She would never get the chance to take her 4-year-old shopping. Last week, in a room in the lower level of the Anacostia Neighborhood Library, authorities said Maurica was fatally shot by a retired D.C. police lieutenant who was training her to become a full-fledged library police officer. The job was supposed to be a steppingstone, she told family, toward her goal of becoming a crime scene investigator one day.
Jesse Porter, the 58-year-old former lieutenant hired by the library system to host trainings for its officers, has been charged with involuntary manslaughter in the Thursday killing, which some witnesses described as the result of a joke gone wrong. His attorney could not be reached for comment.
“She had her whole life ahead of her,” said Maurica’s uncle, Steven Hoskins, sitting outside their family home in Maryland, five days later.
Up the steps behind him and through the white front door was where Maurica had grown up. As a toddler, family said, she dreamed of becoming president of the United States. As a woman, she was determined to build a good life for her and her son.
Pictures of her line the living room walls. Maurica as a baby. Maurica at 9 years old, dressed in stripes with a beaming smile. Maurica playing basketball and soccer and softball. Maurica at her high school graduation.
Born in Beltsville, Md., to Jamaican immigrants, she was raised in a close-knit family. Dinner was always together, and all six relatives who lived in the home would eat Maurica’s favorite jerk chicken. She and her mom wore matching shirts and pajama sets. Her brother, Radcliffe Manyan, was her best friend.
The siblings grew up together, sharing everything from earphones to hobbies. They played sports side by side, with Maurica often joking that she would have become a professional basketball player if she had her brother’s height, family said. When they had children of their own two years apart, Maurica and Radcliffe decided to raise their kids as if they were siblings.
“She was my best friend. She was the person I called every day,” said Radcliffe, 23. “I just wanted to catch up to her, to be more like her.”
He especially admired her love for her work as a library police officer. Radcliffe said his sister was fascinated by crime TV shows and had an intense interest in solving problems. Maurica studied criminal justice at Bowie State University before she had to drop out for financial reasons, her family said. She decided to pursue criminal-justice-related jobs in government and work her way back to school, they said.
Maurica was a security guard before she was hired to be a library police officer in February. Around that time, she bought a house of her own in Indian Head, Md., for the first time to live in with her dad and her son, family members said.
Radcliffe and Sherene Manyan, Maurica’s mom, said they remember how excited Maurica was when she talked about training to become an officer. One evening, the family sat around the dining room together, studying the names and locations of D.C.’s 26 libraries.
Now, Sherene was sitting steps away from that table, holding a framed picture of her deceased daughter.
“It is so unreal to us,” she said.
Just before 4 p.m. Thursday, Sherene said, a police officer called, notifying family that there had been an accident at work involving Maurica. A team of officers was on their way to the house to tell the family more, the officer said.
Panicking, Sherene and her family begged the officer for…
Read More: She was fatally shot during training for D.C. library police officers
