Baltimore Police held a press conference Tuesday evening to identify and release video that they said shows Vincent Jamar Barefoot and Derrick Jackson running from the murder they just committed outside Lexington Market Monday afternoon.
Both men are now wanted for murder and handgun charges.
"This revolving door of violence is really centered around a small group of people is what is plaguing our streets," Baltimore Police Chief T.J. Smith said.
Back in October 2015 during a live stream press conference the police department announced they were looking for public enemy No. 1 - Derrick Jackson.
"He is a validated Black Guerilla Family gang member, he is also a killer,” Commissioner Kevin Davis said in the fall of 2015, “His name is Derrick Jackson. He is wanted for a 2015 murder."
That murder was of Jamal Green in West Baltimore on North Pulaski Street in April 2015. Green was shot four times in the head and neck, according to charging documents, and police wanted the public's help to arrest their suspect, Jackson.
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Jackson was almost immediately arrested that October after the press conference and indicted in November.
His case was then postponed several times before the state's attorney’s office ultimately dropped his case altogether this past September, less than three months before he would be a suspect in the recent Lexington Market murder.
The state's attorney's office sent ABC2 the following statement on the freeing of Jackson this past September, which said, “exonerating information called the identity of the alleged perpetrator into question, which ethically precluded us from moving forward with the case.”
"This late news now about an exonerating witness was never disclosed to me," said Jackson’s defense attorney Josh Insley.
In fact, Insley said not much was disclosed to him about the state’s case. He said in the nearly one year his client's public enemy No. 1 case sat on the docket, his client sat in jail. Inley said the state's attorney’s office handed over very little evidence about the charges up until his trial date of September 16, 2016 where court records show he was suddenly released from BCDC and the state chose to not prosecute the once very public case.
"I guess they ultimately already made that decision that they were gonna dismiss this case before we got there," Inley said. "What I find troubling now is that now that this issue came up again and the state's attorney said they had an exonerating witness. They never told me they had an exonerating witness and my concern is when did they have this exonerating witness?"
But Jackson now faces a new set of murder charges and again, police are asking him to turn himself in for another murder they believe he committed.
The Baltimore Police Department released the following statement:
"The Baltimore Police Department stands by its case and the decision to request permission from the state's attorney's office to charge Derrick Jackson, Jr., who was also later indicted, in a 2015 murder. In each of our murder investigations, before charges are brought, we partner and seek approval from the state's attorney's office. That occurred in the 2015 case. Regardless of the decision made at that time in that case, we are once again talking about someone who is a known violent repeat offender. We will continue to work diligently with the state's attorney's office to build this current case that involves Jackson."
Jackson and Barefoot remain at large for the murder of Tayvon Cokely Monday near Lexington Market.
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