Lake County homicide numbers dropped again in 2024, a positive trend for local law enforcement agencies despite continued safety concerns throughout the Calumet Region as homicide numbers rose elsewhere.
The Lake County Coroner's Office investigated 65 homicides in 2024, it said, a 12% decrease from the 74 in 2023 and a 35% decline from 2022's numbers.
The Cook County Medical Examiner's Office investigated an additional five homicides that occurred in Lake County in 2024, its online case archive shows. Those victims were transported to Cook County, where they ultimately succumbed to their injuries.
But homicide numbers increased from 2023 in Porter and LaPorte counties, a grim reminder that there's still work to be done to curb violent crime in the Region.
There were eight homicide investigations in Porter County, its coroner's office said, more than the total in the last two years combined and the most in a single calendar year in recent Porter County history.
Seven homicides took place in LaPorte County in 2024, one more than in 2023, LaPorte County Coroner Lynn Swanson said.
Breaking down Lake County's data
The Lake County Coroner's Office said it investigated 36 homicides in Gary. While that's more than half of all homicide victims in Lake County, it's still a more than 30% decrease from the 52 in 2023 and the lowest since at least 2021, when the city saw 48.
In Hammond, 13 people were killed in 2024, the coroner's office said. Four homicides occurred in East Chicago.
The average age of homicide victims investigated by the Lake County Coroner's Office was approximately 36. Forty-nine of the 65 victims were Black, while nine were white and seven were Hispanic. The coroner's office has stated the cause of death in 60 of the cases so far — 53 of them involve at least one gunshot wound.
The youngest victim was 2-year-old Je'Loni Smith, who suffered blunt force injuries to his torso and was found "lifeless" in a bathtub on Nov. 4. His mother's boyfriend, Ricky Larkin, was charged with the child's murder that month.
June saw more homicides than any other month in Lake County with 12 in 2024. There were 11 in March.
East Chicago's four homicides marked a 69% drop over a four-year period and the lowest in at least 12 years, officials said. Detectives "solved and charged" suspects in all four alleged killings, said Jose Rivera, East Chicago's police chief.
Rivera credited the 100% solve rate to the department's new relationship with the Lake County Prosecutor's Homicide Task Force. The department assigned Detective Sgt. David Moran to the task force at the end of 2023.
"By joining the task force, our department gained valuable resources from all the agencies that participate in the task force as well as from the Lake County Prosecutors Office," Rivera said. "This would not have been possible without the experience and resources the Lake County Prosecutor’s Homicide Task Force brings."
On average, approximately 58% of all homicide cases were "cleared" in 2023, according to national statistics from the FBI. A case is cleared if at least one person has been arrested or charged or if police have gathered enough evidence to arrest but circumstances outside their control prevent them from doing so.
The Gary Police Department said it cleared 74% of its homicides, joining East Chicago as cities above the national average in clearance rate.
Margaret Sangerman was Lake County's oldest homicide victim in 2024.
But the 73-year-old woman — who went by "Pegg" — had a spirit far younger than her age, according to her obituary. She was found dead inside her Miller Beach house on Dec. 18 with multiple gunshot wounds. Her husband, Mike Sangerman, was also shot but survived. No one has been arrested or charged in connection with Pegg's death.
Family and friends called Pegg "generous and loyal," "fierce and compassionate" and "brilliant and spontaneously funny." She was the life of every party, according to her obituary.
"It never got old, and neither did Pegg," her obituary reads. "News reports referring to Pegg as an 'elderly' woman were slanderous."
62-year-old Leonard Washington Jr., the older brother of City of Gary Councilman Darren Washington, was found lying outside a yard on Oct. 27 in Gary's 2200 block of Baker Street.
Washington said detectives are still gathering information and have not made any arrests related to his brother's homicide.
"I'm patient because I understand that with the crime rate being higher in Gary, while they're investigating my brother, they have other investigations," Washington said. "So the more crime happens, the more caseload, and everybody feels, as they should, that their loved one who has been robbed or been part of a homicide, they believe that their case should be at the top of the list."
For the city councilman who fights every day to implement measures that will reduce crime in Gary, things suddenly became more personal in October.
"None of this hits you until somebody in your immediate family is involved in a homicide," Washington said, adding that he does not want his brother's case to get more attention than anyone else's just because he is an elected official. "My goal is to use my voice and my position as a councilman to fight to help reduce homicides in our city."
It's not an easy task, he admitted. But Washington made it clear that it will take far more than simply increasing the number of police officers patrolling the streets.
"They (police officers) react to crime, and the only way that they can stop crime from happening in the beginning is that you have to have a police officer assigned to every resident or every family in the city," Washington said. "And you can't do that."
The solution exists outside the scope of policing, Washington believes.
"What literally stops crime is that we gotta get businesses in this community," he said. "We gotta create jobs. We gotta create opportunities for people to be able to go to work and live [in Gary]."