Two 16-year-olds charged as adults in Brentwood teen killing

Prince George’s County police announced June 25 that two 16-year-old boys from Mount Rainier were charged as adults in the fatal shooting of 16-year-old Ruben Arevalo Saavedra of Hyattsville. The teenagers face first-degree murder, second-degree murder and related offenses, and police said they are being held by the Prince George’s County Department of Corrections on no-bond status.

Officers were called to the 3700 block of Shepherd Street in Brentwood at about 4:55 p.m. on June 12 after reports of gunfire, police said. Saavedra was found outside with gunshot wounds and was pronounced dead at the scene. Investigators said the shooting stemmed from an ongoing dispute and that the victim and the suspects knew each other, a detail that places the case squarely in the county’s broader struggle with youth-on-youth gun violence.

The arrests came through the work of the PGPD Homicide Unit and the PGPD Fugitive Unit, which is part of the U.S. Marshals Service Capital Area Regional Fugitive Task Force. Police have kept the case active and are still asking for tips through Prince George’s County Crime Solvers and P3 Tips as prosecutors prepare to move the case through the court system.

The decision to charge two 16-year-olds as adults comes as Maryland has recently changed how some violent juvenile cases are handled, ending automatic adult charges for certain 16- and 17-year-olds in serious offenses. That shift puts renewed attention on cases like this one, where county prosecutors and police are treating a teen dispute as an adult murder case because of the severity of the allegation and the age of the defendants.

Brentwood, Mount Rainier and Hyattsville sit close together in the county’s inner-Beltway corridor, where school-age conflicts can spread quickly across neighboring blocks and municipalities. Prince George’s County police also maintain a daily crime report and an open-data portal for incidents reported since February 2017, part of the department’s effort to track crime patterns across the county as families in Brentwood and nearby communities confront another teenage death.