A 62-year-old Northeast D.C. man has been arrested and charged in the 2025 killing of a 54-year-old woman found unresponsive on Rhode Island Avenue, nearly two years after police first responded to the scene. Robert Bellamy was taken into custody by members of the U.S. Marshals Service and charged with second-degree murder in connection with the death of Thameka Harvell.
D.C. police officers were called around 5 a.m. on Jan. 7, 2025, to the 600 block of Rhode Island Avenue Northeast for a report of an unconscious person, according to wjla.com. Officers arrived to find a woman unresponsive at the scene, and she was pronounced dead there before being taken to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner for an autopsy. She was later identified as Harvell, a resident of Northeast D.C.
Months after her death, the medical examiner determined that Harvell's cause of death was a blunt-force head injury with other contributing factors, the station's report states. The manner of death was ruled a homicide in April 2025, though the case sat open for well over a year as detectives continued their investigation.
Arrest Comes Nearly Two Years Later
On Monday, members of the U.S. Marshals Service located and arrested Bellamy, according to a release from the Metropolitan Police Department. MPD's announcement did not detail the circumstances connecting Bellamy to Harvell's death. Per WTOP News, Bellamy was charged with second-degree murder the same day. The case remains under investigation by the Metropolitan Police Department, per the same report from wjla.com.
A Mixed Picture in DC's Violent Crime Data
Harvell's case closes out against a backdrop of shifting crime trends across the District. Washington's reported homicide rate was 41% lower in the first half of 2026 than during the same period in 2025, according to the Council on Criminal Justice. The rate stood at 6.2 per 100,000 residents during that span, and was 43% lower than the same period in 2019, the organization found.
That decline outpaced the national trend, as the average homicide-rate change among the 30 cities in the council's study was a drop of 18% over the same period. But not every violent-crime category in D.C. moved in the same direction. Aggravated assault rose 45% in the first half of 2026 compared with a year earlier, while gun assault climbed 13%, the council reported.
