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Why are they chasing these people? They're still trending downward, unless a bunch of people die. Stupid news people!Quote:
nation's homicide capital, logged 143 homicides last year, the fewest killings in nearly 50 years.
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The trend is continuing. As of Monday afternoon, D.C. police reported 20 homicides this year, compared with 31 through the same period in 2009.
Three people were killed and at least six others were wounded Tuesday night in an outbreak of gunfire on a street near the southern tip of the District, authorities said.
A tenth person was found shot several blocks away, but police said they were unsure whether that victim was involved in the initial outbreak of violence.
Gwendolyn Crump, spokeswoman for D.C. police, said three people were confirmed dead.
Carolyn Hammond, a spokeswoman for Washington Hospital Center, said one of the victims died en route to the hospital, one died in the hospital's operating room and a third was in critical condition there. Authorities said several others were in critical or serious condition at other locations.
Three people were in custody, according to D.C. police chief Cathy L. Lanier.
Two D.C. police cars crashed on St. Barnabas Road in Prince George's County during a pursuit that followed the shootings. Four officers suffered what appeared to be minor injuries, Lanier said.
She said the shooting victims were hit in the 4000 block of South Capitol Street as a gunman sprayed bullets "into a crowd" gathered there about 7:30 p.m.
No motive for the shootings was immediately apparent.
Two people said the victims were clustered in front of a brick apartment building on South Capitol Street. One man said he was walking toward a group of young men in front of the building when he heard a series of gunshots.
"Pat-pat-pat-pat-pat. Next thing I hear, boom!," said the man who declined to give his name. "All I seen was bodies dropping."
The man said he was about a half block away from the scene of the shooting. "It was like Vietnam," he said.
According to family members and friends of the victims at Prince George's County Hospital Center, some of the wounded were females and at least one suffered a gunshot wound to the head. At one point, three women stood together and told each other how fortunate they felt that their children were still alive.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 0033004386
Because they just shot 9 people.Quote:
Originally Posted by loservillelabor
The don't call it murder capital USA for nothing. Strange isn't it? With all those "important people" there... :roll:
and to think, i thought guns were outlawed in DCQuote:
Originally Posted by SicNTiredInSoCal
They are, but criminals don't respect our laws, and that's the problem. :twisted:Quote:
Originally Posted by jamesw62
D.C. police: Drive-by shooting leaves four people dead
Updated 4m ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — A gunman sprayed bullets from a moving vehicle into a crowd in southeastern Washington, killing four and wounding at least five others, before leading police on a chase into neighboring Maryland.
Three people were arrested in the worst shooting in D.C. in 16 years. The D.C. councilman who represents the area, former Mayor Marion Barry, said a dispute between groups in the neighborhood caused the shooting.
Six men and three women were hit by the gunfire around 7:30 p.m., said D.C. police spokesman Officer Hugh Carew. Fire department spokesman Pete Piringer said all were in their 20s and 30s, except for one teenager.
Police have not released the names of the victims, but Rico Scott said his cousin, 19-year-old DeVaughn Boyd, was one of those killed.
Boyd was a high school senior who didn't hang out with the wrong crowd, said Scott, who visited the shooting scene Wednesday morning. Boyd liked to go to the mall and the movies with friends, as well as parties that featured go-go music, a mix of soul, funk and Latin styles, Boyd said.
Boyd's mother was initially told that her son was taken to Washington Hospital Center, then learned early Wednesday he was pronounced dead at a different hospital, Scott said.
"She's not good because she wasn't able to see her baby boy before he succumbed to his injuries. She wasn't able to give him one last, 'It's going to be all right,"' Scott said. "She's not going to be all right for some time."
By late Tuesday, one victim had died at the scene, a second was pronounced dead at a hospital and the third died in an operating room, officials said. It wasn't immediately clear where the fourth victim had died.
The shooting was the worst in D.C. since 1994, when four men fired into a crowd at the O Street Market, killing a teenager and wounding eight other people. A man was convicted of orchestrating the shooting to retaliate against people who had shot him in the stomach and robbed him several weeks earlier. He believed the people who had attacked him often visited the market.
Four D.C. officers were slightly injured while chasing a suspect's vehicle into neighboring Prince George's County in Maryland, authorities said. A weapon was also recovered.
The Washington Post reported that police, aided by a helicopter, pursued a van from the scene.
Two men were to be arraigned in the shooting Wednesday afternoon, but a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney's office did not immediately know what their charges were. It was also not clear whether the two men were among the three already arrested.
Officers had cleared the shooting scene Wednesday, but there were still five police cruisers parked outside a brick garden-style apartment building on a main road that links the area to downtown. There was a blood-covered gauze package on the sidewalk, which was wet and smelled of bleach.
The shootings were in a neighborhood near a water treatment plant and Bolling Air Force Base and about seven miles from the White House. D.C. Councilman Phil Mendelson said the area was known for drugs and related violence.
"It's not a stranger to violent activity, unfortunately," said Mendelson, the chairman of the D.C. Council's Committee on Public Safety and the Judiciary.
Barry, who had been briefed by police, said it appears "crews" — groups of friends who are not necessarily organized as gangs — had some sort of dispute with each other.
"I'm saddened. I'm outraged. I'm angry," Barry said. "We have a tough enough reputation anyway," he said of his district.
He said he was worried about further retaliation between groups, but that he had been reassured by police.
Washington reported 143 homicides last year, the fewest in nearly 50 years.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/201 ... n-DC_N.htm
3 charged in Southeast D.C. shootings; motive might be tied to missing bracelet
By Clarence Williams, Paul Duggan And Keith L. AlexanderWashington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 31, 2010; 4:41 PM
A drive-by shooting Tuesday night that left four people dead and five wounded in Southeast Washington might have been part of a cycle of retaliation spawned by a case of suspected petty theft, showing how a minor occurrence such as the disappearance of a bracelet on a D.C. street can ignite back-and-forth violence climaxing in a bloodbath, police said.
Two men and a male juvenile have been charged with first-degree murder in one of the District's deadliest shootings in years, police sources said Wednesday.
The adults charged were Nathaniel D. Simms, 26, and Orlando Carter, 20, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office said Wednesday. Carter, whose last known address was in the 2300 block of Irving Street SE, has several drug charges on his record dating to 2008, according to court records. Court records list various addresses in Southeast Washington for Simms, whose record includes drug, assault and other charges dating to 2003.
In the shooting, a gunman opened fire on a group of people in front of an apartment building in Southeast Washington, D.C. police said Wednesday.
Police say the motive for the mass shooting might be traceable to a shooting last week in which a 20-year-old man, Jordan Howe, was slain in a fit of violence over a missing bracelet. Howe was shot to death just after midnight March 22 outside an apartment building in the 1300 block of Alabama Avenue SE, where he had been at a gathering with several other people, police said in a court affidavit. They said one person, 19-year-old Sanquan Carter, allegedly opened fire with a handgun in the street because he believed someone stole his bracelet.
Orlando Carter is a brother of Sanquan Carter, a law enforcement official said.
At least one other person also opened fire, police said. They said Carter fled in a vehicle with that suspect and a third person. A law enforcement source said homicide detectives suspect Orlando Carter was the gunman who got out of the vehicle and opened fire Tuesday night.
Sanquan Carter has been charged with murder but, as of Tuesday, no one else had been charged in Howe's slaying.
At least one person interviewed Tuesday night said that some of those wounded on South Capitol Street had recently attended ceremonies honoring Howe. Approximately 350 people had gathered for a late morning funeral for Howe at St. Augustine Church in Northwest Washington, which was followed by his burial at Glenwood Cemetery.
Many of those people later attended a funeral repast at St. Martin of Tours Catholic Church in Northwest Washington that lasted into the early evening.
The burst of gunfire, apparently a drive-by shooting, led to a police chase in which four D.C. officers were slightly injured. Officials later said three people were arrested and a weapon was recovered, but no other details were immediately available.
Initially, three people were reported killed in the shooting. D.C. police said early Wednesday that a fourth victim had died. Police were still looking for a motive in the shooting, in which at least nine people were hit.
A 10th person was found shot several blocks away, but police said they were unsure whether he was a victim of the same flurry of gunfire, which one witness likened to a war zone.
Of the four who were killed, at least two died Tuesday night at Washington Hospital Center, a spokeswoman there said. At that time, three other victims were listed in critical or serious condition. Shooting victims included six men and three women, possibly including a 16-year-old, authorities said. The other victims appeared to be in their 20s and 30s, fire officials said.
DaVaughn Boyd, 18, died Tuesday night in Prince George's Hospital Center after being shot during the incident, according to his father, Devole Thompson, of District Heights.
The shooting occurred about 7:30 p.m. in the 4000 block of South Capitol Street as people stood outdoors and a gunman began "spraying [bullets] into a crowd," D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier said.
Witnesses said the victims were gathered in front of a brick apartment building and described the shooting as a drive-by.
Police sources said an AK-47-style assault rifle might have been used. A man who said he was in the area at the time recounted the sounds he heard as "tat, tat, tat, tat, tat, and then boom!"
Then, "all I saw was bodies dropping," he said. "It was like Vietnam."
Another witness said that as bodies fell, "it was like a pileup at a football game."
The gunfire, several blocks from the Prince George's County border, touched off a chase into that county and back into the District.
As officers pursued a van into Prince George's, two police cars crashed on St. Barnabas Road. The four D.C. officers inside suffered minor injuries, authorities said.
A helicopter that circled overhead apparently aided in the chase, which ended in the Condon Terrace area of Southeast Washington, where the three people were taken into custody.
The shootings in the Washington Highlands area came after a year in which the city, once known as the nation's murder capital, logged 143 homicides, the lowest total since 1966.
The trend has continued. As of Monday afternoon, D.C. police had reported 20 homicides this year, compared with 31 in the same period last year.
The number of people shot Tuesday night might have been the most in the District in one incident since 1994, when 10 people were wounded, one fatally, at a market on O Street NW.
In an eruption of gunfire in Northeast Washington last year, two people were killed and three others wounded.
The site of the shootings is east of Bolling Air Force Base and near the Blue Plains sewage treatment plant. It is about a mile north of the boundary between the District and Prince George's. One side of South Capitol Street near the scene of the shooting is lined with two-story red brick apartment houses; several stores are on the other side.
When the first rescue workers reached the site Tuesday night, they found a "very chaotic situation," said Pete Piringer, a spokesman for the D.C. Fire and Emergency Medical Services Department.
At Prince George's Hospital Center, victims' friends and relatives hugged one another and cried.
Immediately after the shooting, police flooded the scene, and investigators tried to interview witnesses.
"We're still trying to sort out conditions," Lanier said. "It's going to take a while to sort out what was behind this."
Staff writers Matt Zapotosky, Martin Weil, Ruben Castaneda, Clarence Williams, William Branigin, Lori Aratani and Hamil R. Harris and researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... eheadlines