JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – December has been a busy month for the homicide division at the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office.
There have been 10 homicides so far this month, and many of them remain unsolved.
News4Jax records show that for 2015, the number of homicides in Duval County is now up to 112, a pace similar to last year. There were nine homicides in November.
With about a week to go, Duval County is already up to 10 homicides in December. All of them happened within a 19-day period.
There were three homicides in two days this week alone.
On Sunday, 17-year-old Jacoby Wright was found murdered after his body was dumped on Carvill Avenue.
The next day, 28-year-old Justin Grant was killed and another person was injured in a double shooting at Portsmouth and Waynesboro avenues. The same night, 57-year-old Anatoliy Glavnik was shot and killed by an intruder in front of his family at his home on the Southside.
“In terms of prevention, it makes it difficult, because there are so many different reasons to why these homicides are occurring,” News4Jax crime and safety analyst Gil Smith said.
Looking at numbers in recent years, during December 2014, there were 11 homicides in Duval County. In 2013, there were eight, and in 2012, there were 15.
Smith said that JSO has plenty of resources to make sure thorough investigations are done for each crime.
“At 10 this month, that is sort of the average throughout the year. They just allocate the resources as they come. If the homicides are solved pretty quickly, it frees them up to work on others,” Smith said. “It doesn't strain the resources any more than it would throughout the year.”
Smith said despite the numbers being in line with the average over the last few years, the goal should be to get them much lower.
“You would like to have none, but the thing about homicides that makes it different from most other crimes are the motives are always different,” Smith said. "You could have some that are home invasion, some that are just robbery that turns into a homicide, domestic violence disputes, brother against brother. They are sort of all over the place.”
Two of the December homicides happened less than a mile apart on Portsmouth Avenue.
On Dec. 16, Antreenio Hardwick was found dead inside a vacant home on that street. Five days later, the shooting of Grant happened about a half a mile away. No shooter has been caught in either case.
In fact, only one of this month’s homicides has led to an arrest so far. Smith said that isn’t uncommon.
“Sometimes they take a month or two months to make an arrest,” he said. “Just like if you look at the homicides in June or in January by the end of that month, and I doubt they had many arrests.”