Sharita Cristwell didn’t seem like herself that summer morning.
She normally arrived at her mother’s house in Southeast Washington with a smile, ready to go out for manicures, to a restaurant or a doctor’s appointment, Joyce Cristwell said. Sharita, the baby of the family, was her do-everything-with daughter.
“Rita, what’s wrong with you?” Joyce asked.
Then she saw the bruises.
“He tried to kill me,” Joyce recalled her saying on June 16.
Earlier that morning, Sharita, 29, told police her ex-boyfriend and the father of her two children, Harry Dominique Lindsey, had beaten her and attempted to strangle her, court documents show. Her chest, arms and neck, Joyce said, still showed signs of the struggle.
Prince George’s County prosecutors charged Lindsey with first- and second-degree assault. At his first hearing, on June 18, prosecutors argued he was too dangerous to send home before the trial, but Sharita asked the judge to free him because he was “a hardworking father” to their two children and said she was not in fear of her safety. Lindsey was ultimately fitted with an ankle monitor and ordered by a judge to live with his mother.
Less than three weeks later, Sharita was found shot to death. Her killer, police said, was Lindsey. He now faces first-degree murder charges.
Sharita’s story reflects the complicated reality of domestic violence and a system that too often fails the people it’s meant to protect, according to prosecutors, experts and family members. Despite Maryland’s passing a law five years ago that made strangulation a felony, experts say cases are still often treated too lightly in a court system where keeping survivors of domestic violence safe while respecting the constitutional rights of the accused is a delicate balance.
People in abusive relationships can also miss signs of escalating danger or hold out hope their abuser is capable of change, even after enduring months or years of violence. The result can be deadly. More than 100 people in Maryland were killed by a partner between 2020 and 2022, according to the latest figures from the Maryland Network Against Domestic Violence, a nonprofit coalition.
“In many ways, I feel like the system really let her down,” said Jacquelyn Campbell, a nurse and professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, whose research uncovered that women are 7.5 times more likely to be killed by their partner after surviving a strangulation. “We know how to do this better. PG County knows how to do this better.”
District Court Judge Robert Heffron Jr., who presided over Lindsey’s bail review hearing in June, declined to comment because it would violate ethical rules of the court. Lindsey, who has not submitted a plea in the assault case, has a jury trial set for February.
Joyce, who had raised Sharita since she was 1 month old and eventually adopted her and three of Sharita’s siblings, blames the court.
“If they had just kept him, my daughter would be alive,” said Joyce, 69.
Gereese McCotter, Sharita’s birth mother, has been wondering the same thing since her daughter’s death: “Why would they let him out?”
‘Unable to breathe’
Sharita and Lindsey’s relationship, family said, began when she was 18 and he was 21. She was pregnant with their first daughter when she graduated from Eastern High School in D.C. in 2015. Their second daughter was born the following year.
In the beginning, she appreciated his character and “how he took care of his family,” Jaronda Lindsey-Davis, Lindsey’s mother, told The Washington Post. She said her son expressed similar admiration for the new family he was building with Sharita. “She’s having my babies. This is my family. I love her,” Lindsey-Davis recalled her son telling her in those early days. She agreed: Sharita was “a beautiful soul,” Lindsey-Davis said. “I loved her since the day I met her.”
The couple lived with his mother for years in her two-story duplex in Hyattsville, Maryland, until Lindsey moved the family of four to an apartment in nearby Bladensburg in August 2024.
Sharita, whose friends and family called her Rita, was known by clients as the makeup artist Gorgeous Heather. She operated her business from Lindsey-Davis’s living room and had done makeup for celebrity clients, including reality TV star Joseline Hernandez. Lindsey worked two jobs, laying down track for Metro and operating forklifts at a warehouse in Beltsville, Maryland.
Throughout their relationship, Sharita’s relatives said, the pair had an on-again, off-again dynamic. A few months after the move, she met 33-year-old Chick Banks at a Friendsgiving party, he said. The two went out a few days later and talked “every day since,” Banks said, often about what they wanted out of life. For Sharita, that included a four-bedroom home with a backyard — just enough space for Joyce, herself and her daughters, now 8 and 9, to each have a room to themselves.
She wanted out of the new apartment, which, by February, Sharita was sharing with Lindsey “without actually being together,” said Alexis Brown, Sharita’s niece. Her aunt, she said, often hid from others the tumultuous parts of her relationship with Lindsey.
In May, Brown said, she received a call from Sharita, asking if she could stay with her. Her aunt told her Lindsey physically assaulted her in front of their two daughters, she said. “The girls were in the back crying. She was saying she couldn’t do this anymore.”
Women often make six to eight attempts to leave an abusive relationship before finally doing so, said Deena Hausner, director of the Domestic Violence Legal Clinic at House of Ruth Maryland, an intimate partner violence center. The decision to leave is never an easy one — often placing survivors in the most danger — and usually depends on money, resources, the support of family members or even a place to stay.
“It’s never about why didn’t she just leave. It’s about what were the things that prevented her from leaving, whether it’s fear or lack of resources or having had a challenging interaction with the legal system,” Hausner said.
Lindsey’s lawyer said at a bail review hearing that the June 16 alleged assault was the first time he had been accused of abusing her, a claim Sharita’s family disputes.
Brown said that on June 4, the day of Sharita’s early birthday party, she noticed bruises on her aunt’s arms and neck. When they arrived to a Navy Yard hotel, Sharita covered the marks with makeup, Brown said. When she asked her aunt what happened, she recalled Sharita nonchalantly saying he “choked” her because she had met someone. The couple were not together at the time, Brown said, but Lindsey showed up to the hotel unannounced that night.
Twelve days later, police heard a similar story from Sharita.
She told authorities, according to a police report, that before the alleged June 16 assault, Lindsey sent her a video he had secretly recorded.
In it, she told an officer, he asked: “That’s your car, right?”
It was parked at Banks’s parent’s house, he said. Then, Lindsey called her.
“You and that n—– are gonna die,” Lindsey told her, according to the account she gave police.
When she got back to their Bladensburg apartment, Sharita told police, the argument escalated. She said Lindsey pulled her from the bed by her robe before slapping and punching her multiple times. He dragged her to the living room, Sharita said, but she managed to escape and lock herself in a bathroom to call 911. That’s when, according to police documents, Lindsey forced open the door and put his hands around her neck.
“She reported that she was unable to breathe,” police said. “And believed she was going to die.”
Lindsey, 32, was charged with a felony, after officers on the scene described the alleged strangulation as “deliberate” and “prolonged.” Lindsey’s lawyer declined to comment on multiple occasions by phone and in person.
That night, according to police documents, a routine domestic violence lethality assessment showed that Sharita was at an increased risk of domestic homicide.
‘A very major struggle’
Over the past decade, state and local officials have signed legislation, adopted policies and expanded services to protect survivors of domestic violence and reduce related homicides. One focus in particular has been on strangulation, which in Maryland is now a felony punishable by up to 25 years in prison.
The state passed a law making strangulation a felony in 2020, following other states, in hopes of preventing escalating violence and homicides. An estimated 3,000 to 10,000 women are strangled annually in Maryland, wrote Campbell, the nurse and professor at Johns Hopkins, in a letter of support for the bill before it was signed into law.
It’s a crime that can cut off the blood supply to the brain and can cause internal injuries like hemorrhage, stroke and fractured neck cartilage. It can take 10 to 15 seconds and less pressure than the amount necessary to open a can of soda for someone to lose consciousness. Death can occur in under five minutes.
Lindsey was released on home detention by a judge, something Cpl. Elvia Vila-Granda, a detective with the Prince George’s County Police Department’s special crimes unit, said happens too often in domestic violence cases that involve strangulation.
“Unfortunately, we do everything we can, but it’s the court who decides,” she said. “And unfortunately, sometimes they let them go.”
Pretrial release decisions have long faced scrutiny in Prince George’s County. Judges, charged with deciding whether to jail those still presumed innocent, have been accused of being both too lenient and too punitive.
According to a recording of Lindsey’s bail review hearing, prosecutors cited his criminal record, which includes gun charges from 2016 and 2019, and the violent nature of the alleged crime as reasons to keep him behind bars. His defense argued that Sharita wanted him to be released and keeping him in custody might make his family vulnerable to eviction. Sharita was also in the courtroom and told the judge she wouldn’t be fearful if he was released.
It’s common for survivors of domestic violence to push for their partner’s release before a judge, said Lynn Strange, a domestic violence advocate.
“The victim is going through a very major struggle,” she said. “I want to be kept safe. I don’t want to be beat. I don’t want to be strangled. I want to hold him accountable, but I don’t want the retribution.”
The court, she said, must show survivors that perpetrators will be held accountable so they know domestic violence is an issue the county takes seriously.
“The message has to be clear,” Strange said.
When Sharita visited her mother’s Southeast Washington apartment that day in June, Joyce said, they went to get an X-ray of Sharita’s jaw. Then, she said, they went to the Virginia Williams Family Resource Center, the District’s intake facility for families in need of housing, to find emergency shelter for Sharita and her daughters.
Sharita was initially denied help, Joyce said, because Sharita’s name was on her mother’s housing voucher. They immediately drove to a D.C. Housing Authority office to remove it, she said, before returning to the center, where Sharita filled out an intake form obtained by The Post.
In blue ink, she wrote that she had been experiencing domestic violence for a year. She circled “Yes,” that violence was causing her to seek emergency housing, and left check marks indicating she had been physically and sexually assaulted and wanted the center to connect her to further resources.
Joyce said that as far as she knew, Sharita never heard back from the center. Banks, Sharita’s new boyfriend, said she “got the paper that she needed a couple days before she was killed.”
Kevin Carpenter, director of communications for the D.C. Department of Human Services, said he could not answer questions regarding client experience because of privacy laws.
Police data shows domestic violence cases have decreased 8 percent from this time last year in Prince George’s County — reflecting a nationwide drop in violent crime — but the county police department has investigated 37 intimate partner homicides in the five years since Maryland’s strangulation law went into effect, compared with 29 in the five years before the law was passed.
So far this year, the department has investigated 10 intimate partner homicides in the county.
‘No violent contact’
On the last day of her life, Sharita arrived at Lindsey-Davis’s apartment around noon with her daughters. At first, Lindsey-Davis said, everything “seemed normal” on that July afternoon. Lindsey-Davis had made plans to take the girls to a family cookout. Sharita was going to stay behind to do a friend’s hair.
Lindsey was there too, his mother said, getting ready to leave for work.
Judge Heffron had allowed Sharita and Lindsey to contact each other and only meet outside the family home in Bladensburg as part of Lindsey’s pretrial release. But the judge ordered Lindsey to have “no violent contact” with Sharita.
Sharita’s friend arrived after Lindsey-Davis left with the girls, she said. Lindsey was still there. Soon, he asked the friend to step outside so he could talk to Sharita alone, multiple relatives said.
A witness told police they heard arguing coming from inside the unit. Then what sounded like two gunshots. The witness saw Lindsey back away from Sharita while pointing the gun at her. He dropped it on the floor and ran, the witness told police.
When Sharita’s friend returned to the unit, she saw her body propped against the wall, next to her glossy pink vanity table. Lindsey-Davis, who hadn’t left the complex yet, came back to the home and called 911.
Lindsey was located the next day in Capitol Heights, Maryland, by the Prince George’s County Police Department’s fugitive unit with surveillance footage supplied by Metro Transit Police.
He is being held in custody until trial and if convicted faces up to life in prison. His next court date in Prince George’s County is Dec. 4 before a jury trial set for January.
Lindsey-Davis said she has talked to her son nearly every day since his arrest. He has expressed “several times how sorry he is for doing this,” she said, adding that she is “still processing everything.”
Since Sharita’s death, a custody dispute over her daughters has caused a rift in the family.
The girls are living with McCotter, Sharita’s birth mother, who filed for custody of them one day after Sharita’s funeral.
Joyce, Sharita’s adopted mother, and Lindsey-Davis have joined the case as intervenors, attempting to split full custody between themselves, the grandmothers they always knew, Joyce said.
The family feels Sharita’s absence. She was the one who did her nieces’ hair and makeup for prom and graduation. If anyone needed anything, Sharita was the one they would go to, relatives said.
When she wants to feel close to her daughter, Joyce said, she steps outside her red brick apartment building and sits in the white Honda Civic that Sharita bought last year. It’s the only possession of her daughter’s she has left.
Sharita’s scent is still there, Joyce said. So she closes the door and talks to her daughter.
Jasmine Golden and Monika Mathur contributed to this report.
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