Every year in September, I take my pastoral interns to a pastor’s conference in Washington, D.C. Every year, we stay on Capitol Hill in the home of some friends and very gracious hosts. This year’s trip was just this past weekend. For reasons that have nothing to do with the conference, our visit was unlike any I’ve ever experienced before.
On Saturday night a little after 10pm, there was a shooting outside the home in which we were staying. Two of my interns were upstairs and heard the shots. Five of us downstairs watching football didn’t hear anything. One of the interns upstairs (whose name is Chris) also heard someone crying for help in the street. So Chris came crashing downstairs and ran out the front door to go find the person calling for help. By the time the five of us on the first floor figured out what was going on, Chris was out the door. So I took off after him.
Chris was the first one on the scene and found a man on the ground who had been shot in the chest. I arrived right behind, as did a few other guys from our group. The victim was an off-duty firefighter named Zeke, and he was conscious and in distress. Chris held a shirt on Zeke’s chest to stop the bleeding. Zeke told us that a man wearing a mask shot him. He also told us that he grabbed the shooter’s gun, turned it back on the shooter, and shot him back twice in the chest. Then the shooter ran off around the corner. As he is telling us the story, we didn’t know where the shooter was, and there was still no police on the scene.
We were there with Zeke on the sidewalk with no police for a number of minutes. Chris was keeping pressure on the gunshot wound. I was calling 911 from the time we left the house, but I got put on hold and couldn’t get through. I was still on hold when I saw police lights in the distance, went into the street, and flagged them down. Interestingly, some of the first responders were not only metro police but also FBI agents (probably because we were so near the Capitol building). I told an officer that there was a man down on the sidewalk and that the shooter had fled on foot around the corner into the night.
Officers mustered a group to pursue the shooter around the corner while EMT’s arrived and worked on Zeke. Not long after they went after the shooter, we heard a group of women screaming. They sounded in horror and panic. We heard no other shots, so we suspected that people must have found the shooter’s body. But we couldn’t be sure.
Zeke was shot on the sidewalk just steps away from his home. Some neighbors went and got his wife, and she appeared on the street as well. She had two small children in her home and was perplexed about what to do. She needed to get on the ambulance with her husband, but her children were too young to be left alone. She agreed to let Chris and another intern (total strangers to her) to watch her kids, but neighbors arrived before that became necessary.
We were all inside the yellow police line until officers took statements from Chris and another intern who actually heard the shots. Chris was first to render assistance to the victim, and had a story to tell. I should mention that Chris is a Marine and was a champ. He held pressure on Zeke’s chest and prayed for Zeke until he transferred over to EMT’s. Semper Fi. Chris is also a Southern Seminary student and was studying Greek when the shots rang out. After he got back to the house and washed the blood off his hands, he went back to studying Greek. No joke.
Chris got the phone number of Zeke’s wife and followed up with her Sunday morning. Zeke is going to be okay. We had noticed that there was no exit wound. It turns out that the bullet lodged near Zeke’s armpit, and doctors decided to leave it because it would have been too precarious to remove it. Nevertheless, Zeke is home and recovering.
Some police parked their vehicle in front of our house about a half hour after it was all over. So we walked back outside to see if they found the shooter. All the officer would tell us is that they found him. The way he told us this information plus the screams we heard earlier made us think that the shooter was probably dead. But the story was in The Washington Post on Sunday morning, and it turns out that the shooter is going to survive too and is in custody.
Subsequent news reports revealed more about the shooter, and the event became immediately politicized. The shooter is 17-years old. The U. S. Attorney for the District of Columbia is a new Trump-appointee Jeanine Pirro. She has announced that the young man will be tried as an adult and that they have no intention of showing any leniency based on his age. She was fiery in her news conference (see video below).
We have prayed for Zeke and for this young man. Maybe you can too. We are grateful to be home after an experience we will never forget.
