LOCAL CRIME & PUBLIC SAFETY

When 5 teen girls allegedly beat her son to death, she kept his casket open

As the trial in the 2023 beating death of Reginald “Reggie” Brown begins, his 90-year-old mother, Annie Mae Brown Mouton, seeks “justice.”


Annie Mae Brown Mouton, 90, holds a photo of her son Reginald “Reggie” Brown, who was beaten to death last year in the 6200 block of Georgia Avenue NW. He was 64 at the time. (Michael A. McCoy for The Washington Post)

By Keith L. Alexander
September 2, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

When Reginald “Reggie” Brown didn’t return to his sister’s home in upper Northwest Washington after a late-night walk, his mother and siblings assumed his weakened body had finally failed him.

At 64, Brown had battled lupus since he was a teen. He had recently recovered from covid-19. And he was undergoing treatment for cancer. … But when the body of Annie Mae Brown Mouton’s youngest child was released to the family, the funeral director, stunned at Brown’s condition, advised against an open casket.

Police would ultimately arrest five girls ages 12 to 15 in a brutal, unprovoked beating of Brown last year. During the attack, cellphone video and nearby security cameras captured the girls kicking and stomping Brown’s head into the pavement, pulling his pants down around his ankles, and removing his belt and beating him with it, shouting in jubilation as he begins to bleed. … The attack stunned the nation’s capital for its cruelty and for what it appeared to signal about the state of young people in a year that saw a generational spike in violence, with victims and perpetrators, officials said, seeming to grow ever younger.

Brown Mouton, now 90, instructed the mortician to do the best he could to reconstruct her son’s face. But no matter the result, she was resolved to do as Mamie Till had for her son, Emmett, whose brutal 1955 murder galvanized the civil rights movement — leave the casket open for the world to witness. … “I wanted everyone to see what happened to him,” she recalled.

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Reginald Brown in an undated photo. He had suffered health problems since he was young, his family said, and was undergoing treatment for cancer. (Family photo)

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By Keith L. Alexander
Keith L. Alexander covers crime and courts, specifically D.C. Superior Court cases, for The Washington Post. Alexander was part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team that investigated fatal police shootings across the nation in 2015. Follow for updates @keithlalexander Twitter