After Carrying Out The Washington DC Shooting, 23-year-old Youth Commits Suicide While Trying To Be Arrested

Illustration of a shooting case. (Pexels/Karolina Grabowska)

JAKARTA - A 23-year-old youth from Fairfax, Virginia, committed suicide when he was about to be arrested by the police. He became a suspect in the shooting case in Washington DC, Friday, April 22, 2022 local time.

The man, identified only as Raymon Spencer, shot random people from the top floor of an apartment building near an elite prep school in the US capital. Four people were injured in the incident.

The perpetrator was first identified from a video he posted to social media which appeared to show a shot from an upstairs window with a typo: "Shool shooting!"

Washington Metropolitan Police Chief Robert Contee told a press briefing just before midnight that the video "looks very authentic", but it was not immediately clear whether the footage was broadcast live or uploaded after it was recorded.

Hours earlier, police had released a bulletin with a photo of Spencer as a "person of interest".

Spencer killed himself when police entered his apartment, which is set up like a "sniper's lair" where a gun is mounted on a tripod, Contee said.

He said the four victims were shot at random while "they were going about their business… on the streets of the District of Columbia."

Three of the victims were rushed to a nearby hospital, with a 54-year-old man and a woman in their 30s seriously injured, and a 12-year-old girl injured in her arm, Assistant Police Chief Stuart Emerman said at an earlier news briefing.

The fourth victim, a woman aged over 60, was treated at the scene for minor lacerations, he said.

Witnesses told the media they heard multiple gunshots in the upscale Van Ness neighborhood of northwest Washington, near Edmund Burke Middle School. It was in the middle of preparing to enter college, when the class was about to be disbanded.

Contee said there were at least 20 shots fired.

Authorities also said they did not know a motive for the shooting, which is located on a busy Connecticut Avenue lane, where there are foreign embassies, the Howard University School of Law and the University of the District of Columbia campus.