Washington D.C. had a bloody Monday this week as police responded to five shootings and two murders in a four-hour time span.
The rash of shootings began shortly after 1 p.m., with all but one of the incidents occurring in the southeast portion of the city. Police responded to reports of a shooting at 4815 Texas Avenue near Plummer Elementary School, finding a man in an alley who authorities later pronounced dead. Shortly after, bullets tore through the streets near the Georgia Avenue Metro station, grazing a man who police say is in stable condition, reports WJLA.
Several hours later an additional three shootings were reported, all within 30 minutes in southeast D.C.. A shooter, possibly driving a red Honda, gunned down a woman arriving home with groceries, firing off six shots. Police found the unidentified woman dead near her porch. The other two victims of the separate shootings suffered non-life threatening injuries.
“We are just horrified by what we saw today,” Mayor Muriel Bowser said in a press conference. “It’s a level of violence that’s not acceptable in our city. And we are going to put every single resource – police and otherwise – to get rid of this violence.”
City officials are concerned that the spree of violence foreshadows a violent summer in the nation's capitol. Law enforcement urged residents to communicate with police.
“We need people to talk to us,” D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier said Monday. “There’s ways you can talk to us anonymously. The reason we’ve been able to take violent offenders off the streets so far and all the way up through today is because people talk to us.”
