Via MPD.

Content warning: this post describes the incident in detail that may disturb some readers

Jasper Spires, the 18-year-old man suspected of brutally killing 24-year-old Kevin Sutherland aboard a Metro Train on Saturday, is due back in court on Friday morning.

Spires has been charged with first-degree murder while armed and made his initial appearance in a D.C. Superior Court this afternoon, and he’ll appear in court again on Friday. On July 4th, just after 1 p.m., Spires allegedly robbed Sutherland and, when Sutherland struggled with his assailant, Spires stabbed him many times, killing him before paramedics arrived.

In charging documents obtained by the Post, it paints a grisly scene aboard a half-full downtown-bound Red Line on wet but mild Fourth of July afternoon. According to witness accounts, Spires allegedly tried to take an item from Sutherland’s waist—most likely his cell phone—just after 1 p.m.

The two men struggled as Spires “repeatedly punched Sutherland until he fell to the floor and cried for help.” At that point, witnesses say Spires repeatedly stomp Sutherland as he laid on the floor crying for help. Here’s what one witnessed described seeing:

“I watched [the attacker] drop-kick him in the head several times, like he wanted to kick his head off,” the woman said. “We saw the perpetrator kicking the man. He had him on the ground, punching him, kicking him and stabbing him.” She said Sutherland was “moaning a lot.. . .Never have in my life have I seen anything like this. I saw [the attacker] bent over him. I did see the bloody knife in his hand.”

According to the police arrest affidavit, Sutherland was stabbed repeatedly “in the chest, abdomen, back, side and arms.”

During the incident, passengers on the Metro car—there were about ten, according to witness reports—watched the scene unfold in terror, too afraid to intervene. After the attack on Sutherland, Spires allegedly robbed and threatened other passengers, including one man, whose wife went to a different Metro car to alert the train operator and call 911.

The man who Spires allegedly threatened with his bloody knife posted his account of the incident on Reddit. (It’s necessary to point out that there’s no way to verify that this man was on the train, but his account is quite vivid and detailed):

I was on the train car when he was attacked. My wife and I were sitting in the front of the car (the attack happened in the middle), and we noticed only when someone ran past us into the next car. My wife noticed the knife, and went into the next car to tell the driver (it was the second car from the front), so she went and banged on the driver’s window. I only saw it being a fight, so I hit the call button to tell the driver. This almost cost me my life, as in the time it took for me to stand up and hit the button, the assailant had walked up to me. It was only once he got close that I saw the knife. He told me to shut up, which I did, raising my hands. Amazingly, he did not kill me. He walked a bit away from me, and I ran past him to the other side of the car. He then, almost as an afterthought, robbed the older couple. He then assaulted Kevin again, and when the train pulled up to the station, got off. My wife was the one on 911, getting people to go downstairs to meet the police. Metro workers got on the train and told everyone to get off and not to touch Kevin, but my wife relayed instructions from 911 that someone needed to sit with him and try to keep him awake. I sat with Kevin, held his hand, stroked his head and kept telling him to breathe, and that he was going to see the fireworks next year. I sat with him until he died. By the time the paramedics showed up, he had stopped breathing.

According to the Post, authorities suspect that Spires was under the influence of synthetic drugs at the time of the attack. Recently, there’s been a huge spike in synthetic marijuana overdoses and violence stemming from the use of synthetic drugs. Mayor Muriel Bowser recently unveiled aggressive measures to try and combat the rise of dangerous synthetic drugs.