Sometimes he stayed with his great-aunt in Washington. Sometimes he lived on the street. “He would get new phones like people would change socks,” his father said.
In 2019, facing assault charges, Mr. Brevard was found incompetent to stand trial and was sent to St. Elizabeths Hospital, a psychiatric center where Mr. Holmes had also spent time. He was discharged after a week, despite his father’s pleas to admit him for longer treatment.
Mr. Brevard’s father said he later tried to have his son admitted to another clinic, the Washington Hospital Center, but was told that “he is an adult and I cannot have him admitted.”
He added: “He didn’t want to be committed, but he wasn’t in his right mind.”
Mr Brevard was released from his most recent jail term last July, just before he turned 30. A while later, he got a job at City Winery DC, an upscale restaurant and concert venue in the block behind the New York Avenue Men’s Emergency Shelter, where he stayed.
Another resident of the shelter, who gave his name only as Anthony, 50, knew Mr Brevard by sight. One night this month, Anthony said, he and a friend were drinking in the alley behind the hideout, two blocks from Mr. Holmes’ tent, when they saw a man who looked like Mr. Brevard, twice in a short space of time. with his face covered. “I said to myself, ‘Why is he so covered?'” Anthony said.
Later he heard shots. Mr. Holmes’s burned body was discovered the next morning. Two days later, prosecutors said, Mr. Brevard went to New York.
‘Where he died – that’s his home’
At the polyglot open-air market in lower Manhattan, where Chinatown meets SoHo and the streets bustle with tourists and sellers of handbags and watches, Abdoulaye Coulibaly was as familiar as he was mysterious.
