Inside the Navy Yard Suspects' Wild Apartment Building

In the fall of 2021, a resident of the Navy Yard building Crossing DC attended a party at the apartment of her neighbor, a man named Ari who she knew through friends. “That first time I ever went into his apartment, it was so strange to me,” she recalls, “because he had a huge three-bedroom apartment with no furniture. And I was just like, why would you pay for this as a single guy?” She says Ari claimed that the government was footing the bill, which seemed plausible; most people she knew in their building worked for the government.

Later that night, this resident—who asked to be called Micaela—was sitting on Ari’s couch when her friend ventured into one of the apartment’s back rooms. “My friend comes out wearing, like, I think a gas mask and a bulletproof vest,” she says. He described the room as a “bedroom full of guns and military equipment.” (According to prosecutors, a weapons cache was later found in a search of the apartment.) In retrospect, Micaela sees that “there are things that were weird, like the free three-bedroom apartment and a bedroom full of guns when you live in downtown Washington, DC. But I just thought it was something I didn’t understand because I don’t work in the government.”