Unassigned

No Cash Bail Leaves a Pittsburgh Doctor Dead and a Growing Scandal Over Violent Offenders' Release

Eric V.
Eric V.  |  8:00 AM on September 30, 2026

The story is as tragic as it was avoidable. Dr. Idris Evans, a physician at UPMC Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh, was murdered in his own home when he and his wife, Gina, were attacked and stabbed multiple times by an intruder while they slept. Luckily, the couple's two children escaped unharmed and ran to a neighbor's home for help.

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Gina was seriously injured; Dr. Evans was pronounced dead at the hospital.

Shortly after the attack, Pittsburgh Police arrested 32-year-old Elijah Hemingway and charged him with criminal homicide, attempted homicide, burglary, and assault.

Since his arrest, he has also been charged in connection with the sexual assault of a woman, which occurred just 14 hours before the attack at the Evans' home.

Hemingway, despite having a history of violent offenses, was released on a no-cash bond in July after being charged with felony burglary.

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Now a former pretrial investigator is filing a complaint to rescind the policy.

THIS IS BETRAYAL! Cashless bail needs to be repealed NATIONWIDE.

Prosecutors and judges who keep allowing this to happen should also have to face consequences for the crimes the repeat offenders commit 😡We do not have to live like this.

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If you thought another leftist judge releasing a violent criminal back on the streets was enraging enough, it gets far worse. It appears that the Allegheny County Court that released Hemingway, and many others like him, may have been financially incentivized to do so.

Salena Zito Explains:

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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 beat that goal. It 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.

Reduce the jail population and get paid. $5.5 million since 2018. What are a few preventable rapes, robberies, and murders compared to that kind of money?

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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. The results were measurable. 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.”

A 39 percent drop in monetary bonds. Not to mention the life of a doctor, a woman who was sexually assaulted, and who knows how many other victims of violent crime who could have been spared if their offenders were kept in jail.

That's what $5.5 million bought Allegheny County residents. Not that we'll ever know for sure. The county doesn't publish records of how many offenders commit violent crimes after receiving no-cash bail.

Allegheny County doesn’t publish a running count of people who were 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.

The MacArthur Foundation's 2 percent figure may sound small until you consider that, with thousands of cases, violent crimes quickly add up.

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Two percent sounds small until you remember the volume. Allegheny County Pretrial Services completed more than 18,000 bail investigations in 2019 alone. Even a small share of that, in a single county, is not an abstraction. It’s a woman on a footpath off West Street. It’s a family on Linden Avenue.

And Western Pennsylvania has seen this before. KDKA Investigates reviewed hundreds of arraignments by district judges who ran on not setting cash bail. One of those cases was Anthony Quesen, released on nonmonetary bond after a 2023 assault at Point State Park. He was later charged with stabbing off-duty state liquor enforcement officer Benjamin Brallier to death on the Montour Trail, and he pleaded guilty but mentally ill to third-degree murder.

We covered Officer Brallier's murder here.

Sadly, not much has changed. Potentially violent offenders keep getting released, and innocent people keep getting hurt. All because the money keeps coming in.

It's much more likely that they just don't care about us at all.

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We'll file the chances of any kind of accountability under we'll believe it when we see it.

Good question, but it's always (d)ifferent when they (d)o it.

A grant which the MacArthur Foundation says is meant to help the poor instead keeps predators free to find new prey.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

As evil as they may be, they are entrenched. Residents of places like Pittsburgh and Allegheny County repeatedly vote for more of the same. Until they are ready to vote for change, there will be more of the same.

They'll just keep pouring pavement on the long road to hell.