Maria Ayala, 34, parked her motor scooter in front of the Logan Hardware store on Monday evening and went inside the shop to look for cleaning supplies. When she walked out minutes later, she noticed that her scooter was gone.
Then, she heard gunshots. As she stood on 14th Street NW, her mind, she said, went to the worst place.
“I thought it was a massacre of people, and I ran,” she said. “That’s what you’re taught to do, to run or throw yourself to the ground.”
The reality was less deadly but more personal. Ayala’s scooter, which she used to get around the city and go to her cleaning jobs, had been taken by a group of young people, police said, and a stranger had tried to stop them. The suspects, after also attempting to steal the stranger’s scooter, shot the man in the stomach. He was rushed to the hospital conscious and breathing.
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The attack, which occurred just after 7:30 p.m., was yet another instance of gunfire that sent outdoor diners and families strolling down D.C. streets scrambling for cover, according to accounts on social media. The city has increasingly come under scrutiny for public safety, as homicides threaten to reach highs not seen in decades. The District’s mayor and police chief, among others, are expected to testify before Congress later this month — the latest effort by House Republicans to spotlight violence in the nation’s capital.
As of Tuesday, homicides were up by 19 percent compared with the same time in 2022, a year when there were more than 200 killings in D.C. for only the second time in almost two decades. Assaults with dangerous weapons were about comparable to the same time last year, while overall violent crime was up by 9 percent.
“We are all increasingly frustrated by crime,” said Linda Harllee Harper, the city’s director of the Office of Gun Violence Prevention and executive director of the Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement, in an interview with The Washington Post last week.
Outside the hardware store on 14th Street on Monday evening, Ayala saw the suspects fleeing on another scooter. They appeared to be very young, she said, almost as young as her own kids, who are 11 and 17 years old. She said she felt angry at the suspects, guilty that a stranger had put his life at risk because of her scooter, and scared about what could have happened if she had come out of the hardware store even a minute earlier.
“They hurt another person because they were trying to steal my scooter,” she said. “I wonder, if I come out of the store sooner, would they have killed me?”
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