Two people died in shootings over the weekend in Southeast D.C., just three hours apart and a two blocks away from each other.
“I feel angry. Shocked. I feel afraid and I feel hopeless,” LaTasha Gunnels, a resident and registered nurse, said.
She’s concerned about the surge in gun violence in her Southeast D.C. neighborhood after she heard dozens of shots fired near 16th and W streets around 5 p.m. Sunday.
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“I feel like the gun violence is endless,” Gunnels said. “It just sounded like a war zone. It was too many gun shots for me to count.”
A minute later, surveillance video captured a man suffering from gunshot wounds walking to a porch and collapsing.
Gunnels ran over to perform CPR.
“The nurse in me pushed me to go help him. So I went over and I felt his pulse and he didn’t have a pulse,” she said.
Moments later, D.C. Fire and EMS responded to the scene. Doctors pronounced the man dead at a hospital. Two other men were also shot, D.C. police said.
Three hours later, Gunnels heard another shooting a block away, on the 2000 block of 14th St SE.
The victim in that shooting was identified as 28-year-old Kalif Brown. Brown’s mother said he is her third son to die from gun violence in over four years.
“It has to stop. When do it stop? When do it stop?” she said over the phone, her voice breaking.
Gunnels asks the same question. She says she hopes for “positive vibes, peace and spreading love,” in the words of the Bob Marley mural displayed on her porch.
D.C. police are investigating both shootings and ask anyone with information to call them.
