One Dead and Four Wounded in Shooting Around Washington D.C. Condo Building

A doctor who was unhappy about repair work in his condominium fatally shot one person and wounded four others in and around his building on Thursday in Washington, D.C., officials said.

The attack prompted a widespread response from law enforcement agencies and left residents shaken in a busy neighborhood less than a mile from the White House.

The violence began before 8 a.m. at a gym in the gunman’s building in the Logan Circle section, where the shooter killed the building manager, the police said. The assailant then returned to his unit on the seventh floor and shot four people on the streets below from his balcony, according to Jeff Carroll, the city’s interim police chief.

The gunman, identified as Dr. Matthew Wade Lambert, a 55-year-old emergency medicine physician and health care tech executive, then barricaded himself in his condo, officials said. He fired at the police through his own door before setting fire to the unit, they said. Fire was spotted from outside the building, but Mr. Carroll said that sprinklers helped to keep it from spreading.

Dr. Lambert was found in his unit with a fatal self-inflicted gunshot wound, Mr. Carroll said.

The police identified the building manager as James Stuart, 46, who was fatally shot in the VIDA Fitness gym on the ground floor of the Metropole complex where Dr. Lambert lived, Mr. Carroll said.

Dr. Lambert shot the four other victims from his patio using a rifle, Mr. Carroll said.

One of the wounded victims was in critical condition; the others suffered non-life-threatening injuries, the police said. Authorities said that the shooting stemmed from a conflict between Dr. Lambert and the condominium association of his building in which he lived.

One resident, Kathryn Ghotbi, 33, described a narrow escape from the gunman. After hearing a fire alarm, she grabbed her coffee and walked to the elevators on her floor, thinking it was a false alarm, she said.

Ms. Ghotbi said Dr. Lambert, a man she did not know and recognized only as a neighbor, walked slowly and calmly toward her. She said she flashed him a smile as a way to signal that “we’re all in this together,” dealing with what she thought was the false alarm.

“Then I realized he’s got something in his hands,” she said. It was a shotgun.

“He just goes, ‘You should probably run in the other direction.’ ” Then he shot at the elevator buttons and above the elevator bank, Ms. Ghotbi said.

“I screamed, ‘What are you doing?’”

Ms. Ghotbi then ran toward the stairs, partly in shock. When she got to the ground floor, she said she yelled to other neighbors, “There’s a shooter in the building!”

She ran outside, thinking she was safe, only to hear shooting on the street.

Ms. Ghotbi wondered how and why she was allowed to survive.

“I don’t know why he let me live,” she said. As she burst into tears, she added, “I was a foot away from him.”

Dr. Lambert had filed suit last year against the condominium association, claiming that repair work to the outside of the building had been done shoddily, leaving his unit with mold caused by leaking water, according to a civil complaint.

His lawyer, Joel Brathwaite, said at a news conference Thursday evening that Dr. Lambert had seemed in good spirits lately. The case was going well with depositions, he had made a successful presentation at a medical conference on Tuesday and he was scheduled to start a new job on Monday that would help him chase his professional passion: integrating artificial intelligence into health care systems.

“This is a healer, someone who puts people together,” Mr. Brathwaite said. But, he added, “Litigation wears on you. It takes a toll and some of it is not always visible.”

Mr. Stuart, the man who was killed in the gym, was known as Jimmy and had been a member of the gym for 15 years, according to David von Storch, the owner of VIDA Fitness. He worked out regularly at 7 a.m. Dr. Lambert was also a member of the gym, and on Thursday morning he checked in as usual, before shooting Mr. Stuart, Mr. von Storch said in a text message.

Mr. Stuart was a good listener, a stellar cook and a lover of Christmas, according to Matt Cahill, who said in a phone interview that he had dated Mr. Stuart in 2023.

Mr. Cahill, 38, is a stylist at Bang Salon, the hair salon in the Metropole building complex. He was not at work on Thursday morning but said he heard screams while running an errand at a nearby pharmacy, where he sheltered.

He said that he and Mr. Stuart had lost touch, but he recalled Mr. Stuart planning a “Love Actually”-inspired surprise for him, holding up a sign at the salon on Mr. Cahill’s birthday.

Of the other four victims, two were men and two were women, and it was unclear if they were specifically targeted by Dr. Lambert, Mr. Carroll said.

One of the victims, Susan Thurston-Hamerski, was shot while walking her daughter’s dog, her son, Samuel Hamerski, said in a phone interview. Her injuries were not life threatening, he said.

Dr. Lambert had cut a gas line and used an accelerant to create a fire that set off smoke alarms and sprinklers while he was holed up in his apartment, the police said. Dr. Lambert had been on the phone with police hostage negotiators when they heard a single gunshot and lost contact with him. Dr. Lambert used three guns in the shooting — a handgun, a rifle and a shotgun — none of which were registered in the District of Columbia, Mr. Carroll said.

Two of Dr. Lambert’s neighbors on the seventh floor said he had been vocal with his complaints about the building.

“Everybody is aware of the problems he was having in his apartment,” said Francesco Grigoli, a Metropole resident who was traveling and not at home on Thursday.

Still, neighbors said Dr. Lambert was polite in their brief interactions in the halls.

Another neighbor, Nick Ryan, whose unit is directly next door to Dr. Lambert’s, said he did not know about his neighbor’s disputes. But he said Dr. Lambert was warm and friendly, was often in the company of beautiful women and did international medical volunteer work.

“Never in a million years would I have imagined he would do this,” he said.

The Logan Circle neighborhood where the shooting occurred is a mix of commercial and residential buildings, with the vast majority of them featuring ground-floor retail spaces filled with coffee shops and other businesses.

The usual movements of a workday were almost immediately upended by the sirens from dozens of law enforcement vehicles, some from federal agencies. Several SWAT units raced to the scene and blocked the surrounding streets. An emergency alert to cellphones in the area instructed people to shelter in place.

Helicopters circled overhead as ambulances arrived, and snipers were spotted atop the roof of a nearby condo building.

Suzanne Garwood, 55, said that she had been in a locker room when she heard “an enormous bang.” Outside the room, she smelled gun smoke.

Gym staff members ushered Ms. Garwood, a lawyer who lives in Arlington, Va., out a side door and into an alleyway. She walked back toward the gym to grab her bike and heard what she believed to be more gunshots, Ms. Garwood said.

She then took shelter in an apartment building with about a dozen other gym goers.

The terror from Thursday morning was likely to linger in the neighborhood. Mr. Ryan said he never thought such violence could happen there.

“I think we’re going to be shaken for a while,” he said.

Christine Hauser, Michael Gold and Erik Wemple contributed reporting. Kirsten Noyes contributed research.