The Night Linden Avenue Stopped Feeling Safe
11th October 2026
The Evans family threw a Halloween party every year in their backyard on Linden Avenue. Neighbor Jeannine Fisher told WPXI, the local NBC affiliate, 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.