Families despair over unsolved slayings

DURHAM -- Lennis Harris Sr. often lies awake at night, going over a scene that plays in his mind as a heart-wrenching loop.

A faceless man holds a handgun to the head of his 24-year-old son, Lennis Jr.

"I see my son say, 'No, don't shoot.' I can see his eyes as he pleads for his life," the father recounted last week, his own eyes shut tight, his face twisted in agony. "And then that animal pulls the trigger anyway."

Harris' son was one of five men shot execution-style Nov. 19 in a back bedroom of a South Durham townhouse. Four died. All were in their 20s and had either attended college or earned four-year degrees.

The brutality of the slayings shook Durham, a community with the highest homicide rate of any large North Carolina city. Seeking to reassure the public, Durham's mayor and police chief said on television that the killings weren't random.

Away from the cameras, officials disclosed that drugs had been found in the Alpine Road townhouse. Authorities implied that the victims' involvement in the drug trade had brought violence to their doorstep.

More than six months later, no arrests have been made, and the media spotlight has faded.

The elder Harris, a Durham fire marshal, said he rarely hears from the police detectives assigned to the case. For months, he followed advice to stay quiet and let the criminal justice system work, even as he feared the investigation was growing cold.

Then news broke of the rape allegations against members of the Duke University lacrosse team.

When he learned in April that testing on DNA samples from 46 lacrosse players were rushed and completed in less than three weeks, Harris said he and the other parents became incensed. DNA collected from the bloody townhouse the previous November was still sitting at the lab in Raleigh, waiting its turn.

"The priorities are out of whack," he said Thursday. "We'll probably never know exactly what happened in that rape case. But what we know with absolute certainty is that four young men were killed, another left for dead, and that those killers are still walking the streets."

And, he fears, anyone capable of such slaughter will likely kill again.

Gunfire reported

On Nov. 19 about 9:44 p.m., police responding to a report of gunfire in the normally quiet Breckenridge development found a man sitting on the stoop of 2222 Alpine Road, bleeding from his head. Inside, in an upstairs bedroom, an officer discovered four bodies.

Lennis Harris Jr., a 1999 graduate of Durham's Hillside High School, had rented the townhouse a few weeks before. Lying nearby was his first cousin, Jon Skinner, 26.

The two men had been close their entire lives. Skinner was a basketball standout at a high school in Winston-Salem. Both attended St. Augustine's College in Raleigh, though neither was enrolled at the time of their deaths.

Lajuan Coleman, 27, was Harris' housemate. He was a graduate of Durham's Southern High School and went to Florida A&M University on a basketball scholarship. He later graduated from Old Dominion University in Virginia with a degree in biology.

Jamel Holloway, 27, was a 1997 graduate and three-sport athlete at Hillside High. He later earned a degree in sports medicine from Livingstone College in Salisbury and was a volunteer wrestling coach at Hillside. He worked nights at a Durham group home, where family members said he often bought clothes and paid for haircuts for needy children.

All had been shot multiple times, according to autopsy reports, and police recovered the fragments of more than a dozen fired .45-caliber bullets.