It’s almost a strangely routine detail: only hours before allegedly opening fire on the Edmund Burke School in Van Ness on Friday afternoon, suspected gunman Raymond Spencer bought two microwavable meals at a nearby supermarket.

That revelation is among the tidbits that D.C. police are piecing together about Spencer’s whereabouts ahead of the shooting, which injured four people, scrambled law enforcement, and kept students and nearby residents on edge for hours as police searched and evacuated the Ava Van Ness apartment — from which Spencer is said to have fired more than 200 rounds at the school located across a shared alley.

Speaking during a press briefing on Monday afternoon, D.C. Police Chief Robert Contee said police had recovered four long guns — three of them set up to fire automatically — and two handguns from the apartment, along with 800 unspent rounds of ammunition. (The guns were all purchased legally.) But he also revealed that police had recovered parts of three other long guns from an apartment Spencer rented in Fairfax, as well as another 1,000 rounds of ammunition.

Contee said Spencer, a graduate of Wheaton High School who briefly served in the U.S. Coast Guard, rented the apartment in the Ava in Jan. 2022. He also said that Spencer was caught on surveillance cameras the night before the shooting rolling a large bag into the building, and that he had placed his own camera outside his apartment to see anyone approaching.

Contee added that Spencer had placed some type of appliance against the front door. “He heard us made an entry and shot and killed himself,” he said. Spencer was found inside the bathroom, where Contee said he had created a “command center” of sorts with a laptop, pillow, blanket, phone, and guns.

Still, Contee said what remained unclear was any motive for the shooting. “We are looking at his patterns of life,” he said, adding that police were working with Spencer’s family. He also said that police remained unclear as to whether  he purposely targeted the school.

“It’s kinda hard to say that the school specifically was the target. My gut tells me just where he was focused and where he was shooting he intended to do what he did. I don’t know why. I have to believe that based on his location and where he was shooting, I have to believe that is not something we can rule out,” said Contee on a possible link to Burke.

Contee and Mayor Muriel Bowser didn’t limit themselves to discussing the Van Ness shooting, instead highlighting 10 other shootings that happened on Friday and Saturday where 15 victims were hit. Those included a triple shooting on Kennedy Street NW shortly after the shooting in Van Ness, and another shooting shortly thereafter in Takoma where a man in a wheelchair was shot after an apparent argument with three men on Blair Road NW.

In mentioning that shooting, Contee expressed frustration with how some criminal suspects have been treated, repeating an oft-expressed broadside aimed at the U.S. Attorney for D.C. — which prosecutes all serious violent crime — that not enough is being done to punish offenders, especially as homicides and gun violence have been on the rise in recent years.

“The level of ridiculousness we are seeing… we had a man in a wheelchair shot on Blair Road. Some person thought the responsible thing to do was shoot a man in a wheelchair. That is unacceptable anywhere, and I don’t know what program we have for that. I don’t know what people are expecting to see for that, but people like that deserve to be in jail because they have demonstrated that they cannot function in community,” he said.

Contee said that 40 illegal guns had been confiscated in D.C. over the weekend, and the number is up across the board this year compared to the same period last year — 969 so far in 2022, up 50% from the same time in 2021.

D.C. officials also used the press conference to highlight what they say are failings in parts of the “public safety and justice ecosystem” that they say are contributing to increases in some crimes. In one presentation slide, they said D.C. is building its capacity for prevention of crime through programs like violence interruption while facing “stretched capacity” in rehabilitation programs, lower capacity in the courts, and losing capacity in intervention and enforcement — the size of the police force. Bowser and Contee have made a recent push to hire up to 347 more police officers next year, and growing the department from the current 3,500 officers to 4,000.

“This government is going to do all in its power. We’re going to reach out to get, you know, even expand our resources. But we need everybody in the system and that includes the community to be thinking the exact same way. We will get safer together,” Bowser said.

Bowser also announced a new Violent Crime Impact Team, a partnership between MPD; the FBI; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives; and the Drug Enforcement Agency, to target illegal guns.