With An Instagram Account, KillMoeNews Becomes Go-To Source For D.C.'s Deadliest News

The revelation was almost an afterthought in the 20-page police affidavit charging Marktwan Hargraves with the killing of Nyiah Courtney, the 6-year-old who died during a mid-July shootout outside a liquor store in Southeast D.C.

"Got talk to ya it's serious it's crushing me inside bruh I cried last night," Hargraves allegedly wrote in a text message to friends. When they asked what happened, he responded: "Go see killMoe."

Hargraves, 22, was referring to killmoenews, an Instagram account that follows murders and violent crime in and around D.C. "Breaking... 6 Year Old Killed In The 2900 Block of MLK Jr Ave SE" flashed a post on the account on July 16. It was that Instagram post, police allege, that made Hargraves realize who the victim of the shooting had been.

And he wasn't the only one.

Killmoenews has more than 37,000 followers, and the posts — sometimes dozens a day, tracking crime as it happens — can draw hundreds of comments apiece. They can also spark outrage, as they did earlier this month when killmoenews tweeted out a video of three police officers detaining a Black man in Southeast — and repeatedly punching him even as he was restrained. The video drew more than 200,000 views, prompting D.C. Police Chief Robert Contee to decry the officers' actions, suspend them, and refer the case to the U.S. Attorney for D.C. for possible prosecution.

Part citizen journalism and part community forum, killmoenews is Derrick, a 30-year-old resident of Ward 8. (He asked that we only identify him by his first name for safety reasons.) What started last year as a hobby to occupy his time during slow moments as a dump truck driver has now become a full-time and largely self-sustaining job documenting violent crime in and around D.C.

And with the rise in homicides in recent years — killings are 10% higher than the same time last year, when the city hit a 15-year high — Derrick rarely lacks for content. The steady barrage of deadly incidents he reports weigh on him, but he says he feels a commitment to a community that can often go under-covered by a shrinking pool of traditional media outlets.

"Do I get tired of posting homicides and stuff like that? Yes, I honestly do," he says. "But it's like, you know, I can't stop doing it," he says.

'Nobody's really in the house watching the news anymore'

Derrick has joined a small but committed group of citizen reporters who scan police and firefighter radio chatter for news on incidents as they occur. They're quick to post updates to social media, often beating traditional media outlets to the punch on reports of shootings, homicides, deadly car crashes, and more. And in some cases — especially with a shrinking local press corps — they're also the only ones who go to the crime scenes.

But where many of these scanners rely on Twitter, Derrick has opted instead for Instagram, the image-heavy platform owned by Facebook.

"Nobody's really in the house watching the news anymore, you know, unless you're older," he says. "So I see this generation now, they pick up their phones for everything. So I said, TikTok, Instagram, everything is, you know, visual. So I'm like, 'OK, I'm going to do the news on Instagram.' And that's what I did."

According to Statista, Instagram is one of the country's most popular social media platforms, with over 115 million users. Those users also skew young, and are more likely to be Black. According to the Pew Research Center, almost half of Black adults in the U.S. say they use Instagram, compared to a third of white adults.

"We talk often about social media platforms and I compare it to drugs. In certain neighborhoods certain drugs are much more prevalent than in other neighborhoods. The upscale neighborhoods in Washington, or in the trendy neighborhoods, typically it's Twitter. And then you go on the other side of the river they're heavily into Instagram," says Alan Henney, a longtime radio scanner who has worked with younger upstarts like Derrick. "His audience is predominantly Instagram-based."

The influence of Instagram is even evident in the city's centers of power: Trayon White, who represents Ward 8 on the D.C. Council, is more active than any of his colleagues on the platform, posting daily updates for his 50,000 followers.

Instagram has also become something of an investigatory tool for D.C. police. According to internal documents that were posted by foreign hackers earlier this year, police officers in the Seventh District — which encompasses much of Ward 8 — maintain a "Social Media Quick Reference Guide" listing Instagram usernames for dozens of suspected members of neighborhood-based crews. Earlier this month, police arrested a D.C. man in Ward 7 after he broadcast a live video Instagram allegedly showing him holding a handgun that had been modified to serve as a fully automatic weapon.

Within the D.C. government, there's a growing realization of the power Instagram has to communicate with certain communities — and some city agencies are trying to harness those voices, including Derrick's. As part of Building Blocks D.C., a new gun violence prevention initiative, Derrick received a $5,000 grant to continue his reporting on killmoenews. ("Kill moe" is traditional D.C. slang for an expression of surprise or frustration.)

"The Building Blocks D.C. mini-grant program provides an opportunity for us to create unique partnerships with members of the community who have new and innovative ideas about how to prevent gun violence and improve public safety," says Linda Harllee Harper, the director of the D.C. Office of Gun Violence Prevention, in an email. "Our partnership with killmoenews demonstrates this opportunity, especially given his interest in reaching younger residents via social media and creating a platform for them to express their thoughts and concerns about public safety."

Derrick has become something of an urban influencer; he's not selling a particular product or lifestyle, but rather highlighting the destructive power of deadly violence by cataloguing its victims.

'It doesn't make sense'

On any given day, Derrick does what most radio scanners do: he listens. As incidents occur, he posts updates — largely to Instagram, but he has started using Twitter, too. When possible, he goes to the scene of the crime, sharing images and videos of his own. And if he can't be there, someone will often send him photos or videos that he reposts.

"He gets sent a lot of content from the community. So that's his really strong suit, getting really exclusive content from people and their cell phone footage or whatever. He'll get it faster than anybody else," says Larry Calhoun, 38, a childhood acquaintance of Derrick's and the face behind DC REALTIME NEWS, a radio-scanner account based largely on Twitter.

Still, Derrick admits that the traditional journalistic thrill of being first to the story, or getting exclusive content, is often counterbalanced by the constant drumbeat of death and despair he's amplifying. Sometimes it shows; where reporters may robotically stick to the facts as they know them, Derrick will occasionally let his emotions come through.

"2 shootings walking distance!!!!! Come on man im tired as a reporter smh smh smh we are killing our own," he posted in frustration on Aug. 15 after a pair of fatal shootings within blocks of each other in Anacostia.

A few days later, he posted a picture of Kemon Payne, the 15-year-old who was stabbed to death during an altercation outside a KIPP charter school in Northeast. "We are making ourselves extinct," he wrote in all caps under the image. "We have to do better and set an example for the generation after us... the youth had no guidance and no future because all they see is rappers talking about sliding." The post got more than 3,800 likes and 530 comments.

"The part that affects me the most is seeing the families," says Derrick, a father of two children. "I've been to plenty of crime scenes now. You always see the females and the families come together crying. Do these guys that's doing wrong, you know, do they understand the impact that it has on them but also their families?"

Many of those emotions coalesced around Nyiah Courtney's death, and the realization that her accused killer learned of it from Derrick's Instagram account.

"I actually cried," he says. "It's not even about me being mentioned. It's more so of this little girl who lost her life for nothing. And for him to see that from my page is like, OK, that shows me that people really do pay attention to what I am posting. But it's like, c'mon, we have to do better if you all see everything that I post all day but you're still doing negative. It doesn't add up and it doesn't make sense."

Killmoenews is now a self-sustaining operation. On top of the D.C. grant he received, Derrick sells ads for local businesses on his page and solicits donations. He has ambitious hopes of growing his Instagram page into an "African American news station."

But he says that while his current reach largely comes from the consistency of his reporting on crime, he remains conflicted about whether to focus only on crime, violence, and homicides. It's a regular concern for communities in D.C. beset by violence — they want the deaths to be recognized and to produce change, but they don't want their communities defined only by the worst of what happens there.

"I have a lot of people who criticize me, saying, 'Look, can you post positive if we don't want to see negative all day? Well, I'm like, 'You know what? You're absolutely right, because I don't want to see it all day,'" he says. "The funny part to me is people don't want to see it, but they absolutely want to see it."

This story is from DCist.com, the local news website of WAMU.

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