Prosecutor Details D.C. Gang Killings

Soltys told a different story.

In the early hours of Aug. 1, 2000, the prosecutor said, Gooch and three other gang members visited the home of William Cunningham, a drug dealer with a stash of cocaine and cash in his apartment. They planned to rob him, Soltys said.

"When Larry Gooch saw Will Cunningham as he opened the door, Larry Gooch shot and killed Will Cunningham with a single gunshot to the head," she said. Christopher Lane, a friend of Cunningham's, was staying in the apartment. One of Gooch's cohorts chased Lane into the kitchen and shot him in the head, Soltys said.

On a September night two years later, when Miguel Miles, stoned on PCP, showed up on the gang's turf to buy drugs, he got out of a sport-utility vehicle and began behaving irrationally, flailing his arms and shouting. Soltys said Gooch ordered Miles to get back in the SUV, and Miles complied. When he got out of the vehicle again, still acting crazy, "Larry Gooch stepped off the curb and opened fire and shot Miles six times," Soltys said.

When a gang member was being arrested in a carryout restaurant in November 2002, she said, Gooch tried to distract police and help his friend escape by creating a disturbance outside. She said he fired a shot into a patrol car parked in front of the carryout, narrowly missing an officer.

Three months later, suspecting that Calvin Cooper and his girlfriend, Yolanda Miller, had been stealing drugs from the crew and cooperating with police, Gooch approached them on the street one night, Soltys said. She said he shot Miller six times, leaving her dead in a snowbank, then chased Cooper into an alley and shot him three times in the back.

"It was like a McDonald's drive-through," Soltys said of the street-corner drug trade controlled by the gang. "There was traffic all the time. . . . There were all these shootings, all this gunfire, people arrested with weapons.

"And there were murders."