In the end, 13 people were hit in the drive-by shooting Monday, nearly all of them grazed or struck in their arms or legs. One victim took a bullet to the lower back and was described as being in critical condition.
Police said they had few answers to explain the shooting: no motive, no arrests, no information about a gun. Mostly, they and other city officials struggled to assure the public that a quickly gentrifying corner of the city is safe.
“I’m saving up my money — because I got a baby on the way — so I can get out of here,” said Tonya Brigdes, 36, one of 284 residents of the eight-story Tyler House. Brigdes, who is nine months pregnant, said she has seen crime ebb and flow over the years. But Monday’s shootings, she said, were a startling reminder of how bad the area can be.
Tyler House is surrounded by late-night clubs that police have long blamed for the violence along this stretch of North Capitol Street and New York Avenue. But it is also just blocks from a neighborhood with a new and stylish name — NoMa (for “north of Massachusetts Avenue”) — that city officials and private developers are trying to transform into a thriving center of expensive condominiums, upscale grocers and trendy restaurants.
That world seemed far away to the victims and witnesses of Monday’s shooting.
“Everybody was screaming,” said Jonique Douglas, 21, who had just come out of a nightclub around the corner and was standing in front of Tyler House when the bullets came. “They shooting like directly at us. . . . It coulda been a bloody mess.”
Douglas said about a dozen people were standing on the sidewalk about 2:10 a.m., minutes after the club closed. A video of the shooting distributed by D.C. police showed cars speeding by and people falling to the ground. Police were looking for two vehicles — one dark, the other a light- silver or gray sedan.
D.C. police scrambled Monday to piece together what happened and who was involved, although they said no one has been arrested. They did not rule out that someone on North Capitol Street had returned fire; one man said he was struck in the ankle while walking on the other side of the street.
The shooting came three years after a similar high-profile shooting in the District; in 2010, nine people were shot, three of them fatally, on South Capitol Street.
Police said they don’t think that Monday’s violence was connected to shootings on the other side of New York Avenue, in front of Big Ben Liquors, that left seven people injured on consecutive weekends in October, although no arrests have been made in those cases, either. At the time, police suspected a drug dispute involving people at Tyler House.
