Zack Freeling death in D.C. now ruled a homicide

At 26, Zack Freeling had already endured the suicides of his father and brother and the loss of his mother to cancer when, in the summer of 2021, his mentor was electrocuted.

The loss of that friend and father figure rocked Freeling. But he vowed then to keep pressing on with his dream — a D.C. food truck that the mentor had encouraged him to complete. “He taught me to never quit,” Freeling said on social media. “I will continue to fight on in your memory. I will not give up.”

Three months later, Freeling was found dead in the foyer of his home on Quincy Place NE. He had been shot once in the left shoulder, and the bullet had traveled downward through his heart, his family said.

When the D.C. medical examiner’s officer ruled his manner of death “undetermined,” police initially suspected suicide, to the outrage of family members who challenged the decision. The gun was found at the scene, not typical for a homicide; but he was shot in the shoulder, not typical for a suicide. However, the D.C. crime lab was not taking cases as it dealt with losing its accreditation earlier in 2021, so tests to detect things such as gunpowder residue weren’t done, investigators hired by the family said.

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Nearly three years later, chief medical examiner Francisco J. Diaz reclassified the case: Freeling’s manner of death is now a homicide, D.C. police announced last week — a move that opens the door for police to pursue charges.

“Just because there’s suicide in the family doesn’t mean this was a suicide,” said his uncle, Bruce Weiss, who began regularly calling the medical examiner’s office in 2021 and found a sympathetic ear in Diaz.

“Dr. Diaz is a jewel,” said Freeling’s aunt, Isa Freeling. “He was comforting and kind and diligent, and even though it took three years, he did what he had to do.”

Diaz said in an interview that TV shows and films have created an unrealistic expectation of quick answers after a death. When he worked in Wayne County, Mich., as an assistant medical examiner, he once changed an “undetermined” death to “homicide” 30 years after the event.

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“New information came to light,” Diaz said of that case. “These types of things occur. People expect instantaneous results, like on TV.”

In Freeling’s case, lab tests had to be farmed out to private labs because the D.C. crime lab had lost its accreditation and the FBI lab was deeply backed up, Diaz said. When the results came back this year, Diaz felt comfortable declaring the case a homicide. He would not detail the type of tests, citing the ongoing investigation. The homicide finding means only that a death was caused by another person, not that a murder was committed. Murder is a criminal act, to be charged and adjudicated by the courts.

Freeling grew up in Bethesda and attended Georgetown Day School, where he made friends easily and participated on the wrestling team, his aunt said. Freeling’s father “used to call him his ‘little lion,’” said Isa Freeling. “He’d say, ‘Roar for me, Zack,’ and he’d roar.”

She said Freeling “was an adventurer, he was full of life and he was compassionate. … He was just full of fun and love. He had no judgment on anybody.”

Freeling first got the idea of a kosher food truck while he attended Vanderbilt University, and he named it Aryeh’s Kitchen, with aryeh being the Hebrew word for lion. Built into an Airstream trailer, the truck did well. But it was too tough to balance with a full class load, and Freeling eventually donated it to the Jewish community at Vanderbilt.

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While Freeling was at college, his older brother Sam, who his family said had struggled with mental health issues, took his own life in 2013. His father, Kenneth Freeling, was devastated, Isa Freeling said. A former partner at two large law firms and then of counsel at Covington & Burling, Kenneth Freeling leaped to his death from his Park Avenue apartment in March 2017, shortly before Zack’s graduation from Vanderbilt.

Freeling’s parents had divorced, so Zack inherited much of his father’s estate, which came to about $5 million, his aunt said. Court records show his mother sued her son for the $5 million in 2018, claiming fraud. Then in 2019, his mother, Sue Cimbricz, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Zack helped nurse her, his family said. Days before her death, in January 2020, he posted a photo from her hospital bedside: “Happy birthday mom. I love you.”

“Zack was a very courageous person,” Isa Freeling said, “with all of this happening to him, his mother suing him, having to take care of her as she lay dying. He stuck it out, he wanted to live, he wanted to make that food truck work.”

It was through that work that Zack Freeling came to know Corries Hardy, a fellow food truck owner who cheered Freeling on and treated him like family, Isa Freeling recalled. Freeling’s truck was again named Aryeh’s Kitchen, to dish up “Southern kosher” fare with “lots of steak, lots of meat,” said his aunt. He printed up T-shirts with the truck’s logo, was gradually navigating D.C.’s health department certification process and hired a team of workers in anticipation of the truck’s launch.

But Freeling was “trusting,” his uncle said. “He wasn’t maybe as street-smart as he could be. He had some money because his father passed away, people knew that and they took advantage of him.” His aunt and uncle said Freeling hired people to work on his truck without checking their backgrounds, and that his family worried about him.

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Freeling’s roommate was the one who called police on Oct. 18, 2021, to report finding Freeling unconscious on the first floor of the rented townhouse they shared, according to a D.C. police report. Paramedics tried to resuscitate him, but Freeling was pronounced dead at the scene with a single gunshot wound, the report states.

When Freeling’s family learned that the manner of death was “undetermined,” they were stunned. They met with D.C. police, who moved the case from its suicide investigators to its homicide detectives.

Isa Freeling and Weiss said detectives listened and seemed receptive, but that nothing changed. They hired private detectives from an agency in New York.

“We did an extensive analysis of the autopsy,” said Michael Ruggiero, the president of the Beau Dietl & Associates agency. “We determined, from the trajectory of the bullet, this in no way made sense as a suicide. You would have to hold the gun at an angle that was physically impossible.”

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The gun belonged to Freeling’s roommate, who told police that Freeling must have found the gun while the roommate was out, Ruggiero said. The Washington Post could not locate the roommate.

The investigators also met with Diaz, who said all cases that are undetermined are discussed every week by the pathologists in the D.C. medical examiner’s office.

“The original consensus here,” Diaz said, “is it could go either way. Is it possibly a homicide? Yes. Is it possibly not? Yes.”

Sometimes, all of the tests and analysis don’t provide an answer. “I’ve performed 10,000 autopsies,” Diaz said, “There’s nothing more frustrating than when you don’t have an answer.”

He added: “To the credit of the family, they kept asking.”

Diaz said the case needed lab testing, but the D.C. crime lab had lost its accreditation in April 2021 after it made errors testing ballistics in two murder cases, then “misrepresented” the mistakes during the investigation. The District had been using the FBI for some lab work, but it had a two-year backlog. Diaz ultimately hired a private lab, which also experienced some delay, but finally produced results earlier this year. Diaz declined to discuss specifics of the evidence while the case is still under investigation.

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Weiss said he was persistent in pushing Diaz. “He kept apologizing that it was taking so long,” Weiss said. “He stayed with it, he said he would get to the bottom of it. We were lucky we found a guy who would listen to us, knew what he was doing, and took the time to care.”

D.C. police spokesman Tom Lynch said “the investigation has been ongoing and has uncovered a lot of evidence that, without a ruling from the medical examiner, you can’t apply for murder charges. A classification change like this means the investigation can proceed with the goal of pressing murder charges against someone at some point.”

Freeling’s aunt and uncle said they are hopeful that Freeling’s killer will be charged and convicted.

“Zack wanted to live,” Isa Freeling said. “He wanted desperately to marry and build a new family. That future was taken away from him, and us. He was the last living member of his family. We will never give up on him getting justice.”

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