone fired a rifle into the bedrooms of a home in South Dallas’ Bonton neighborhood.

An emotional police Chief U. Reneé Hall vowed to track down the boy’s killer. “It happened on my watch, and I am angry,” she said at a news conference later that day. “And this s— has to stop in this city.”

Rory’s uncle Jaylon Miller, 21, suffered serious injuries when he was struck by six bullets in the targeted shooting, but he was back in class at the University of North Texas at Dallas several weeks later.

Police released images of a vehicle of interest in the days after the shooting, but they have offered no additional details about the case since then. No arrests have been made.

By late December, there had been more than 250 homicides in Dallas in 2020, according to a Dallas Morning News count.

Sisters slain on Commerce campus

Authorities discovered two sisters who had been fatally shot in a dorm room at Texas A&M University-Commerce after a student reported finding a bullet hole in her wall the morning of Feb. 3.

Deja Matts, 19, was a freshman at the school. Her sister Abbaney Matts, 20, was at the residence hall with her 2-year-old son — who also was shot but survived his injuries.

Jacques Dshawn Smith, 22, Abbaney Matts’ ex-boyfriend, was arrested the next day at his home in Rowlett. An arrest-warrant affidavit said surveillance video showed him leaving the dorm and running through a parking lot the morning of the shooting.

Authorities said Smith had been arrested just a week earlier after he hit Abbaney Matts with a lamp and frying pan and threatened her with a knife; an emergency protective order had been put in place for her after that incident.

Soon after his arrest, Smith was charged in a Denton murder case from December 2019. The 22-year-old has since been indicted on a capital murder charge in each case, and he remains in the Hunt County jail, with bail set at $2 million.

The sisters’ mother, Vanessa Calderon, has sued Texas A&M-Commerce, saying she has been unable to get information about the school’s investigation into the shooting.

Man kills 2 sons, new wife in murder-suici

Police who were called to a Far North Dallas hotel the afternoon of March 10 found four bodies in one of the rooms in what was determined to be a murder-suicide. The dead were later identified as 41-year-old Charles Schoenfeld, 31-year-old Brittany Howard, 12-year-old Charlie Schoenfeld and 9-year-old Noah Schoenfeld.

The boys, who attended schools in Richardson ISD, had been at the center of a long-running custody battle between Charles Schoenfeld and his ex-wife, Elizabeth Schonfeld, who alleged he had been violent when she filed for divorce in 2009. Howard was Schoenfeld’s new wife.

Schonfeld later told The Dallas Morning News that she got a bad feeling that morning after she didn’t receive a call from her sons when they were supposed to be on their way to school, only a text message from her ex-husband saying that a “nightmare” was over.

In the months that followed, the Schonfeld family started a nonprofit in honor of the boys: the Charlie and Noah Foundation. “That’s definitely what the world needs right now — is more Charlie and Noah,” their aunt Jennifer Schonfeld said.

Leslie Squair Baker killed in carjacking

Her husband told The Dallas Morning News that she had been shot in the heart — it was the “biggest damn target” her killer could find, Robert Baker said.

A 16-year-old who police said was the gunman was taken into custody two days after the shooting, and two more teenagers were arrested in June. Detectives said they found links between Baker’s slaying and another shooting that same day, as well as two other carjackings.

Anthony Jermaine Lewis, who has since turned 17, has been certified as an adult and was indicted on a capital murder charge in early December. Deng Chan Ajack, 19, and Antony Isaiah Taylor, 18, also have been indicted on one count each of capital murder. All three remain in the Dallas County jail.

Texas woman’s body dumped in lake

An Erath County woman was found dead in a lake that straddles the Kentucky-Tennessee border in late June, and authorities say a Fort Worth man drove hundreds of miles to dump her body there.

Jeffrey Kenneth Rogers, 60, was arrested June 23, three days after 41-year-old Traci Jones’ body was discovered inside a plastic container that had been sealed with zip ties.

Authorities wrote in a detailed arrest-warrant affidavit that Jones, Rogers and his wife, Tammy Rogers — a former Arlington ISD elementary school principal — had been making pornography together. But the relationship between them had soured, authorities said, and Jones had threatened to expose the situation, even reaching out to a local TV station and the school district.

Rogers was recorded a number of times on surveillance footage in mid-June, according to the affidavit: buying a plastic container at a hardware store, leaving a hotel with Jones, touching the plastic container in the back of his pickup and renting a boat in Tennessee.

Authorities said Rogers admitted strangling Jones after becoming “scared” of her. He has been indicted on a murder charge and remains in the Erath County jail. His wife, who accompanied him on the cross-country drive, has not been charged with any crimes.

Newborn found dead in bucket of tar

In early August, Collin County sheriff’s deputies were called to a home in Princeton about a possible case of an infant’s death going unreported.

Donna Ann and Roland Charles Grabowski, both 42, were uncooperative and were taken into custody, where they soon admitted that their newborn son, Micah, had died more than a week earlier, authorities said.

When the sheriff’s office searched the property, they found the boy’s body in a bucket of tar inside a shed. Authorities wrote in an arrest-warrant affidavit that the couple had lied about Micah’s whereabouts.

Donna Grabowski has been indicted on charges of abuse of a corpse and tampering with evidence, while Roland Grabowski was indicted on one count of abuse of a corpse. Both remain in the Collin County jail.

Suspect arrested in 1980s serial rapes

After authorities arrested 74-year-old David Thomas Hawkins on Aug. 19, they said that they had finally cracked a series of attacks on women that dated back more than 30 years.

New DNA analysis methods linked Hawkins to four sexual assaults in northeast Dallas from 1982 to 1985, as well as two more in Shreveport, La., police said. (The same techniques led to the arrest of California’s Golden State Killer.)

Hawkins, who had pleaded no contest to an Arkansas rape in the early 1970s and was paroled after four years behind bars, had led a seemingly quiet life in the Fort Worth area for decades. But after the DNA led authorities to him, the FBI surveilled his home and Dallas police obtained search warrants and seized a number of weapons and electronics.

Hawkins has been indicted on three counts of aggravated sexual assault and one count of aggravated rape. He remains in custody at the Dallas County jail.

Yaser Said apprehended after years on the run

When 18-year-old Amina Said and 17-year-old Sarah Said were fatally shot on New Year’s Day 2008, their bloodied bodies left in a taxi outside an Irving hotel, police quickly suspected that their father was their killer. But when authorities surrounded the family’s Lewisville home the next day, no one was inside.

For years, law-enforcement officers searched around the world for Yaser Said, following leads that took them as far away as Egypt; he was named one of the FBI’s most-wanted fugitives in 2014.

But on Aug. 26 the 63-year-old was arrested close to home, at a house in Justin in southwestern Denton County. His son and brother also were taken into custody that day, accused of helping him remain at large.

Court documents revealed that authorities had nearly nabbed Said in 2017 after a maintenance worker spotted him at his son’s Bedford apartment, but he escaped, apparently by jumping off the patio before police obtained a search warrant.

Said, who was indicted in absentia on a capital murder charge in 2008, remains in the Dallas County jail. He also faces a federal charge of unlawful flight to avoid prosecution.

His son, Islam Yaser-Abdel Said, 32, and brother Yassein Abdulfatah Said, 59, have been indicted on federal counts of conspiracy to conceal a person from arrest, concealing a person from arrest and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; they remain in federal custody.

Man accused of wearing disguise to kill ex

Alyssa Burkett, 24, of Rockwall was fatally shot and stabbed the morning of Oct. 2 as she arrived at the Carrollton apartment complex she managed.

Witnesses described her assailant as a Black man, but police soon turned their attention to her ex-boyfriend, Andrew Charles Beard, who had been involved in a contentious custody battle with Burkett. An arrest-warrant affidavit alleged that he had put a tracking device on her vehicle and suggested that he had worn dark makeup and a fake beard to disguise himself during the attack.

Beard, 33, turned himself in on a murder charge three days after the shooting but posted $1 million bond two weeks later, outraging Burkett’s family.

He was arrested again in late October on a federal charge of possessing an unlicensed firearm silencer; outgoing U.S. Attorney Erin Nealy Cox said it was “unthinkable” that Beard was free on bond.

Beard has been indicted on the murder charge and the weapons charge. He has been deemed a flight risk and remains in federal custody, and a trial on the federal charge — for which he faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted — is scheduled for late January.

White Wolfe City officer fatally shoots Black man

Friends and relatives of Jonathan Price have said he was trying to break up a fight outside a convenience store in Wolfe City, a small Hunt County town about 60 miles northeast of Dallas, before a white police officer arrived and fatally shot him the night of Oct. 3.

An arrest-warrant affidavit says that Price, 31, who was Black, approached 22-year-old Officer Shaun Lucas with his hand extended, asking “You doing good?” Lucas, who thought Price was intoxicated, said he pulled out his Taser and told him to follow his orders, then used it when Price walked away, the affidavit says.

According to the affidavit, Price then attempted to grab the stun gun and Lucas fired four shots from his service weapon, mortally wounding him. The incident was recorded by the officer’s body camera, but that footage has not been released.

Lucas was arrested on a murder charge two days later after a Texas Rangers investigation determined that his actions “were not … reasonable” and that Price had resisted being detained “in a non-threatening posture.” Lucas has since been fired.

Because Lucas had previously worked for the Hunt County Sheriff’s Office, he was moved to the Collin County jail, where he remains in custody. He was indicted on the murder charge in November.

Man accused in spree of killings, shootings

Jaden Urrea, 18, was fatally shot early Oct. 31 in downtown Dallas. The attack was seemingly random, his family said.

Two weeks later, 36-year-old Adam Gautreau and 57-year-old Kenneth Hamilton were killed about 30 minutes apart in the Stemmons Corridor and east Oak Cliff, respectively. Police said a black Chevrolet SUV may have been involved in both shootings.

On Nov. 18, firefighters found the body of 60-year-old Blair Carter, who had been shot, after they put out a house fire in Celina.

Jeremy Rashaud Harris — who once dated Carter’s daughter and had a history of domestic violence that involved her — was arrested later that day; he had been recorded by a surveillance camera trying to get into the home right before the fire was reported, authorities said in an arrest-warrant affidavit.

Dallas police then said that Harris, 31, was the gunman in the three Dallas slayings, calling him a “serial killer.” Authorities also have linked him to or suspect he is connected to additional shootings in Dallas, Denton, Frisco and Prosper.

Harris was indicted on a charge of capital murder in the Celina case and remains in the Collin County jail, with bail set at $4 million. He also faces three counts of murder and two counts of aggravated assault in Dallas County.