Suspected Van Ness Shooter Had Hundreds Of Unspent Rounds, D.C. Police Searching For Motive

It’s almost a strangely routine detail: only hours before allegedly opening fire on the Edmund Burke School in Van Ness on Friday afternoon, suspected gunman Raymond Spencer bought two microwavable meals at a nearby supermarket.

That revelation is among the tidbits that D.C. police are piecing together about Spencer’s whereabouts ahead of the shooting, which injured four people, scrambled law enforcement, and kept students and nearby residents on edge for hours as police searched and evacuated the Ava Van Ness apartment — from which Spencer is said to have fired more than 200 rounds at the school located across a shared alley.

Speaking during a press briefing on Monday afternoon, D.C. Police Chief Robert Contee said police had recovered four long guns — three of them set up to fire automatically — and two handguns from the apartment, along with 800 unspent rounds of ammunition. (The guns were all purchased legally.) But he also revealed that police had recovered parts of three other long guns from an apartment Spencer rented in Fairfax, as well as another 1,000 rounds of ammunition.

Contee said Spencer, a graduate of Wheaton High School who briefly served in the U.S. Coast Guard, rented the apartment in the Ava in Jan. 2022. He also said that Spencer was caught on surveillance cameras the night before the shooting rolling a large bag into the building, and that he had placed his own camera outside his apartment to see anyone approaching.