Photo by Command ZIs Bloomingdale suffering a scourge of teenagers?
Yesterday, a Pepco worker who was shot in the neck after an altercation with local youths was released from the hospital, having suffered only a minor injury after the daring 7 p.m. shooting. As the Washington Post reported yesterday, the 52-year-old Pepco worker — whose name has not been released, since he is a witness in the case — argued with a group of five teenagers, three boys and two girls, and participated in a shoving match with one of them. The teens fled but returned, one of them brandishing a gun. The Post’s report makes it sound as though the shooting was not intentional: “Words were exchanged again, and the weapon went off, striking the employee, police said.”
This writer has heard other reports of teenagers gone wild in Bloomingdale, a neighborhood better known for its whimsy and strollers than for unruly teenage crews. The Bloomingdale listserv has mentioned a number of incidents in which teenagers were said to have harassed area pedestrians. As I recall, there was an incident some months ago in which a man was beaten while waiting for at the bus stop at First St and Florida Ave NW, apparently for no better reason than he was standing there. One of the guys who hangs outside the Sunset Liquor Store on the same corner — these games are a veritable Neighborhood Watch patrol, when they aren’t themselves violating open-container laws — told me that he had intervened after a group of three guys attempted to push a woman off a bicycle.
There’s no way to know yet whether these are isolated incidents or a string of crimes by a single group of thrill-seeking, underemployed, highly dangerous teens. The 2006 revelation that 11th Street NW had been transformed by brick-throwing goons into a gauntlet for bicyclists was kicked off by a Craiglist question. Consider this a similar query: Do you know anything about a teenage crime epidemic in Bloomingdale? It wouldn’t be the first terrible trend to visit the neighborhood, but if a crew of crummy teenagers is running around with a gun, it’s easily the worst.
