‘The world’s not as bright a place without him’: A Bowie man’s family continues to look for answers a year after he was attacked and killed
It’s been a year since 53-year-old Millard “Tony” Noack Jr. was assaulted in Bowie, Maryland, while walking home. He died from his injuries only months later, but a motive or a suspect were never determined.
His older sister is still searching to find his killer(s).
“I’ve done a lot of social media posting about what transpired that night, what happened and how here we are, a year later, and there’s no information,” said his older sister, Michaele Angulo. “It was all over my Facebook. I asked everyone I knew to share it. I made it a public post. I put it all over nextdoor.com.”
On Aug. 29, 2023, Noack was walking home from an urgent care clinic for shoulder pain when someone struck him in the head, which caused critical injuries, and then ran from the scene. Bowie police officers found Tony on the street on the 7000 block of Race Track Road.
Two months later, Tony died at the hospital from his injuries. An autopsy ruled his death a homicide and said that he died from blunt force trauma.
“Maybe he accidentally bumped into someone and didn’t mean to and, people these days, there’s just so much rage and so much hatred and the way that people react to things is so spontaneously unnecessary,” Angulo said.
His sister said he walked to the Metrobus stop on Stonybrook Drive and Sussex Lane, but missed the last bus so decided to walk home. He was only half a mile from home when he was attacked. Because of this, his sister thinks the attacker lived close by in their neighborhood.
“Tony walked everywhere, and when he would walk, he would wear one of those bright yellow neon vests for visibility, because there’s nowhere to walk on Racetrack Road,” Angulo said.
“There’s no safe sidewalk. Our whole community is meant to be walkable, but it really isn’t. You’re not safe. So for visibility purposes, he would walk down to the Metrobus stop every day to go to work.”
Tony was a federal employee in a mailroom in D.C. In his free time, he loved going to different restaurants and churches. His sister worries someone may have seen Tony as an easy mark because, due to cancer treatment as a child, he suffered from brain injury.
“He’s very, very smart, but the every day, common sense chatting with people, he did it on a level of someone who might be younger. So that’s how that manifests. I don’t know if somebody thought they could take advantage of him. I don’t know if they saw him as somebody they could easily prey upon,” she said.
A reward of up to $25,000 is being offered for any information leading to an arrest and indictment in this case. Anyone with information can contact Crime Solvers at 1-866-411-TIPS (8477) or online at www.pgcrimesolvers.com.