DC shooting latest: 2 dead including suspect Matt Lambert

Welcome into the DMV zone. Let's get you behind the scenes of everything we're working on today. I'm Marina Morocco. A busy news day here across the DMV as we continue to follow that breaking news at the heart of Washington, D.C. A mass shooting devastating downtown D.C. One person killed, four others injured after the shooting happened near Logan Circle. Let's walk you through how this all unfolded. About eight this morning, sources telling Fox 5, Dr. Matt Matt Lambert opened fire inside the Vita Fitness gym on 15th Street in Northwest. A D.C. council member telling Fox 5 he was targeting his condo building manager. Shortly after, the suspect exits the gym and starts firing additional rounds, injuring four other people. Dr. Matt Lambert then barricades himself inside his condo. The suspect fired at officers with a fire breaking out on the seventh floor as well. After ongoing negotiations, Lambert turned the gun on himself and died from that self-inflicted gunshot wound. We have team coverage for you throughout this hour. A lot to unpack here in the 3 o'clock hour. Let's get out to our Tom Fitzgerald, who's been in the Logan Circle neighborhood for these afternoon hours. How are things now as we continue to see police presence behind you, Fitz, and so much to unpack now? Well, to be clear, life is returning to normal in this Logan Circle neighborhood, but it is nowhere near as normal after what these folks went through, witnessed, and in some cases ran for their lives this morning. As we talked to you at the top of this broadcast, the suspect, Dr. Matt Lambert, Dead tonight of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, 11 D.C. schools had to be placed in lockdown today after this very serious mass shooting situation unfolded here this morning, sending both residents in neighboring apartment buildings and businesses in this area. Many of them were open, some others getting ready to open to shelter in place for their lives. Take a look at this video from earlier today. This was at the Vita Fitness Center just after 8 a.m. There were about 50 people inside that gym working out, getting their day started. That is when this armed man, Dr. Matt Lambert, we're told, walked into the fitness center, began shooting immediately through the door, targeting that one individual who was killed. That was not the end of it. There were three other people now suffering life-threatening injuries. Police say the gunman began shooting from outside the gym, making his way inside. When the suspect got out of the gym, he actually went and barricaded himself up on a seventh-floor apartment. He was talking with police negotiators when suddenly a gunshot rang out inside that apartment. D.C. Police Interim Police Chief Jeffrey Carroll saying that... Police were able to arrive on this scene incredibly quickly and found multiple victims spread out throughout the area. There is one person that was shot and deceased inside a gym. We have some other individuals that were actually across the street working on a construction site. We have the report of another individual who was inside the lobby area or in the alley area. As you can imagine, we're not only investigating, but we're also interviewing those witnesses. I think it's part of living in America nowadays. Like, it's not anything new, really. It's very unfortunate that it's like this. The police were literally here in 30 seconds, and they come running down the street. They're telling everybody to get inside, lock your doors, active shooter. They're running around, getting people out, clearing the streets, blocking everything off. Look, this was terrifying for folks out here this morning. One witness inside the gym reported rushing to that victim who was fatally wounded, others running for their lives. There were fire alarms when fires were set in the building allegedly by this suspect today. D.C. Councilmember Brooke Pinta, who chairs the council's justice committee, identifies that fatal victim as being the manager of the condo building where the shooter lived. D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser was also on scene today saying she wanted to commend the overwhelming amount of police response that was heeded. Here within seconds, according to many of the eyewitnesses today, and said she mourned of this loss of life. We're live on 14th Street near P. Marina, we will send it back into you. Fitz, thank you. Joining us now is former FBI agent Ken Gray and national security expert Jack Thomas Tumarchio. Both of you men, thank you so much, gentlemen, for joining us here. Obviously, a lot going on in these last hours. We're still getting and trying to parse some of this information, including about this suspect. But Ken, to the responses. Let's start with you, an incredible response from all the jurisdictions across the District of Columbia, and an incredibly quick one as well. Absolutely. So because of the proximity to the White House, you had Park Police, U.S. Secret Service, FBI, National Guard, the MPD, and also Capitol Police. So a lot of different agencies there showing up. MPD on the scene within 30 seconds. Incredible response. But then again, this was for an active shooter, so they did not know where the shooter was. So you need that many agencies showing up to be able to try to locate and neutralize the shooter. Jack, to that point, you have written extensively about counterterrorism and the efforts to coordinate so many jurisdictions together, including a local municipal police department. What did you see from the response? Was there anything that could have been done differently because it was so quick here? Could this have been prevented? Well, probably not. A lot. This individual is a physician. Apparently, he looks like he had a beef with the landlord. He had some issues with mold in his apartment, and I think he was in some kind of active litigation. So this is one of these one-off times that things just happen. But, you know, again, the best thing I saw here, not that there's a best thing, But the response from the police was so rapid, so... Perfect. That these guys were right there in 30 seconds. And they were, you know, as they were coming on scene, they were telling the residents to shelter in place, lock your doors, don't come out, active shooter. This is about the best you can get for this kind of response. But, you know, could we have predicted this? Probably not. Ken, you've got someone, right, who walks into a very busy gym at 8 in the morning, clearly knows the area well, is able to access something that had codes, gets in there, targets the person that they were allegedly looking for, injures several others, goes back into their condo, and now you're in a condo building with windows with the ability to continue to injure more people. What do police do in that instance when they know where he is to prevent further damage from happening? Well, they tried to get the residents in the surrounding floors and the same floor out of the area so that they would be out of harm's way. There were additionally snipers that were on top of other buildings trying to gain view of the barricaded subject at that time. But you want to try to isolate The barricaded suspect there, to be able to bring forces to bear against him if necessary. They started negotiation and talked to him for around an hour before he decided to kill himself. And so, you know, with this in mind, they were there considering every contingency in this case, and they had the manpower to do so. But the best thing to do is just simply, as they did, get people out of the area. Starting negotiations, trying to talk him out, but eventually he decided to take himself out. And we have pictures of Dr. Lambert, the alleged shooter here, from his own website, Dr. Matt Lambert there. Jack, you know, we think of suspects, you know, people who go on shooting rampages and obviously profiles are very different in every scenario. And this one, according to his own self, he's a double certified emergency doctor, someone who had been living. If you look at some of the allegations online and what he considered untenable situation in his condo that was not remediated with the allegations that there was mold and other things that were afflicting and had to some degree this issue with his homeowners association. Association. Could have been an injunction. There could have been situations. We don't know if potentially in 2020, you know, afterward, we'll figure out whether or not people felt threatened by him. But to that point about suspects like this, is there anything to do rather than just the postmortem, if you will, the after action? Well, you know, we don't we're going to do a postmortem on who Dr. Lambert was. We don't know what he was facing. He may have had mental illness. He had may have had other stressors and maybe something just. Made him cross over the line and do something, something violent. You know, certainly we saw a shooter down in Fort Hood, Texas several years ago in the Army. He was also a physician and has actually been sentenced to death in the next couple months or couple weeks. So it doesn't really matter what your occupation is. It doesn't even matter what the issue is. This thing with his condo may have just been the breaking point, the last straw in maybe other issues that he was going through that he just wasn't able to cope and he had a lot of anger. And, again, I think we'll find that out. As we do the post-mortem on who Dr. Lambert was and what kind of life he was living. What do those negotiations look like, Ken, in those moments that are so critical for police? To your point, keep the person talking, not continuing to commit acts of violence. What does those two hours following the shooting look like between negotiators and someone who's barricaded themselves and who seems to have really reached the edge, so to speak, is on the precipice of killing themselves? Sure. The negotiator is trying to build rapport with the person, find some way in order to make them, convince them that they have something to live for, that they are trying to find a better solution than to continue on in their barricaded situation. Thank you. He shot five people, killing one, critically wounding another, injuring another three. He was at his wit's end, he barricaded in, and this was probably going to end up this way. A negotiation tried to talk him out, and they do so by trying to just find some way to convince the person to continue talking to him and to work out a solution, but no solution was It was possible in this case. Jack, bigger picture here as we go, and we'll give you the final word here. Clearly, we are at a point here where for the past decades we have seen mass shootings almost become the norm to some degree. We've not seen something to this degree in some time in Washington, D.C., and yet still it is so fresh in so many communities. What's the big picture here? How do we get to a point where it's not normal? Well, it's never going to be normal. Certainly, these are acts of violence, and they are still random acts of violence, I would say. Okay. You know, there's certainly discussions about gun control, and when you have people with automatic weapons, the question is, do people need to have automatic weapons, or do you need to just put a ban on that? And again, that's a policy decision for the Congress and for the administration. I don't see an immediate change in that. Gun lobby's pretty heavy, but certainly when you have these kind of things, and you have have school shootings when, you know, children are just massacred. It makes one think that there needs to be something to change this normal because it's not normal and we shouldn't, frankly, we shouldn't put up with this in our society. And we do need to make some changes in my opinion. Jack, Ken, we appreciate speaking with both of you and your insight as the situation continues to unfold and the investigation continues. Stay with us here on the DMV Zone. We'll be right back.