Salena Zito: The night Linden Avenue stopped feeling safe

EDGEWOOD, Pa. ― The Evans family threw a Halloween party every year in their backyard on Linden Avenue. Neighbor Jeannine Fisher told WPXI that she remembers "tons of people and kids" there. She also remembers the first time she met Idris Evans: He helped carry her groceries from down the street to her house.

It's the kind of street where that still happens. It's also the kind of street where people don't think much about whether the kitchen window is open on a warm September night.

Just after midnight on Sept. 24, police say someone came through that window.

Evans, 46, and his wife, Gina, woke up in their third-floor bedroom to find a man in his underwear attacking them with a kitchen knife. Gina Evans later told police, according to the criminal complaint, that the man was "psychotic" and kept talking about God and being God. She yelled for their boys, 8 and 12, to run to a neighbor's house, and they did. Then, badly wounded, she ran to another neighbor's house herself.

Her husband died in the hospital. He was a pediatric critical care physician at UPMC Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh, co-medical director of its pediatric transport team, and an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

Police found the suspect hiding in neighbor Sandra Trappen's garden, bleeding from deep cuts on his hands.

His name is Elijah Hemingway. He is 32 and from Pittsburgh's Hazelwood neighborhood. He is charged with criminal homicide, attempted homicide, burglary and aggravated assault. He is presumed innocent.

What has unsettled people well beyond this block is what came out over the next 72 hours. Hemingway had been arrested in Allegheny County in July on a felony burglary charge and released without posting a dime. He had spent most of 2025 in a Florida jail and a court-ordered mental-health commitment after allegedly beating a girlfriend and fighting sheriff's deputies. And on Saturday, county police charged him with raping a woman on a footpath in Wilkinsburg, a working-class borough bordering Pittsburgh, about 14 hours before the Evans family was attacked.

Here is what the record shows about how Hemingway ended up on the street.

On Feb. 6, according to police, a woman on the North Side of Pittsburgh came home from dropping her child off at day care and noticed her laptop had been moved. Her Nest camera showed her former partner, a man she said had never lived there and wasn't allowed inside, forcing his way in and leaving with two iPhones and the laptop.

He wasn't arrested until July 9. A day later, Senior District Judge Anthony Ceoffe released him on nonmonetary bond ― that is, without payment.

Hemingway had pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct in Allegheny County in 2018, 2021 and 2023. In each case, a Tribune-Review found, the criminal complaint listed a current or former domestic partner as the victim. WPXI counted 16 prior charges on his record. And when the Volusia County, Florida, sheriff's office ran his history last year, it reported "multiple prior arrests in Pennsylvania for assault and aggravated assault with no prosecution."

Three domestic cases that ended as disorderly conduct pleas. A burglary of an ex-partner's home. On paper, Hemingway was a man with no record that counted.

District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala Jr. said his office wasn't in the room. Prosecutors, he explained, don't attend preliminary arraignments "unless we are asked to attend those by police or concerned citizens, victims who are being intimidated."

"Had we known about this and known about his rap sheet," Zappala said, "we probably would have taken an appeal with Judge (Edward) Borkowski."

District Court Administrator Joseph J. Asturi said judges at Pittsburgh Municipal Court arraignments receive the criminal complaint, affidavit, warrant, a pretrial risk assessment and criminal history. What nobody has said publicly yet is whether that history included Florida, or what the risk assessment recommended.

Hemingway's Florida troubles began in March 2025 in Deltona, where he was living with a girlfriend. On March 19, deputies were called to the home. According to the sheriff's office, the woman said he grabbed her by the neck, pushed her down onto a bed, and hit her two or three times, and she took her son and locked them both in a bedroom. Deputies wrote that Hemingway "began rambling on to deputies about not accepting vampires." He was charged with domestic battery and released.

Thirteen days later, he was arrested again, and he was still on pretrial release in the domestic case. On April 1, 2025, a bank employee said Hemingway threatened to hurt the employee's wife and children. When a deputy tried to take him in for a mental health evaluation, Hemingway, who kept calling himself "Egyptian Pharaoh King (Tutankhamun)," punched the deputy in the face and fought off others.

This time, Florida held him. In June 2025, Circuit Judge Karen Foxman found him incompetent to stand trial, noting a "substantial likelihood" that without treatment he would be a danger to himself or others, and ordered him held until he could be restored. 

In October 2025, the Department of Children and Families told the court that he was competent. On Nov. 21, he pleaded no contest to the officer battery charges and was sentenced to time served, roughly eight months. Adjudication was withheld, which means Florida did not formally convict him of those felonies. On Dec. 1, he was adjudicated guilty of misdemeanor battery and of violating the conditions of his pretrial release.

The first release, after the domestic battery arrest in March, looks bad in hindsight. He was back in handcuffs within two weeks, this time for fighting deputies. The second release, at the end, followed the formal steps: an incompetency finding, months of treatment, a state agency certifying him competent, a plea and a sentence.

The problem isn't that a judge cut him loose early. It's what happened after the door opened. Nothing in the public record I could find shows anyone kept watching a man a Florida judge had called a likely danger without treatment, or that anyone passed that warning to Pennsylvania.

And "adjudication withheld" matters. Pennsylvania's online court system doesn't show out-of-state cases at all. And on a national background check, a Florida felony case involving three counts of battery on officers can show up as something less than a conviction. Either way, a Pittsburgh arraignment could easily see a guy with a few summary offenses.

How did this county come to release a man like this so easily?

Part of the answer is a decade of deliberate policy. Some of it was paid for by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation when it awarded Allegheny County a Safety and Justice Challenge grant. The initiative describes its mission as fighting "the misuse and overuse of jails." The county's own first-year report is blunt about what the money was for: "to reduce the population of the Allegheny County Jail by 20%."

The county reported a 36% reduction in its jail population during that first two-year grant.

The MacArthur Foundation then renewed: $2 million in 2020, $1.17 million in 2022 over four years, and $334,000 in 2024. In all, $5.5 million since 2018. The county has said it was chosen for the 2021 renewal "based on the promise and progress of work to date."

In other words, results got rewarded.

What did the money buy? The county's reports list public defenders at overnight arraignments, hiring staff so every district judge could get a pretrial risk assessment, and faster court processing. At the overnight arraignments where public defenders began appearing, district judges set money bonds 39% less often than in the same period of 2018. And the county's pretrial office, in its own words, "never recommends money bail, which is ineffective and unfair to people who are poor."

That recommendation creates a system built to say yes to release, one that measures success by how many beds sit empty. Keeping a man in jail requires somebody to push against that current. At Hemingway's arraignment, by the district attorney's own account, nobody from his office was there to push.

Nonmonetary bond for a burglary charge with a thin Pennsylvania record was common in Allegheny County before the MacArthur Foundation arrived. Florida, remember, let him go the first time too. What the record does show is a county that took foundation money on the promise of shrinking its jail, reported that shrinkage back to the funder, and got more money for it.

Allegheny County doesn't publish a running count of people released pretrial and then charged with a violent crime. What's available points in different directions. The MacArthur Foundation's own evaluators report that across all participating sites, people released pretrial were "no more likely to return to jail for a new crime after strategies were implemented than before," and about 2% came back charged with a new violent crime.

A 2018 county pretrial outcome report put the local "safety rate" at 89% ― roughly 11 in 100 released defendants picked up new criminal activity while their cases were pending.

Hemingway was arraigned on Sept. 26 and denied bail. His preliminary hearing is on Friday.

"(W)e are sure that many of you may be feeling shaken," an Edgewood Borough Police Department statement said.

Shaken is the right word. People here aren't calling for anyone's head in a jail cell because he's poor. They're asking something narrower and harder.

When a man shows up at a bail hearing with a record that includes three domestic cases, a burglary of an ex-partner's home, and a Florida judge's warning that he's dangerous without treatment, and nobody at that hearing knew it, why doesn't someone in the system stand up and say, "Not this one"?

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Salena Zito is a staff reporter and columnist for the Washington Examiner.