Two men have been arrested and charged in the Monday night shooting of an undercover U.S. Park Police officer in Southeast Washington, D.C. police announced Tuesday.
Darren Foster, 21, and Asheile Foster, 22, allegedly ambushed the officer as he was driving a white Tesla in the 5100 block of Queens Stroll Place SE while investigating an earlier incident, police said in a news release. The assailants approached the officer’s vehicle in the Marshall Heights neighborhood and fired multiple shots as the officer drove away, police said. A D.C. police spokesman said the suspects are brothers.
The suspects were each charged with assault on a federal police officer while using a gun, according to the news release. They could make initial appearances in D.C. superior or federal court Wednesday, when additional details are likely to become available through court documents.
Police have not said how they think the gunmen may have identified the undercover officer, who police said did not return fire.
Asheile Foster had been arrested by U.S. Park Police detectives Sunday, during a narcotics enforcement operation in Congress Heights, about five miles from where the shooting occurred, according to documents filed in D.C. Superior Court.
Detectives said they found clear plastic bags with fentanyl and alprazolam on him. He was charged with two counts of unlawful distribution of a controlled substance and two counts of unlawful possession with intent to distribute a controlled substance.
Kenneth Spencer, an official with the Park Police union, said the officer who was shot Monday was struck in the shoulder and was discharged from a hospital Tuesday morning.
“The officer was ambushed by at least two gunmen,” U.S. Park Police Chief Scott Brecht told reporters Monday night. Interim D.C. police chief Jeffery Carroll added, “The officer was targeted inside the vehicle.”
Authorities said the shooting was captured on at least one security camera; police gave vague initial descriptions of one man wearing a white hoodie and blue jeans, and the other man wearing black clothing with white stripes down the sleeves and pants.
The officer, who has not been identified, was airlifted to a hospital in the Park Police’s Eagle helicopter. Police described the firearms used as rifles; it was not immediately clear if investigators had recovered the weapons. The FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies have joined the investigation.
Park Police officers typically patrol the District’s parks and monuments, which include the National Mall and numerous smaller parks and vehicular parkways throughout the region. It is one of many federal police agencies that regularly patrol District streets and the campuses of federal institutions, and its jurisdiction throughout the nation’s capital is broad.
The shooting on Queens Stroll Place, renamed from Drake Place after a 1991 visit by Queen Elizabeth II, happened in an area that in the past has been plagued by gun violence.
A Washington Post analysis in 2021 showed that in a little more than three years, crime scene technicians found 2,759 bullet casings — by-products of shootings involving rifles, pistols and shotguns — in about a one-square-mile area that includes Marshall Heights. It was among the highest concentrations of bullet casings collected in the city in that period, a stark demonstration of how many times triggers were pulled.
Crime has dropped in the District over the past two years, though violent crime in Marshall Heights is up so far this year compared with the first three months of 2025, police statistics show. That is due to a spike in assaults with dangerous weapons, a category that includes shootings, in the neighborhood near the border with Maryland.
A couple blocks off the Benning Road commercial strip, the street where the shooting occurred is lined by small single-family homes; on one side of the street, they sit on a small hill. In the late 1980s, the area was the epicenter of deadly drug battles, with Benning Road the divide between two of the city’s most notorious warring street crews — Simple City and Eastgate.
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