The guy who took a bullet outside a City Place gym Monday evening may have been shot during a drug deal, detectives with the third police district announced Tuesday in a press statement.
It’s unclear how detectives arrived at this theory, but they believe the 25-year-old victim, a District resident, was walking outside — not exiting from — the Gold’s Gym at 8661 Colesville Rd just before 6:00 p.m. when his two assailants showed up and capped him.
Previously, police thought the unnamed victim was a gym patron caught in a random mugging. Detectives now think the victim and suspects may have known each other, the press statement added.
Either way, the victim was shot above his left knee. The bullet exited through the other side of his left leg, then hit the middle part of his right leg. He was brought to an unnamed local hospital with what police described as non-life-threatening injuries.
The two perps are still on the loose. The first suspect was a six-foot-tall black guy weighing about 130 pounds, bald but rocking a beard and side burns. He wore a puffy coat, white tee shirt and packed a handgun. The second was a clean-shaven black guy wearing a hat and a gray hooded sweatshirt, and sporting a tear-drop tattoo on his face.
The third district’s investigative section is keeping the crime-tip line open at (301) 565-5835, so holler if you know something. Callers may remain anonymous.
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I was actually thinking that it might turn out that the victim shot himself in the leg and invented the other people entirely. But it’s not surprising at all to turn out to be something a bit more than originally described.
Still a bit scary to have gunplay on the street, but so long as I keep my various dealers happy, I think I’ll be fine in downtown SS.
Okay, so this is not as awful as an attack on a stranger. But it is still bad news. An innocent ped could have been hit as well — this happens all the time in troubled neighborhoods.
Kathy J said in a post about the previous story that an entrance is in a dark alleyway. This should be an easy fix — more light. More lights on the sidwalks in DTSS is probably a good idea, anyway. Just make sure the light actually beams down on the sidewalk, not up where it is not only wasted, but harms birds.
The police probably checked and found that he didn’t have a gym membership and hadn’t been in there that day.
Terry, the entire transaction (or attempted one) and shooting were apparently caught on a City Place Mall surveillance camera stationed just outside the gym entrance on Colesville. Also, I checked with an employee of the gym when I went to work out today and they indicated that the police did speak with gym management and quickly determined that the victim was not a gym member and had not exited through the gym’s doors as he had reported.
That’d be a particularly dangerous place for stray bullets too, since the sidewalk there is frequently crowded to nearly impassible because of the bus shelters there — particularly since they shut down the bus stops that used to be around the corner on Fenton Street, meaning even more bus lines stop at those two shelters on Colesville Road, meaning more people lined up there constantly.
That reminds me, I’ve thought for a while that maybe the buses that are going to turn the corner at Fenton Street (F4/F6 and some of the Ride Ons) should use those stops there, and the buses that continue up Colesville Road might be given stops on the other side of Fenton Street on the less crowded sidewalk between the American Apparel and the county liquor store, to disperse the bus-waiting crowd a little bit.