WASHINGTON (The Thursday Times) — A gunman shot five people at and around a gym in Washington’s Logan Circle neighbourhood on Thursday morning, killing one, and later shot himself in an apartment building where he had barricaded himself, police and officials said.
The shooting began just before 8am local time at a VIDA Fitness gym on the 1500 block of 15th Street NW, about a mile north of the White House, Jeffery Carroll, the interim chief of the Metropolitan Police Department, told reporters. Officers reached the scene within 30 seconds and found a man who had been shot inside the gym. He died there.
Four more people were found shot nearby and taken to hospital. One is in critical condition, and the other three are expected to recover, officials said. A law enforcement official said the gunman shot one of them in a parking garage elevator.
Police said the suspect, a white man who was a member of the gym, then barricaded himself in an apartment on the seventh floor of a building on the same block. Negotiators spoke to him for more than an hour. Officers then heard a gunshot, forced their way in, and found him with a gunshot wound. A law enforcement official later said he had died.
Carroll said the man appeared to have been in a dispute with the building’s homeowners association, but gave no further details of a motive.
“We’re devastated. Someone was killed in our city this morning, a senseless act of gun violence,” Mayor Muriel Bowser said.
James Spellman, who was at the gym, said about 50 people were there when the shooting started. “Within seconds there was a man who fell to the ground,” he said. He said he heard about two shots inside the gym and five or six outside.
The FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Secret Service, and National Guard troops joined the police response. Nearby schools were placed on alert, streets around 15th and P Streets were closed, and police stepped up their presence at the Dupont Circle and Farragut West Metro stations.
National Guard troops have patrolled the capital since August 2025, when President Donald Trump took federal control of the city’s policing and sent in hundreds of Guard members to fight crime. That deployment continues.
