A 17-year-old was killed and 20 others were injured in an overnight shooting Saturday in Washington D.C. Among the victims was an off-duty 1st District Police officer, who Metro police chief Peter Newsham said was shot and “seriously injured.”
Newsham said that judging from gunshots being fired in multiple locations simultaneously, it appeared there were at least three shooters.
Family identified the victim to CBS Washington D.C. affiliate WUSA-TV as Christopher Brown. His grandmother told WUSA-TV that he was a great person and would affectionately call him her “Poppy.”
“You need to stop because you took away something that belonged to me, somebody hat I loved so much and somebody dear to me,” grandmother Patrice Brown told WUSA-TV in a phone call hours after the shooting.
“I know this is not the only child or will be the last child,” she continued. “But they need to stop this. I want everybody to be safe and happy. But this is not the way to be safe. And this is not the way to be happy.”
His mother, Artecka Brown, told WUSA-TV that Brown was a father to a 1-year-old boy and had another baby on the way. “He was an innocent king … he just wanted to go attend a neighborhood party,” she said.
Newsham said the shooting occurred at a large social gathering with several hundred people in attendance. Newsham said police had been at the scene earlier.
“Preliminarily there were police officers on the scene. I want to confirm that, I want to talk to the management team over here and see if we were doing everything we possibly could,” Newsham said. “Because we can’t tolerate these types of gatherings in our city during COVID-19, it’s just too dangerous.”