Raymond Spencer is a person of interest in the shooting in DC.
Raymond Spencer made changes to the Wikipedia page for the Edmund Burke School, which is near the Van Ness neighborhood where a man shot at random on a busy Friday afternoon.
As of April 22, 2022, Spencer wrote that a gunman shot at the school. “The suspect is still on the run,” says the police officer.
A person of interest was later identified by police as Spencer from Fairfax, Virginia. They then said that the suspect had been found dead in a nearby Van Ness apartment that night, surrounded by guns and ammunition, where he had been shot.
Officers no longer wanted Spencer after they found out that he had killed himself when they broke into his door. D.C police chief Robert J. Contee III said that, in a way, Spencer was who they were looking for.
Officers say that four people were hurt when a gunman opened fire in the Van Ness area. They say that one man was killed, two women were shot, and one 12-year-old girl was hit by the bullet.
As of Saturday morning, very little had been learned about the person who was being investigated. Whether the gunman was targeting Burke, if he went to school or had any connection to it, and what ties he had to the Van Ness neighborhood were not known. Police say Spencer’s online footprint gave them information about the shooting that sent a busy D.C. street into panic and sent armored vehicles into the area to look for the gunman.
During the investigation, law enforcement looked at social media posts that were attributed to a person named Raymond Spencer, including 4chan, an online message board with millions of users. This is what the user wrote in one message, four minutes after shots were reported: “Dear God, please forgive me.”
“They’re in the wrong part of the building right now looking for XD.” These posts made it seem like they were joking with the police. It was later: “I’m waiting for the police to catch up with me.”
Contee says that a graphic video that was posted online Friday shows what appears to be the shooting, but it isn’t clear when it was put up. There are posters from a financial aid auction at the Burke school that were themed like the game Clue all over the glass walkway there, which is shown in the video. Shots are fired, and one of the glass panels breaks.
At 3:58 pm on Friday, Spencer last updated his Wikipedia user page. This was just before he got shot. In his bio, the page said he was “a fan of AR-15s.”
His relatives could not be reached right away. Fairfax County police also waited outside Spencer’s home on Fair Lakes Circle on Friday night. The location is thought to be his home.
Fairfax County police said in a statement: “We have found a possible home and are very close to this location.”
There was a shooting in Washington on Friday afternoon. As soon as 3:00 pm, police cars started to drive down Connecticut Avenue. The nearby schools were put on “lock down.” Their kids were at nearby schools, and parents were afraid. Police officers on foot told people to move and get down.
A letter from Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) called Friday’s shooting a “heartbreaking day for our community.” She also criticized the District’s continued use of guns and called for an end to gun violence in the city.
Tonight, I saw parents who were scared, and they thought about what might happen to their kids, the mayor wrote in a letter. In our country, there’s been a lot of gun violence, and it needs to stop.
She talked about kids who stayed in their homes for hours and people who were taken out of their homes by police.
In a short but terrible act of violence, “four people, including one child, were shot,” Bowser said. This was the second of four shootings in the city today. When a person who should not have had a gun got hold of one, they used it to scare people at a school.
The suspect was found on the fifth floor of the AVA Van Ness apartment building, which is next to the Burke School. Police think he may have fired from an apartment balcony. The chief said that the apartment had a “sniper-like set-up” and that a tripod was found in the weapons and ammunition that were found there. Early Saturday, it wasn’t clear if Spencer lived there, as well as in Fairfax, or what his job was at the AVA.
Man shot himself, two people who knew the man said. They spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the ongoing investigation.
People who live in the AVA apartment building say that Jackie Rollins was watching Netflix when she heard the shots. She didn’t know what it was, though.
There were a lot of shots but Rollins didn’t know what they were because he had never heard a gun except on TV or in a movie. When my grandson saw something on the news, I found out.
As soon as she turned on the local news, the cameras kept going outside her house. Then she saw police with guns outside her house. After a little while, police told her that she would have to leave the building soon. There has been a shooting at a building where she has lived for about 18 months. She said she had seen the man who is said to have shot him a few times but didn’t know much about him.
“I just can’t understand how you don’t care about human life,” she said.
Police still didn’t let Rollins and other building residents back into their homes at 10pm.
A great place, she said. “This is the first thing like this and, hopefully, the last one.”
