On the morning of Monday, August 19, 2019, 76-year-old Evelyn Udell Smith opened her door to let in a deliveryman who was hauling the appliances she had purchased at Best Buy. That man, Jorge Luis Dupre Lachazo, entered the Boca Raton, Fla. home and beat Udell Smith to death with a mallet and doused her with a chemical, causing Smith to burst into flames. A month earlier, Dupre Lachazo’s driver’s license had been suspended for failure to show up to a court hearing after running a stop sign. But it is unlikely that the delivery contractor that had hired Dupre Lachazo knew about the suspension.
Years earlier, just weeks before his rampage, Navy Yard shooter Aaron Alexis had had his federal security clearance renewed, despite having been arrested three times in the previous decade. His superiors didn’t know about those arrests.