When they were kids, Rayven Amuan Edwards and her older brother would record little skits. She loved the arts and wanted to be an actress, and the siblings would re-create funny scenes from their favorite movies.
“She had a lot of dreams and aspirations,” said her brother, Raymond Edwards.
But as she grew older, Rayven Edwards, 34, faced challenges, including debilitating health issues, raising three children on her own and, according to family, police and court records, an abusive relationship with her youngest child’s father.
D.C. police said Stephon Marquis Jeter, the father of her 3-year-old son, came to her apartment in Northwest Washington’s Glover Park neighborhood Wednesday afternoon. An argument spilled into the hallway, then outside, where police said the ex-boyfriend fatally shot Edwards and wounded her 10-year-old daughter in the arm.
Then, police said, the 35-year-old Jeter grabbed the couple’s son and sped away with him in a black pickup truck heading toward Maryland.
Authorities spanning two jurisdictions searched for the truck for two hours and issued an Amber Alert for the missing child. The search ended about 6:30 p.m. when, police said, they found Jeter dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound after a police pursuit and crash in Southeast Washington. The toddler was not in the pickup truck; police said they found him later, safe with a relative.
“This is one of the most tragic circumstances I’ve ever seen,” interim D.C. police chief Jeffery Carroll told reporters. “An entire family is destroyed with the acts of one individual.”
The shooting was part of a violent few days in the District that included the fatal shooting of a suspected armed robber by a U.S. deputy marshal in Northeast and a man found dead in a suspicious apartment fire in Logan Circle. Five people have been killed in the District this year, down from 20 at this time last year. Two have been related to domestic disputes.
Violence in Glover Park, one of the city’s most affluent neighborhoods, is unusual. Wednesday’s shooting in the 4100 block of W Street Northwest was the first fatal gunfire since 2020 in the neighborhood north of Georgetown and west of Observatory Circle, home of the vice president, and near foreign embassies.
Edwards lived at the apartment. Her mother, Yvonne Edwards, 54, said her daughter was diagnosed with lupus, which caused both her kidneys to fail. She received daily dialysis treatments and was on a waiting list for a transplant, her mother said.
The family grew up near Brightwood Park in Northwest Washington, and Yvonne Edwards described them as close. She said Edwards twice saved the life of her younger brother, pulling him out of a tubful of water when she was 3 and he was 7 months, then again when her brother turned 18 and overdosed on a pill somebody gave him at a party. He collapsed in an alley, and his sister happened to go outside and quickly called 911.
“Rayven was the sweetest person,” her mother said, noting the closest she ever came to cursing was one day at a restaurant when someone used a derogatory term aimed at her mother. “It stinks in this place anyway,” Yvonne Edwards recalled her daughter saying.
“Rayven was the quietest one in the room,” Yvonne Edwards said, adding “she always wanted to be a mother” and that she had her youngest child even while suffering kidney failure. “She sacrificed everything for her kids,” said her sister, Rayne Edwards, 27.
Yvonne Edwards said her daughter and Jeter had been classmates in the second grade, but didn’t know that until the pair met through mutual friends as adults and started dating several years ago. Her mother said the relationship grew physically and mentally abusive, and D.C. police said they responded to numerous domestic-related calls. Further details were not immediately available; efforts to reach Jeter’s relatives were not successful.
D.C. court records do not show any recent criminal cases involving Jeter and Edwards, and her mother said Rayven Edwards was sometimes “scared for him to be locked up” because she wanted him to help raise his son.
Court records do show that Edwards and Jeter sought numerous temporary protective orders against each other starting in the summer of 2022 through 2025. Such cases can lead to court orders for one person in a relationship to stay away from the other.
The records show that most of the temporary orders were dismissed at or before formal hearings. In most cases, records show, the person who petitioned the court did not show up for a hearing. One case that did reach a full hearing, in 2023, was dismissed. Yvonne Edwards said her daughter was often too sick to make court dates.
Edwards’ mother said that most recently, Jeter wanted to live with Rayven and that Jeter had taken her apartment keys and thrown all her clothes out of the apartment.
“She kept telling him he couldn’t stay there,” Yvonne Edwards said.
Police said when officers arrived on W Street about 4:40 p.m. Wednesday, they found Edwards suffering from multiple gunshot wounds. She was pronounced dead at the scene. Police said her 10-year-old daughter had a gunshot wound to her arm and was treated at a hospital. Another child was not harmed.
Police said officers quickly learned that Edwards’ and Jeter’s 3-year-old son was missing and broadcast an Amber Alert with photos of the toddler, his father and a black pickup truck with Maryland license plates.
Carroll, the police chief, said officers in Prince George’s County saw the truck and pursued it into Southeast Washington to the Dupont Park neighborhood off D.C. Route 295. There, police said, the truck crashed at 30th Street and Nash Place, and Jeter was found dead inside.
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