Two Indianapolis men were charged Wednesday in the 2015 murder of Tamara Sword, the daughter of Chicago community activist Andrew Holmes, police said.
Gang unit members raided a home on the northwest side of Indianapolis, where they arrested 33-year-old Michael Edwards and 28-year-old Kenneth Jones, and seized several weapons and a small amount of narcotics, according to a release from the Indianapolis Municipal Police Department.
Jones faces two counts of murder as well as drug and weapons charges. Edwards faces a single count of murder and drug charges. Both are charged with dealing narcotics.
Sword, 32, was shot to death last September, as she sat in the passenger seat of a car parked near an Indianapolis nightclub where a flurry of gunfire erupted during a brawl. A 28-year-old man was found dead, pinned underneath a car in the parking lot.
Holmes has spent nearly a decade traveling to the scenes of shootings across Chicago’s South Side, consoling victims’ families and trying to tamp down the danger of retaliatory violence. On Wednesday night, Holmes said he had canceled meetings with relatives of two recent murder victims so he could drive to Indianapolis for Edwards and Jones’ first court appearance.
“It’s been pure Hell, I can tell you,” said Holmes, who has continued his work as a community activist in the months since his daughter was killed — and also has spent at least two weekends a month in Indianapolis, following a familiar post-murder itinerary of canvassing neighborhoods, cajoling reluctant witnesses and feeding information to police.
“The pain is incredible. The headaches, your chest so tight you feel like you’re having a heart attack. . . . I know so much about what these families that I see every day are feeling,” he said.
As he has done countless times in Chicago, Holmes knocked on doors, passed out fliers, called his daughter’s friends and other potential witnesses, and passed information on to police.
“It’s no different than how we do up here,” Holmes said. “People know. People see things, people know how things happen, and who did it. But then they wait until they get that knock on the door.”
Holmes said he didn’t know if information he uncovered led police to make the arrests, but tipsters told Holmes the names of the likely suspects and the circumstances weeks ago. In the intervening weeks, as he waited for police to build their case, Holmes said he has spent torturous hours stalking Edwards and Jones from afar by scanning their Facebook and Instagram accounts.
“They don’t have a slight bit of a damned idea the pain I’ve been going through, that they’ve put my family through,” he said. “You can see them on the Facebook page, just going on with their normal lives.”
Just as he counsels families in Chicago, Holmes said he never gave up hope that his daughter’s killers would be caught.
“I told the police when I got there that I had faith in two things: God and the Indianapolis police,” Holmes said.
