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James Angelo. photo/courtesy Mercy Hospital

After four months, hospital guard’s murder still a mystery
Stressed police department struggling to solve case

By Joshua Miller 

At the end of the rainiest day of the rainiest month in Portland’s recorded history, James Angelo began his last shift as a Mercy Hospital security guard. Thick, menacing clouds had hung over Portland throughout Sat., Sept. 6, intermittently letting loose torrents of soaking rain. On a break a little more than halfway through his 11 p.m.–7 a.m. shift, Angelo, 27, a short Sudanese man with a deep voice and an even temperament, walked outside for some early Sunday morning air. 

As he started his break a few minutes before 4 a.m., Angelo’s thoughts may have wandered to his two-year-old daughter, Amari Elizabeth. He had begun working as a guard at Mercy four months earlier to better support the child and her mother, Karsha MacKenzie, his girlfriend. The late shift at the hospital offered better pay and better benefits than his previous job cooking at DiMillo’s Floating Restaurant, where he had worked since high school. Looking out at the empty street, Angelo may have pondered the chances of his much-loved New England Patriots in their season-opener that afternoon. Or he may have just been looking forward to finishing his shift, going home to the apartment he shared with his girlfriend and daughter on Sherman Street, and getting some sleep. 

The rain had stopped at 2 a.m., but two hours later, the humid air still felt thick and heavy. Near the hospital’s back entrance on Winter Street, two men approached Angelo, who was in uniform but unarmed.

At 4 a.m. in the West End neighborhood that surrounds Mercy Hospital, most residents were asleep, James Broadbent included. A lanky architect with a shaved head and glasses, Broadbent usually sleeps soundly through any commotion, even when his wife is awakened by loud revelers on hot summer nights. In the early hours of that Sunday morning, however, he sat up suddenly in bed. Broadbent heard five gunshots in quick succession, as if someone was pulling the trigger of their weapon as fast as they could. A few moments passed, and then he heard sirens.

Portland police arrived on the scene shortly after the shooting. But nearly four months after Angelo’s murder, the case remains unsolved.  

Based on the hospital’s security camera footage, police told the media they are seeking two men who fled the scene. Mercy Hospital offered a substantial reward for information about the murder, a sum that has been increased twice and now stands at $41,000 — the largest reward offered for information about a crime in Portland’s history. And yet no one has called police with any usable information.

“It’s a difficult case,” said interim Portland Police Chief Joe Loughlin. “And what’s extremely unusual is that we have no one coming forward. To have that amount of money, to have no one coming forward is [strange].” 

Loughlin said his department has some physical evidence from the scene, but nothing conclusive. “We have some angles that we are working, some leads that we are working, but nothing to hang our hat on, so to speak,” he said. 

Though he tries not to show it, you can hear the exhaustion and exasperation in Loughlin’s voice. His department has 14 fewer people on staff than it did a year ago (seven fewer officers and seven fewer civilian administrators). A grant-funded position that paid for a full-time liaison to Portland’s immigrant communities in 2006 was discontinued in 2007 due to budget constraints. 

Two other key law enforcement positions are also vacant. The department used to have two deputy chiefs to assist the chief— one oversaw the Detective Division, the other oversaw patrol. Loughlin is essentially doing all three jobs, and will continue to do so until the city hires a new chief sometime later this year. (Loughlin has applied for that position.)

“We’re functioning under a lot of strain,” said Loughlin, though he also said the challenges his department is facing are not affecting its effort to solve Angelo’s murder. “We put all our resources into something like that,” he said, and the PPD continues to work with federal authorities on the case.

With the city facing another extremely difficult budget this spring, there’s no assurance any positions in the department will be restored. In fact, further cuts are possible. “I don’t know what to expect,” said Loughlin.  

While the chief ponders the future, Angelo’s family and friends think of the past, left with nothing but memories and unanswered questions. 

•  •  •

Angelo’s journey to Mercy began thousands of miles away. When he was young, his family left war-torn Sudan for a refugee camp in Cairo, and eventually made their way to the United States. 

At 14, Angelo arrived in Maine without any English, but with incredible footwork. Despite his stature — he stood at 5’3” as an adult — Angelo was a highly skilled soccer player. He played varsity soccer at Portland High School and coached a youth soccer team, Portland United, after graduation. He is remembered as being deeply invested in the team. 

“You can watch him on the sideline, whenever we screwed up, jumping up and down, dropping his clipboard,” said Alfred Jacob, who now coaches United. “Or you would see him running up and down whenever there was a goal.” Sometimes when his team scored, Angelo would run onto the field, screaming in celebration with them. “He was someone with a good heart,” Jacob said. “You know, when you talk to him, he’s very straightforward, he doesn’t dodge around the corner.”

Off the field, Angelo was eminently calm and collected. According to his family, he was planning to enroll in a criminal justice program and hoped to become a police officer. He was soft-spoken, a peacemaker who would get involved in an altercation to break up the fight. 

“James was a more reserved than a dominant person,” Genet Gebrewahd, a friend, said. Like many of Angelo’s friends, Gebrewahd remembers “just his smile — his beautiful smile — and his gentle personality and his respectfulness.”

•  •  •

It was already a busy night for Dr. Marc Hoffman, the attending physician in Mercy’s emergency room, when a security guard came running in and said James was down in the parking lot and there had been reports of gunshots. Hoffman and two nurses sprinted out back and found Angelo face-down on the pavement, almost unconscious. There was no blood, and in the semi-darkness it was unclear whether Angelo had been shot or not. However, once they got him on a stretcher and wheeled him inside, what had happened became clear.

“That’s when we saw a very small bullet entrance wound in his upper back, upper right, above the scapula,” said Dr. Hoffman. “So there was this little wound, not bleeding, and we didn’t find any exit wound.” The Mercy ER team had already called an ambulance, and Angelo was rushed to the nearest hospital with a surgeon on call, Maine Medical Center. He died shortly after his arrival. 

“The video wasn’t particularly clear, because of the rain on the lens covers,” said Mike Sperry, Mercy’s director of security. Surveillance camera footage indicates one of the men who approached Angelo was a short, clean-shaven black man in his early 20s with short hair, wearing black pants and a white hoodie with a logo or design on it. The other assailant was wearing a light-colored top of some sort, but all other details were obscured. 

Police were at a disadvantage from the moment they arrived. Given the hour, there were few people awake in the neighborhood and even fewer roaming the streets. Any physical evidence left by the shooters — hairs, fibers, clues of one kind or another — may have been lost on the wet ground. “Given the amount of rain, it didn’t really help preserve the scene too much,” Sperry said.

News of the murder spread quickly in Portland’s Sudanese community, whose members reacted with dismay and horror. They sent a letter to city officials that said they no longer feel safe in Portland, and urged police to do more to protect them and solve Angelo’s murder and other crimes against immigrants.

“The most shocking thing is to have that happen to a person like James,” Gebrewahd said. “He was not a person who evoked any type of violence. He was always quiet and reserved, very respectful towards others.”

In a quiet corner of Calvary Cemetery  in South Portland, James Angelo’s grave lies unmarked and unkempt, covered with lumpy sod and bits of hay.

In Sudanese culture, when there is a death without closure the dirt over the coffin is left rough. When the circumstances surrounding the death become known, a celebratory ceremony in remembrance of the deceased is held, and the soil is smoothed.

“But for now, his grave is not rested, and that’s how we can tell he’s also not happy,” said Okeny Paeli, a close friend who’d known Angelo since they were teens. “He’s not happy because someone killed him for no reason.”

“The family, the community, nobody knows why, so we are also not happy,” Paeli continued. “The grave will be like that until the killer is found.”

Paeli saw Angelo the weekend before he was killed. “He got his life all together after suffering and going through ups and downs over the last 10 years,” he said. “But he was ready to be a man now — to be independent for himself. He had a job, he was going to go to school, he had a daughter. So his life was coming together. And that’s when…” Paeli trailed off.

“He’s physically gone,” he said, “but James’ spirit is still around us.”

Joshua Miller, who produced the seeds of this article while a student at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, is currently an editorial intern at The Atlantic in Washington, D.C.