Two teenagers were killed and three others were wounded during a drive-by shooting Tuesday afternoon in a troubled Northeast Washington neighborhood.
The victims, males between the ages of 16 and 18, were standing in the courtyard at the Clay Terrace housing complex at about 4 p.m. when a black sport utility vehicle with tinted windows rolled up and bullets started flying, D.C. police said. One young man died at the scene. The other four were taken to the hospital, where a second victim was pronounced dead, police said.
Police combed the area and looked for the black Chevy Tahoe. Patrolmen were hitting other neighborhoods to prevent retaliatory attacks.
Police Chief Cathy Lanier said there were hundreds of people in the area who might have information to help capture the killer or killers. She pleaded for witnesses to come forward.
“It’s someone’s child today. It’ll be someone else’s child tomorrow unless someone comes forward,” Lanier said.
Police have not determined what set off the deadly attack, but they were pursing the possibility that the shooting stemmed from conflicts between neighborhood groups.
Some of the long-standing conflicts are so old that none of the members involved remembers how they started, Lanier said.
“Most of these beefs are not based on anything, but just the history of disputes,” Lanier said.
D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty reminded the public that he held a news conference in the same place last year to announce the arrest of 32 people accused of running an open-air PCP market there. Most of those arrested belonged to the street-level crew called CT3, for the initials for Clay Terrace. The PCP came from Los Angeles.
“Obviously, there’s a lot of work to be done,” Fenty said Tuesday.
Homicides around the city are down 28 percent in 2009 after creeping up the last two years, according to police.
