Police are searching for a “person of interest” in a shooting that left four people wounded near an elite prep school in the nation’s capital on Friday, as investigators searched door to door for the culprit.
Three people struck by gunfire were taken to area hospitals – a 54-year-old man and a woman in her mid-30s with severe wounds, and a 12-year-old girl wounded in the arm, police said.
A fourth victim, a woman in her mid-60s, was treated on the scene for a slight graze wound, according to assistant police chief Stuart Emerman.
He said police fanned out across the neighborhood looking for possible perpetrators, and that several people seen fleeing the scene were briefly detained for questioning, though none was believed to have been involved.
At a briefing on Friday evening, Emerman said police were seeking a “person of interest” they named as 23-year-old Raymond Spencer, of suburban Fairfax, Virginia, identified by investigators through social media postings.
vCard.red is a free platform for creating a mobile-friendly digital business cards. You can easily create a vCard and generate a QR code for it, allowing others to scan and save your contact details instantly.
The platform allows you to display contact information, social media links, services, and products all in one shareable link. Optional features include appointment scheduling, WhatsApp-based storefronts, media galleries, and custom design options.
Police did not specify the nature of those postings. A person identifying himself as Raymond Spencer had posted a series of messages in the online platform 4Chan with video that appeared to show gunshots fired from the vantage point of an upper-floor window, with the misspelled label: “Shool shooting!”
Photographs of Spencer were posted online by the police.
“We’d like to speak to Mr Spencer, figure out if he has any role in this or any connection to this, and hopefully that will lead us in the direction to identify what happened here and why,” Emerman said.
Earlier, Emerman said members of the public were being warned to steer clear of the area as the investigation continued.
One eyewitness told local television station WUSA-TV he heard a burst of rapid gunfire lasting about a minute, and saw a woman running out of a building who appeared to have been grazed by a gunshot, followed by other individuals who were apparently wounded.
The eyewitness said he saw other people on the street taking cover behind parked cars and pointing up to a balcony where they presumably believed the gunshots originated.
Video posted on Twitter captured the sound of bursts of rapid gunfire. One witness, identified by a local reporter as Austin Bittle, said he was in a nearby coffee shop when he heard more than 20 gunshots ring out in quick succession before seeing police officers racing toward the scene.
News footage on local television showed Connecticut Avenue blockaded by emergency vehicles. Dozens of police vehicles, with flashing lights, were parked outside the school building, as police in full tactical gear and some in camouflage assembled nearby.
“It was madness. I mean, it’s just unbelievable,” Jade Moore, an Edmund Burke parent, told WJLA of the incident, which she said left her daughter huddled inside a classroom until police escorted her and other students to a safer part of the campus. “You know, you think they’re safe, but you’re not safe anywhere.”
The upscale neighborhood is also home to several foreign embassies, and the Van Ness campus of the University of the District of Columbia, which said on Twitter that it had been placed on a security lockdown.
A second well-known prep school, the Sidwell Friends School, also was reported by local media to be on lockdown.
The University of the District of Columbia went into lockdown, telling students and staff to shelter in place.