Yet for two years, the man with the knife — his face captured on blurry surveillance video before he ran away — had been shrouded in mystery.

Now, police in Montgomery County say they know who he is: King Yassin Leigh-Conteh, 19, of Silver Spring. They arrested him Monday on two counts of first-degree murder in the Jan. 10, 2017, deaths of Angel Gomez-Pineda, 24, and Kevin Moya Cruz, 22, at the Westfield Wheaton mall.

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In court Tuesday, Assistant State’s Attorney Donna Fenton said the victims had been involved in an earlier altercation with Leigh-Conteh in the mall. The parties separated and met up again near the restaurant — with the victims now accompanied by two friends. That group of four, police say, grabbed the bamboo sticks.

“It is at that point in time that this defendant produces a knife, chases after one individual, who drops,” Fenton said, adding that surveillance video captured the movements. She said Leigh-Conteh then chased and stabbed the second victim.

“He committed these two murders just in broad daylight,” Fenton said. “There were civilians, pedestrians, milling about.”

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“He’s innocent,” countered Leigh-Conteh’s attorney, Robin Ficker, saying detectives have misidentified who is on the video.

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There have been earlier identification problems in the case.

Soon after the killings, detectives arrested a different suspect: A 17-year-old from Montgomery Village who was known to police from previous run-ins and who they believed was the person in the surveillance video. A Montgomery County grand jury indicted the teen on two counts of murder.

That suspect and his attorney insisted that he had never been to the Westfield Wheaton mall and that he had been with a friend recording music at the time of the deaths, according to court filings. And in March 2017, prosecutors, saying they had insufficient evidence to proceed, dropped all charges after the 17-year-old had spent more than two months behind bars.

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Ficker keyed in on the earlier arrest and dropped case. Speaking of his client, he said: “You can’t tell it’s him from that video any more than they could tell it was the other guy they charged with this offense before.”

From the time of the stabbings — and stretching well into 2018 — detectives kept the video images to themselves, trying to match them with any leads or suspects that developed.

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But the case went cold.

“Leads in the case have been exhausted,” Montgomery County Police said in an Aug. 25, 2018, news release as they made snippets and still images from the surveillance video publicly available.

That did not yield immediate results. But on Dec. 1, an anonymous caller told police that a person named King Conteh had committed the killings. It is not clear whether the video prompted the call.

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Detectives researched the name, suspecting the caller was referring to King Yassin Leigh-Conteh, they said in court filings. They compared Leigh-Conteh’s Motor Vehicle Administration photograph with the mall video and found the images “extremely similar in physical appearance,” Detective Mike Carin wrote in charging documents.

Detectives continued investigating Leigh-Conteh. Early Monday, they knocked on the door of the apartment where he lives with his mother.

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“Mom, the detectives are outside and they say they have a search warrant to come in,” he told his mother, according to her recollections in court Tuesday.

Detectives said they found a pair of shoes and a hat similar to those shown on the suspect in the surveillance video.

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Ficker questioned how a match could be made from the grainy surveillance video.

“The person in the video has shoes on,” he said after court, “and the people who live in the apartment had shoes in the apartment. That’s as close as they got.”

He termed the hat connection “pure nonsense.”

After searching the apartment, one of the detectives drove Leigh-Conteh to work. Several hours later, Ficker said, police returned to his job to arrest him.

Leigh-Conteh’s family members spoke in support of him in court Tuesday, saying he has always worked hard and never complained during the family’s recent hard financial times.

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“He was brought up in the church and chose to do the right thing,” said his mother, Dahlia Leigh.

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