D.C. Slayings Bring '08 Toll to 72

Late last night, a man was wounded by a gunshot in the back in the 3500 block of Warder Street NW, in what appeared to be the latest violent act in the District, police said.

The first incident in the weekend's spasm of violence occurred at 9 p.m. Friday in the 1600 block of Trinidad Avenue NE, when the 52-year-old man was killed during a confrontation with officers. Police said they had been called to a home to deal with a domestic dispute. The man approached them with a knife and refused to drop it, police said. They opened fire. As of last night, his name had not been released.

Just before 1 a.m., Shannon Shamar Lewis, 27, a furniture mover, left his apartment in the 5300 block of C Street SE in the Marshall Heights area, where he lived with his mother, Michelle Lewis, his grandmother and one of his three young children.

The street dips and rises like a shallow V, with the playing fields of C.W. Harris Elementary School on one side and single-family houses and Urban Outreach Apartments on the other. As Lewis stood waiting, his family, in the apartment, heard gunshots.

"I called 911 and went outside," said the grandmother, who declined to give her name. "I looked that way, then someone said to go the other way. Shamar was lying in the parking lot."

Two other men were wounded, one of them critically, in what police said was a drive-by shooting.

Jason A. Dale, 24, of Oxon Hill was charged last night with second-degree murder.

"I saw all the shootings on TV, and I thought, 'Even if they catch these people, that won't bring my baby back,' " Lewis's grandmother said.

About a half-hour after Lewis was killed, police were called to the 1100 block of Abbey Place NE, not far from Union Station, where a group of men gambling with dice had gotten into a heated argument. Gunfire ended the crap game, with the victim shot several times. Police did not identify the slain man last night.

At 2:30 a.m., police said, a man was shot and wounded in his buttock at Kenilworth Avenue and Quarles Street NE. He was recovering at a hospital yesterday. Then, at 4 a.m., three men were fatally shot after an argument on Holbrook Street NE, about a block from the H Street corridor, a popular strip of restaurants and nightspots. Police said the dispute might have begun in a nightclub. They said 35 shots were fired by at least two gunmen with semiautomatic weapons.

One victim fell dead in an alley, one collapsed in the street and one died in a car. Police identified them as Duane Hough, 27, of the 1400 block of Trinidad Street NE; Anthony Mincey, 35, of the 600 block of Morton Street NW; and Johnny Jeter, 24, of the 1700 block of Holbrook.

"Something personal happened with these guys," said Groomes, adding that officers patrolling the area were close enough to the scene that they heard the shots.