The 10-year-old girl who was shot and critically injured while riding in a vehicle with her parents and siblings on Mother’s Day in Northeast Washington has died of her injuries, according to D.C. police.
Police have not made any arrests, and Chief Robert J. Contee III said Wednesday that he had no updates on the investigation.
“It breaks my heart,” he said, adding, “As long as we’re having the conversation about people dying as a result of illegal handguns in the hands of people who shouldn’t have them, then we got a lot of work left to do.”
Arianna is one of more than 84 homicide victims in the District this year, and the youngest of seven juveniles to be fatally shot. A 13-year-old, three 16-year-olds and two 17-year-olds also have been killed in D.C. this year. In the most recent killing, a 17-year-old Roosevelt High School student was fatally shot in the school’s parking lot Wednesday.
As of May 11, D.C. police said that 43 juveniles had been shot, double the same time last year. Statistics show that 105 juveniles were shot in all of 2022, 16 of them fatally, nearly double the number from the previous year. Violent crime and homicides are up this year.
Jawanna Hardy, founder of nonprofit Guns Down Friday, said she spent much of Tuesday in the hospital with Arianna’s family. Dozens of her relatives sat in the lobby, barely eating and barely speaking. A pastor joined them, Hardy said, at that point with some hope that the child would survive.
“People were coming in and out of the hospital room just telling the same story over and over again,” Hardy said. “An innocent child. She was an innocent child.”
Hardy said she brought pizza and Skittles from the cafeteria and tried to gently encourage Arianna’s mother to eat and drink. Arianna’s father was there too, Hardy said. “Mom and Dad fighting for their little girl.”
Hours after Arianna was shot, police said a 12-year-old girl was struck when a stray bullet crashed through her bedroom window as she slept in Southeast.
The violence has angered D.C. leaders, who described the shootings of the girls as “unacceptable” and renewed their calls to curb the accessibility of illegal firearms. On Monday, D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) proposed legislation to include stiffer penalties for illegal gun possession and to make it easier for judges to hold defendants before trial if they have previous convictions for violent crimes. She said the goal was to fill “gaps” in existing laws that authorities have said enable repeat violent offenders to quickly get back on the streets.
Arianna was shot about 9:15 p.m. on Sunday on a residential street in a community near Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens.
Police said shooters standing in the street or on a sidewalk fired more than 50 shots, and they may have escaped in a black or dark-colored SUV. No other description has been provided.
After the girl’s parents recognized that she had been hit, they drove her to a firehouse at the edge of Capitol Hill, in the 1500 block of C Street SE, police said. The distance is about three miles. From the firehouse, where she arrived about 9:20 p.m., she was taken to a hospital for treatment, authorities said. Police said she had been struck in the upper body.
Police said they do not believe that anyone in the vehicle was targeted.
Contee said that when he learned of the shooting, he immediately thought of Chelsea Cromartie, an 8-year-old girl who in 2004 died after being hit by a stray bullet as she watched television in her aunt’s Northeast Washington home.
Contee was the head of the homicide unit at the time, and he said an arrest was made in the case on Mother’s Day of that year. He said that the bullet was fired by someone in a dispute at a carryout and that it passed through a window and struck Chelsea in the head.
D.C. police are offering a $25,000 reward for information that leads to an arrest and conviction in the shooting of Arianna, and the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are each offering rewards of $10,000 on top of that — bringing the total possible reward to $45,000. But Contee said he hopes that “beyond reward money, somebody’s heart is motivated” to come forward and help police.
“We have a kid who should have been home with her parents on Mother’s Day,” he said.