A gunman shot dead his building’s manager and wounded four other people in Washington, D.C. on Thursday, before barricading himself inside his apartment and taking his own life after a standoff with police, officials said.
Police identified the suspect as Matt Lambert, 55, a doctor who had been locked in a long-running dispute with his condominium association over mould and damp in his apartment.
“We believe it’s related to that,” Metropolitan Police interim Chief JW Carroll told a news conference on Thursday afternoon.
Police identified the man who was killed as James Stuart, 46, the manager of the building, and said he appeared to have been deliberately targeted.
The attack began shortly before 8am local time (1300 GMT) in a gym in the Logan Circle neighbourhood, about 1.6km (one mile) northeast of the White House.
Police said Lambert shot Stuart with a handgun before returning to his seventh-floor apartment. He then opened fire from his balcony with a rifle, hitting four people. One of them is in critical condition, and the other three suffered non-life-threatening injuries.
Carroll said the first officers reached the scene within 30 seconds of the initial call. Lambert also fired through his door at officers in the hallway and set a fire, he added.
Police negotiators spoke to Lambert by phone. When they heard a gunshot, officers forced their way into the apartment and found him dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Three guns and petrol were found inside the apartment.
The standoff brought the usually busy neighbourhood to a standstill. Large numbers of officers in tactical gear and dozens of emergency vehicles flooded the area, streets were closed and police marksmen with rifles took up positions on rooftops.
A man who said he witnessed the shooting described hearing gunshots and seeing one man run to another who appeared to have been hit.
“Blood was pouring immediately, and he said, ‘He’s dead,’” the witness said. “We didn’t know if the gunman was still on the premises, so we just ran frantically.”
He said he heard more gunshots after running away from the gym.
Lambert first sued the building’s condominium association in 2025, saying water and mould had made his unit unlivable. In court papers, he said he had spent about $300,000 on repairs.
The association denied the claims and filed a countersuit against the gym on the building’s ground floor, alleging that its commercial dryers were the likely cause. The case was still pending at the time of the shooting.
Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser praised the quick police response to what she called a “senseless act of gun violence”. She said the White House had been briefed.
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Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang is stepping down amid reports linking him to a woman suspected by U.S. authorities of spying for China, throwing the future of the $4 trillion chipmaker into uncertainty.
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