Lamethia “Mimi” McCollum was a 28-year-old, pregnant single mother. She shared the top floor of a two-family house in Brooklyn with her eight-year-old daughter, Vicky. Mimi had recently moved from the projects to a quiet, tree-lined neighborhood in the Flatlands. She had a car-service dispatch job that she loved and she was talking about marriage with her new boyfriend. Her baby, a daughter named Mia, was due the first week of July 2003. But in the midnight hour of June 27, someone walked into Mimi’s house and shot her in the head.

Three years later, the case is labeled “ongoing.” No suspects have been arrested. Instead, remnants of Mimi’s life sit in a bulging brown accordion file neatly labeled “LAMETHIA MCCOLLUM,” atop a desk in Coney Island. The file belongs to Detective Timothy O’Brien of Brooklyn South Homicide.

Since her murder, Mimi’s family members have come to blows, in and out of court. They have suspected strangers, friends and each other. Mimi’s mother, Lottie, and sister, Shanna, feel cold-shouldered by detectives. They have resorted to letter-writing campaigns and have even asked a psychic for answers. Vicky, who discovered her mother’s body, is now 11 years old. “When they know who did it, and I see them, I’m gonna throw a brick at them,” she says. “If they don’t know who it is, I’m gonna be very depressed all my life.”

The McCollum case is one among dozens that O’Brien spends his workday trying to crack. And it is one of hundreds stalling in the criminal justice system each year, as the trend of unsolved homicide continues in New York City.

New Yorkers are less likely to be murdered now than 20 years ago. During the 1980s and ’90s, murder rates hit their peak—with 2,245 slayings in 1990. In the mid-’90s, around the time NYPD launched CompStat, the city’s homicide numbers took a nosedive. They have continued falling ever since, hovering around 600 during the last few years.

But despite having fewer murders on its hands, the NYPD is solving a smaller percentage of homicide cases. 

In 1985, 1,384 people were killed in New York City. About 78 percent of those murders were solved. In 2001, there were 658 homicides. The NYPD cracked roughly 66 percent of them. In December 2005, murders totaled 540; about half were cleared by year-end. (An unpredictable number of unsolved cases will be cleared in 2006 or later, tacking onto that year’s percentage.) The FBI’s most recent figures show the national average for solved homicides at nearly 63 percent; in major cities it is about 58 percent.

“In theory, it should be a lot easier to clear homicides,” says Edward Mamet, who spent 20 years in the NYPD’s Detective Bureau before retiring as captain. He says technical advancements like DNA testing should be a boon to present-day homicide investigations. “That’s the paradox. Why were true clearances—arrests—higher in the past than they are now, when these things are available?”

New York boasts a consistent drop in homicides, positioning it alongside most major U.S. cities, whose murder rates are also trending downward. Unfortunately, the city’s homicide clearance trend also mirrors a national pattern. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, clearance rates cross-country are worse than in the mid-1970s—by 15 percent. FBI figures reveal that over 13,000 people were killed in the U.S. in 2003. Of those, about 5,000 murder victims were not matched to a killer.

One of those victims was Mimi. Whoever killed her and her baby got away with it. It’s a scenario that will repeat itself roughly 250 times in New York this year.

* * *

On East 48th Street in Brooklyn, nearly identical brick row houses, separated by patches of lawn barely large enough to hold a kiddie pool, are squeezed together. It’s the Flatlands, where Mimi and Vicky lived for two years after moving out of the Farragut projects.

Mimi had spent her adolescence getting into fistfights and her early adulthood buying jewelry and partying. Parenthood was the only force powerful enough to make her settle down. She wanted a stable life for her daughter, so Mimi got a GED and took business administration classes at New York City Technical College. She stopped splurging on pagers and high heels. She stuck with her job as a car service dispatcher.

Sometime around 11 p.m. on the night of her murder, Mimi clocked out of work. Her mother, Lottie McCollum, was babysitting Vicky; the two were at a family dinner in Fort Greene’s R.V. Ingersoll projects. When Mimi got home, she picked up the phone and talked to her boyfriend—not the father of her unborn child, but a man who also had a young daughter of his own. At the time, her family says, he and Mimi spent weekends at the roller rink with their children. They were talking about marriage.

Around 12:30 a.m., Lottie and Vicky left the family dinner and caught a cab. On the ride home, the air was unusually cool for a summer night, and the streets were empty. When they pulled up to Mimi’s house, Lottie followed her granddaughter upstairs. She took off her coat and waited in the living room while Vicky went to kiss Mimi goodnight.

“Grandma?” Vicky called from the bedroom. “Come see what’s wrong with

my mommy.”

Vicky had left the lights off, not wanting to wake her mother. When Lottie flipped the switch, she found Mimi lying next to the bed in her lime-green suit and jacket with a pillow near her head.

“I thought Mimi was just sleeping on the floor,” Lottie remembers. “She sometimes did that. When I picked her head up, I stuck my hand in the bullet hole.”

Lottie started CPR, hoping to revive Mimi and pump blood to the baby. When she realized CPR wasn’t enough, Lottie called 911. An ambulance arrived and sped Mimi’s body to Kings County Hospital, where doctors tried unsuccessfully to save Mia.

When Lottie tells the story, her face goes tense and she fidgets with anything lying nearby—a TV remote, an unlit candle. Her gravelly voice rushes out, pressured and shaky. “All these things took place in about two minutes,” she says. “Couldn’t have even been two minutes, really.”

The proceeding hours would prove crucial to the investigation. According to criminal justice experts, that’s the time period when police actions are most important—when they can help to make or break a case.

There’s a measure of “human error” in homicide investigations, notes former NYPD Cold Case Squad leader Vito Spano. Police mistakes are “not deliberate,” he says, but “people trying to shortcut things” could play a part. And, he adds, “Worse than not catching the killer is catching the wrong person.”

One often-cited study from 1999 evaluated over 250 characteristics of homicide cases in four major U.S. cities (not including New York). Co-authored by University of Maryland’s Charles Wellford, it suggested that 51 things can shape an investigation. Chances of catching a killer increase if police interviewed the victim’s family, friends and neighbors if they roped off the scene right away and if the first investigating detective showed up within 30 minutes. In other words, if police weren’t taking shortcuts.

Detectives from the 63rd Precinct arrived about 15 minutes after Lottie’s 911 call, Lottie says. They immediately cordoned off the crime scene and started questioning Mimi’s neighbors, waiting until the next morning to question her family. Detectives peppered the neighborhood with fliers requesting leads. Criminal justice data shows that nearly half of murders are cleared because someone comes forward and identifies the killer, but detectives found no witnesses to Mimi’s murder—and they still haven’t. The closest they got was a downstairs neighbor who thought she heard someone running from the house around the time Mimi was shot. O’Brien is quick to explain why that isn’t enough: “Was it three hours earlier? Was it someone taking a shortcut? Or was it the perp?” And could she pick the runner out of a line-up? Correctly?

O’Brien is the main detective on Mimi’s case. He technically shares the duty with the 63rd Precinct’s Detective Lyman, who opened the case, but Lyman is responsible for all types of investigations in his precinct—muggings and stolen cars as well as murders. O’Brien handles homicides exclusively. He is part of a five-detective team known as the Brooklyn South Homicide Task Force.

Brooklyn South Homicide’s office is tucked discreetly inside a Coney Island brick building near the quaintly named, littered streets of Mermaid and Surf. The detectives sit at desks covered with their childrens’ school pictures, coffee mugs and piles of paper. A framed picture of Tony Soprano hangs on the wall alongside an American flag and maps with multi-colored push-pins in them. The maps are of South Brooklyn’s precincts. Each push-pin—too many to count—represents a murder.

Detective O’Brien was born and raised in Brooklyn. He is 44 years old, although he’ll make you guess his age. He’ll also quiz you on his heritage and whether you can identify Thomas Jefferson’s face; interrogation is, after all, his job. On his desk is are a typewriter and a fedora hat. He gets coffee for visitors, shakes hands and proudly shows photos of his sons, all of whom bear Irish first names. And despite spending his workday surrounded by murder, O’Brien is friendly. He is the picture of happiness, except for one conspicuous trait: He doesn’t smile.

“They’re constantly running through your head,” he says of murder cases. “If you’re driving by somewhere, you’ll think, ‘Oh, I have so-and-so; they were killed on this corner.’”

O’Brien joined the homicide squad 12 years ago. He has worked hundreds of homicides, handling seven or eight simultaneously in an average day while 30 or 40 sit waiting for a lead.

Squad members share work and O’Brien says he doesn’t think a larger staff would help. It might speed up the process of canvassing for witnesses (knocking on neighbors’ doors), but he doesn’t believe this would change the results of their investigations. Most of the time, he says, an arrest depends on witness accounts or a fingerprint left somewhere—not on how many cases he has on his plate.

“Some people who are killed do certain things that can lead to that point,” says Mike Habert, another detective on O’Brien’s team.

“Like a drug dealer shot in the head, versus a grandma looking out the window,” O’Brien adds. Habert tags on a disclaimer: “Not that you work them any differently.”

Each clearance is a point for the homicide squad, regardless of the victim’s wealth or status. All murders are treated equally under NYPD standards. But Mimi’s relatives argue that detectives devote less attention to her case because she was a working-class black woman. Mimi was killed only six months after the also-pregnant Laci Peterson, they point out.

Traits like race or sex don’t have a statistically proven effect on how detectives prioritize cases. Research on clearance demographics, however, runs remarkably thin.

In 2003, Ohio State University sociologist Richard Lundman looked into the relationship between victim traits like race and sex and whether their killers were caught. He studied Columbus, Ohio, during a period when its homicide rate was comparable to that of the nation’s 50 largest cities. “In communities that had a high African-American population, the [clearance] rates were lower. The ethnicity of the victim didn’t make a difference, but the composition of the community did,” he says. “In black communities, [cops are] practicing a heavy-handed style of policing. That has consequences in the future, like people less willing to provide information.”

His sentiments are echoed from Boston, where the clearance rate hovers around an abysmal 30 percent. Tom Nolan worked in the Boston Police Department for 27 years. Not only were neighbors reticent with cops because of historically sour relationships, he says, but also because of fear. “In the lion’s share of cases, they absolutely know what happened, who the shooter was, who his friends are, where they are, where they got the gun,” says Nolan. “They don’t believe that the police can protect them or will protect them, so they fail to come forward.”

Retired NYPD Captain Mamet doesn’t believe that tension between cops and community members is a factor in New York clearance. “I have never encountered that, and I’ve worked in some very bad areas,” he says. “From the days when there was really a schism between the white cops and the black community, I never saw any problems with that.”

“It’s not just African-American versus white communities,” Lundman remarks. “It’s poor versus affluent communities.”

Mimi’s neighborhood is 50 percent African-American. About one in five of her former neighbors are on some form of public assistance.

O’Brien won’t discuss what he knows about the murder, but he confirms that the evidence includes a bullet shell the killer left in Mimi’s bedroom. (The killer left with the gun, but it probably wouldn’t be a pivotal piece
of evidence anyway: O’Brien has never found a decent fingerprint on a gun during his career. Prints don’t stick well to gun metal, he says.) Lottie says detectives traced the shell to a handgun used in an unrelated Staten Island shooting, but that’s all they have told her. And since Mimi worked in customer service, her telephone calls were routinely recorded. O’Brien has the taped conversations from Mimi’s shift that night, which may include arrangements to meet a friend after work, her sister Shanna McCollum says.

The morning after, detectives brought in Eddie Brown for questioning. Brown, who was Mimi’s ex-boyfriend and Vicky’s father, seemed a likely suspect. After the couple’s breakup, Eddie met and married another woman within a year. He says that instead of moving on, Mimi grew manipulative. Eddie had court-ordered rights to see Vicky every other weekend, which Mimi used as collateral for child support payments. Following a long period of squabbling and threats fired from all directions—everyone tells a different version of the story—Mimi and Eddie slapped each other with restraining orders.

“Me and Mimi weren’t on the best of terms at the time,” Eddie explains. Tension stained their interactions from 1996—when they split—until Mimi’s death. The ex-girlfriend and new wife, especially, didn’t get along. “I wanted everybody to be cool,” Eddie says. “Not necessarily friends, but tolerant. But it didn’t work out that way.”

Brown told detectives he was running his trucking company until 1:00 a.m. on the night of Mimi’s murder, working with an Astoria oil-and-freight delivery business named Mystic. The skeptical detectives kept pushing, showing Eddie photographs of Mimi’s murder scene, he says. But when they questioned the Mystic staff, they discovered Brown’s alibi was true.

O’Brien will not name current suspects but reveals that an ex-boyfriend and a long-time family friend are among the people

he’s considering.

The likelihood that Mimi’s killer did not know her is greater now than it would have been during the murder peak of 1985, when clearance was nearly 80 percent. It is undisputed as a reason for the falling clearance rate: homicides are changing. They used to be domestic—a boyfriend killing his girlfriend during a spat—and therefore easier to piece together. Now, strangers murder each other more often in “drug related, transient type of homicides,” Wellford says.

After the first week of investigation, likelihood of catching a killer diminishes exponentially. Now three years later, the odds of finding, arresting, and prosecuting Mimi’s killer are small: one to six percent.

“It’s the ones you think are easy and you’re going to solve right away that end up being the hardest,” O’Brien says. “The ones where it seems like you’ll never make an arrest? Out of the clear blue sky, something will just fall in your lap.” O’Brien’s squad sets aside old cases to wait for these leads, when they figure they’ve pursued all
other avenues.

The detectives feel they are working the McCollum case as doggedly as they can, but it doesn’t look that way from the

family’s perspective.

Shanna fumes about this often. “Get your ass out there, and find out what happened,” she says. “To me, it seems like they’re not doing anything.”

Lottie feels “like they don’t give a damn.” She hears from O’Brien less now than when the case was fresh. Lottie and Shanna say O’Brien told them he would provide quarterly updates, but they say he hasn’t returned any of their phone calls since March of 2005. 

Numerous studies show that depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) go hand-in-hand with this type of bereavement. If survivors feel the justice system isn’t doing its job properly, their recovery time is longer.

“There’s no reason that he can’t pick up the phone and say, ‘Ms. McCollum, I just wanted to say there’s nothing else to report,’” she says. “We get the impression that, hey, they don’t care.”

“They call, and they feel like we don’t care,” O’Brien says when asked how victims’ families react to unsolved cases. “I understand their frustration.” He doesn’t mention that he is frequently pulled away from work to testify in homicide trials. He doesn’t blame his case load. He only says of the family, “They’ve helped a lot, actually.”

O’Brien is, indeed, tough to pin down. It takes weeks of calling to get him on the phone. He’s almost always “out on the field,” working. Along with the 30 or 40 cases under his command, he helps guide new, less-experienced detectives on the force—a regular occurrence in squads of late, with seasoned detectives retiring from the NYPD.

The direct effects of staffing shifts, retirement and overtime cuts are unknown, but all experts interviewed agree those factors likely play a part in the clearance trend. The budget may, too.

“Even though homicide is obviously an important crime for most police departments, in recent years their attention seems to have been moved to other areas, like drugs and quality of life crimes,” Wellford adds.

Promising models for homicide unit funding exist outside of New York City. The Phoenix police department is showing how “police can solve cases if they’re given the resources to do so,” says Wellford. Since the Phoenix PD started assigning crime scene technicians to all homicides in the last year, clearance rates improved. Contrast that with New York, where the first patrol officer or detective on the scene usually gathers evidence. “If you get real people who are experts in retrieval, it appears to be making a pretty substantial difference,” Wellford says, adding that Phoenix detectives also “ended up clearing 45 homicides that had been sitting for two or three years.”

Mamet offers one final observation. “There aren’t enough homicides to train the detectives,” he says. As the murder rate drops, so does each detective’s caseload, he explains, noting that detective squads didn’t downsize as homicide rates dropped. “I’m not suggesting killing people to train detectives. But that is one of the big factors. Look at it, 600 a year compared with 2,000” in the 1990s.

Murder is the crime police consider to be the most serious—and the one that traditionally has the highest clearance rate of all crime categories. The chance of catching your garden variety killer in New York City is better than in Boston—or in Los Angeles, where the clearance rate has crossed the 50 percent mark only once since 1998. The northeast solves more cases than the national average, by about four percent.

But the NYPD continues to chase the national trend, in spite of its status as one of the least violent major cities.

This year, 250 families will join Vicky and Lottie in the group of unsolved homicides. For Detective O’Brien, this means working long hours and delivering disappointing news to frustrated family members.

Sitting at his desk at Brooklyn South Homicide, he explains the irony—that handling a homicide investigation is the height of a detective’s career path. “Or, you could also look at it like the last stop.”