WASHINGTON (REUTERS) - A gunman opened fire on random victims from a sniper’s nest on the upper floor of an apartment building near an elite prep school in the nation’s capital on Friday (April 22), wounding four people, before taking his own life as police burst into his dwelling, officials said.
Police said the suspect, Raymond Spencer, 23, of suburban Fairfax, Virginia, was initially identified from video he had posted on social media that appeared to show gunshots fired from the vantage point of an upper-floor window, with the misspelled label: “Shool shooting!”
Washington Metropolitan Police Chief Robert Contee told a late-night news conference the video “looks very much to be authentic,” but it remained uncertain whether the footage was streamed live or had been posted after it was recorded.
Police had issued a bulletin with photographs of Spencer hours earlier saying they were seeking him as a “person of interest” in their investigation.
Spencer killed himself as police officers entered his apartment, which had been arranged in a “sniper-type setup” with a weapon mounted on a tripod, Mr Contee said.
He said the four victims were shot at random as “they were going about their business ... on the streets of the District of Columbia.”
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, Assistant Police Chief Stuart Emerman said during an earlier briefing. A fourth victim, a woman in her mid-60s, was treated on the scene for a slight graze wound, Mr Emerman said.
Eyewitnesses told Reuters and local media outlets they heard multiple bursts of gunfire in the upscale Van Ness neighborhood of northwest Washington next to the Edmund Burke School, a private college preparatory academy, just as classes were about to be dismissed for the day.
Mr Contee said at least 20 rounds were fired. Authorities said they had no motive for the shooting, which took place along a busy Connecticut Avenue corridor that is also home to several foreign embassies, the Howard University School of Law and a campus of the University of the District of Columbia.
Earlier, Mr Emerman said several individuals seen fleeing the scene were briefly detained for questioning but none were believed to have been involved.
A WUSA reporter posted a short video on Twitter of another witness identified as Austin Bittle who 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.
According to the District of Columbia’s Metropolitan Police Department, the shooting unfolded in the 4100 block of Connecticut Avenue in the city’s northwest quadrant near the Burke School.
“I was in the building and I was getting ready for track practice, but then I heard loud noises and glass was shattering behind me. A bunch of us just got out of the building and ran,” one unidentified student told local ABC affiliate WJLA-TV in an interview from a liquor store, where the youth had taken cover.
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 neighbourhood also is home to several foreign embassies, Howard University School of Law, 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.
