There wasn’t much to do except come together. People embraced. They cried. They lit tealights, and they steeled themselves against the cold breeze. The silence was punctuated by short speeches and the rustling of leaves.
At a vigil in D.C.’s Logan Circle neighborhood on Thursday evening, the stillness belied the chaos that had taken place that morning, when a man opened fire in a gym and his apartment building, killing one and injuring four others, before setting his apartment on fire and ultimately turning a gun on himself.
“This is a community that pulls together,” said Judy Harris, 64, who has lived in Logan Circle for more than 20 years. “It’s comforting to come together as a community, and I had no doubt that this is what the Logan Circle community would do.”
The neighborhood’s typical sense of calm was shattered when a resident opened fire over what appeared to be a personal grievance against the management of his condominium building.
“The only way people will pay attention, you have to do something,” a building manager recalled him telling her after the shooting but before he shot himself.
By a quarter past 8 a.m., people across the city were paying attention.
There were the neighbors, several of whom described hearing loud booms — though some assumed, at least at first, that the noises were fireworks or a car backfiring — who sheltered in their apartments, awaiting further instructions.
There were the shop workers who pulled people off the street and offered them a place to hide from the unfolding chaos.
There were the parents, who fretted as D.C. Public Schools campuses were put on lockdown. They could not get in, and their children could not get out.
And there were the law enforcement officers who swarmed the streets and stood on roof tops.
By the time the rain cleared and the sun emerged, illuminating the changing leaves on brick-lined streets, a suspect had been identified: Matt Lambert, a 55-year-old emergency room doctor who owned a condo in the Metropole and had filed a lawsuit against the building’s management company in 2025, alleging it had failed to address water damage and mold in his unit. He was also a member of Vida Fitness on the building’s lower level.
Lambert appeared to direct particular ire toward one of the building’s managers, James Stuart, complaining repeatedly about Stuart spending time at Vida Fitness in social media posts on an account linked to Lambert.
Lambert entered Vida Fitness and fatally shot Stuart with a handgun, authorities said. Lambert then made his way up to his seventh-floor apartment and shot four more people on the street from his balcony before barricading himself inside the unit, interim D.C. police chief Jeffery Carroll said. Around 11:30 a.m., Lambert was declared dead at the scene, police said.
The shooting sent panicked residents and gym-goers fleeing for shelter.
The surrounding streets filled up with emergency vehicles with flashing lights, and officers cordoned off several blocks around the scene. Neighbors and residents, some still in their pajamas or gym clothes, clustered on street corners or near police barricades. Helicopters flew overhead, and around the city, people phoned loved ones with the same question: “Are you okay?”
By lunchtime, officials had set up an emergency reception center at Stead Park for witnesses to give statements to police and for people displaced by the shooting to get food, water and clothes. Jennifer Zwilling, CEO of the Edlavitch DC Jewish Community Center, brought a few pizzas from Andy’s.
“We’re all feeling like we want to do what we can to help the neighborhood,” she said.
Vida Fitness is a 20-year-old hub for the city’s LGBTQ+ community. “It’s the gay gym,” said Seth Guidry, the communications director for the LGBTQ+ recreational league Stonewall Sports.
“Vida is a space where we can obviously go and work on our physical selves, but also a sense of community,” he said. “Beyond going out for drinks or to a restaurant, Vida has always been a place where we can see our friends and connect or just see faces that become familiar.”
It’s a safe space for people, he explained: “I think that that was challenged today.”
JR’s, a nearby LGBTQ+ bar that neighbors the emergency reception center, posted Thursday afternoon that its “doors are open for anyone who needs a safe space for community during this time.” A few doors down, the LGBTQ+ steakhouse Annie’s created vouchers for teachers at the nearby Ross Elementary School to get a free drink.
“We want to be part of the community, and so we’ve had a good relationship with Ross,” said Daniel Huff, a manager at the restaurant. “They went through something very difficult today. And so we wanted to be there for them.”
When Huff arrived at the restaurant around 2:30 p.m. on Thursday, he said he got a call from someone asking if it was still open despite the shooting. “Of course,” Huff replied.
“It’s important for us to be there when people need a place to go,” Huff said.
A couple blocks away, the First Baptist Church of the City of Washington, D.C., opened its doors three hours early to give those affected a place of refuge. People came, one at a time, seeking comfort in one another.
“In moments like this, I think you need very tangible reminders that you are not alone,” said associate pastor Eric Mathis. “If you are home by yourself or in small groups or kind of in your echo chamber, the world can sometimes feel really small.”
Later, a children’s choir dress rehearsal went ahead at the church as scheduled. People involved considered canceling the rehearsal, but the fact that it went on showed “a beautiful sense of community,” said Tanya Wirth, whose daughter is in the choir.
Around that time, Call Your Mother district manager Daniel Cobos was at the bagel shop’s Logan Circle location, around the corner from the Metropole and Vida Fitness gym. He was doing his best to get the shop ready to open on Friday.
As the shooting was happening, Cobos said people took shelter in the bagel shop. Staff got as many people as they could into the shop, locked the doors and stayed away from the windows, he said.
Cobos said it was important for the chain to support the community. “We’re all about our community,” he said. “We’re big on vibes, and that’s in the good times and the bad times.”
Cobos said the shop was planning to offer free bagels and coffee to Metropole residents sometime soon.
About an hour after the Logan Circle vigil began, the crowd walked a few blocks west, bringing the thank-you notes they had written to Call Your Mother. They taped them on the store’s window.
“I’ve always been glad to be your neighbor but never more than today,” one note read.
At another vigil, just after the sun set, a small group from First Baptist walked in solemn silence the few blocks from their house of worship to gather near the site where the shooting occurred less than 12 hours earlier.
“Most mornings, I drive that path, and the next time that I drive that path, I’ll feel different,” Mathis, the pastor, told his congregants. “For those of you who walk or run by or are near it, it will probably feel different and so hopefully this gives you an opportunity to be in that vicinity for the first time, not by yourselves, but with others in the context of community.”
They walked past newscasters, relaying to audiences what guns the shooter had in possession. They stopped across the street from the Metropole, where barricade tape blocked off the building’s entrance. The church group prayed together, their faces illuminated by the candles they held and flashes of red and blue from nearby police lights.
Edwin Vela, who was running less than a block away when shots were fired in the morning, read aloud from the prayer sheet. “We lament that a place meant for living became a place of death,” he said. “In our lament …”
They all spoke in unison. “Lord, have mercy.”
Danielle Paquette and Tim Carman contributed to this report.
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