Shooting victim’s mother asks to have Portsmouth commonwealth’s attorney removed as special prosecutor
HOPEWELL — It’s been more than four years since 31-year-old Angel DeCarlo was fatally shot by a police detective responding to a convenience store armed robbery in late 2018.
Because a local officer was involved, Virginia State Police were asked to investigate, and a special prosecutor was appointed to determine whether he should face charges. Portsmouth Commonwealth’s Attorney Stephanie Morales agreed to serve as special prosecutor.
That was May 2019. A decision by Morales’ office as to whether an indictment should be sought has yet to be announced.
During a hearing Friday in Hopewell Circuit Court, a lawyer who represents Angel DeCarlo’s mother, Emily DeCarlo, asked Judge Wallace Brittle to remove Morales from the case and appoint another special prosecutor.
“It’s been four years, two months and 12 days,” since she was asked to handle the case, attorney Brian Telfair told the judge. “We need some sort of closure not only for the family, but for the detective and the people of the Hopewell community.”
The shooting happened Dec. 18, 2018, at a convenience store on Winston Churchill Drive in Hopewell, a city of roughly 23,000 people about 20 miles south of Richmond.
Police said officers were responding to an armed robbery call when they saw a woman who matched the suspect’s description nearby and ordered her to stop. They said the woman pointed a gun at one officer who then fired at her. DeCarlo was pronounced dead at the scene.
DeCarlo’s mother has disputed the police’s version of events and filed a civil lawsuit against the city and the detective in 2021 but agreed to withdraw it last year while she waited for Morales’ office to conclude its investigation, Telfair said. The family plans to refile later, he said.
Brittle said he was concerned the investigation has gone on for so long. He said that while he understood such inquiries can take a long time, he questioned whether the circumstances would have been the same had the officer been the one shot.
“If Angel had shot him, I bet Angel would have been indicted in minutes,” he said.
But the judge also questioned whether it was in the best interest of the DeCarlo family to have another commonwealth’s attorney assigned to the case.
“You’re not going to find a prosecutor more willing to prosecute a police officer than Ms. Morales,” Brittle said, referring to the many cases her office has filed against local police officers, including the successful prosecution of Portsmouth police officer Stephen Rankin, who was found guilty of manslaughter for the 2015 fatal shooting of a shoplifting suspect.
Morales, who was accompanied in court by four staff members, said she and her team have been working diligently on the case since the beginning, gathering evidence and meeting numerous times with state police investigators, medical experts and others involved. It sometimes was delayed waiting on evidence, including a phone for Angel DeCarlo the family was supposed to turn over, she said.
Morales told Brittle her office reached a decision in January on whether to recommend an indictment and scheduled a meeting with DeCarlo’s mother so they could tell her the news first. The meeting was canceled, however, when Telfair became ill and was never rescheduled, she said. Telfair filed his petition seeking to have Morales removed around that time and talks between the two sides came to a halt, she said.
“We’ve been working extremely hard on this,” Portsmouth Senior Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Haille Hogfeldt told Brittle. “To say that we haven’t properly investigated this is insulting.”
The judge told the two sides he’d hold off on a decision for two months, with the hopes a resolution will come before then. Morales and Telfair also agreed to meet soon.
Jane Harper, jane.harper@pilotonline.com
