Gunman Takes Own Life After Wounding Four Near Elite Washington Prep School

A gunman opened fireplace on random victims from a sniper’s nest in an rental constructing close to an elite prep faculty in the nation’s capital on Friday, wounding 4 people, earlier than taking his own lifestyles as police closed in, officials said.

Police said the suspect, Raymond Spencer, 23, of suburban Fairfax, Virginia, was once in the beginning identified from video he had posted on social media that seemed 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 informed a late-night news conference the video “looks very much to be authentic,” but it remained unsure whether or not the footage was once streamed live or had been posted after it was once recorded.

Police had issued a bulletin with pictures of Spencer hours formerly saying they had been in search of him as a “person of interest” in their investigation.

The taking pictures and manhunt paralyzed the upscale Van Ness neighborhood of northwest Washington subsequent to the Edmund Burke School, a private college preparatory academy, simply as training have been about to be brushed aside for the day.

The college and different houses in the vicinity were positioned below a protection lockdown, with apprehensive college students texting anxious parents as police mounted a door-to-door search for the suspect.

With help from eyewitness reports, police managed to pinpoint the gunman’s position to the fifth ground of a “particular condominium building” and finally “breached the place where the suspect took his own life,” Contee said.

Police seized greater than half of a dozen firearms, consisting of various rifles, and large amounts of ammunition in the apartment, which had been arranged in a “sniper-type setup” with a tripod weapons mount, the chief said.

“His intent used to be to kill and harm contributors of our community,” but investigators had yet to determine a motive, Contee said, including that the gunman acted alone.

The 4 victims were shot at random as “they have been going about their enterprise … on the streets of the District of Columbia,” he instructed reporters.

Three people struck by gunfire had been taken to vicinity hospitals – a 54-year-old man and a female in her mid-30s with severe wounds, and a 12-year-old woman wounded in the arm, Assistant Police Chief Stuart Emerman stated at some point of an before briefing.

A fourth victim, a lady in her mid-60s, was treated on the scene for a moderate graze wound, Emerman said.

Eyewitnesses informed Reuters and neighborhood media retailers they heard multiple bursts of fast gunfire. Contee said at least 20 photographs had been fired.

‘SOMETHING BAD HAPPENING’

The late-afternoon violence unfolded alongside a busy Connecticut Avenue hall that is additionally home to various foreign embassies, the Howard University School of Law and a campus of the University of the District of Columbia.

Deaven Rector, 22, a regulation student, told Reuters he heard three bursts of gunfire that seemed to emanate from the AVA Van Ness rental constructing where he lives, and which used to be evacuated.

“Right now, the police have secured the area, and it’s safe, however the truth that this kind of chaos can be induced by way of a maniac on a regular Friday… The youngsters were about to get out of school,” he said.

Jennifer DiGiacinto informed Reuters she learned of the capturing from a text message from her son, a Burke School 11th grader.

“He said, ‘There’s some thing terrible happening, I want you to flip on the news.’ I said, ‘Why, what’s happening?’ And he said, ‘Gunfire, I’m beneath a desk, we’re barricaded in.’”

Local news footage showed Connecticut Avenue blockaded by means of emergency vehicles. Dozens of police motors with flashing lights were parked backyard the school building, as police in full tactical tools and some in camouflage assembled nearby.

Local NBC affiliate WRC-TV confirmed evacuees from a constructing walking down a sidewalk, some with their arms raised.

Lamenting the trauma of gun violence that has grow to be commonplace in the United States, Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser told reporters, “Unfortunately, I had to seem to be in parents’ eyes tonight who have been terrified. And they were terrified wondering of what may occur to their children.”