Classes were finally over at the Edmund Burke School in Northwest Washington, so Phoenix Gault-Brown, 15, a sophomore, gathered up his belongings on the upper school’s second floor and prepared to head downstairs for the carpool lane. He had a fairly routine evening planned — he was going to hit the gym and lift some weights.
He walked toward the nearby elevated glass pedestrian bridge when suddenly its windows shattered, spraying the space with glass and bullets. At first, Phoenix thought, it was a bomb. But nothing exploded. Then, he knew. Everyone, he said, knew.
“Everyone started running toward the closest stairwell. It was just terrifying. Everyone’s faces, they just dropped,” Phoenix said.
The outburst of gunfire that tore through the otherwise tranquil part of upper northwest Washington — about one mile north of the National Zoo — left three adults and a juvenile wounded. One of the victims was a man who provides security for Burke and Georgetown Day School, according to an email Georgetown Day’s head of school sent to its community Saturday.
Police identified Raymond Spencer, of Fairfax, Va., as a person of interest in the shooting before declaring that a suspect was discovered dead that night in an apartment filled with firearms, ammunition and a tripod.
But the shooting also cratered the sense of security and insularity in one of Washington’s more elite private schools, which runs from the sixth grade to 12th grade and counts about 300 students, according to its website. On Saturday, Burke’s head of school, Damian Jones, emailed the school community with the subject line, “Holding You In Care.”
“Dearest community, We don’t yet have words for what we all experienced yesterday. Today, I first to want to express my deepest care and love, and assurance that we will be there for you at every turn,” he wrote. “I also want to emphasize that everyone did everything right, and everything they could: our faculty, staff, and administrators who sheltered, cared for, and stayed with our students; our young people who showed profound courage and compassion for one another, and even brought levity to yesterday’s long hours …”
Jones, who also acknowledged the aid of the school’s neighbors and local and federal law enforcement officials for arriving within minutes, announced that there would be no classes Monday. He said the school’s administration will meet over the next two days to discuss how they can “best attend to our community’s needs, mental and physical, in the days and weeks to come.”
Jones did not return messages seeking comment.
Burke, which was founded in 1968, bills itself as a “progressive, college prep school” that features an “inclusive environment.” At each grade level, Burke students undergo a year-long “integrated civics, equity, and leadership curriculum, grounded in social justice pedagogy.” Its complex, which sits along one of the city’s most vital corridors, Connecticut Avenue, looks less like a traditional school and more like the modern headquarters of a corporation. A four-story building fronting Connecticut Avenue — Burke’s middle school — is wrapped with large windows and connects to the high school through the elevated glass-enclosed bridge.
Those same design features, though, made Friday’s shooting all the more frightening, Phoenix said. Once he saw the walkway’s windows shatter, he said he and several other students rushed toward the stairwells so they could go down and exit the school. But as they raced down the steps, someone at the bottom yelled that the gunman might possibly be roaming nearby. So, everyone ran back up.
Then, Phoenix said, he was on the upper school’s third floor in the office for foreign languages with about a dozen other students. A Spanish teacher, he said, slammed the door and everyone crawled under three or four desks or sat on the ground up against the walls. People were crying and huddling.
“One of my classmates was calling the police, but since so many people were calling the police, she got put on hold and she started hyperventilating,” he said. “I was trembling. I was holding hands with my friend. It was nice to have someone with me. We didn’t feel as alone. I was freaking out. But she was just like, ‘Calm down, calm down, you’re going to be okay.’”
Meanwhile, Phoenix’s parents, Barbara Gault and her wife Susan Gault-Brown, had left the family’s Maryland home and were racing to Burke. They’d been alerted to the shooting by their neighbor, Patricia Termini, 63, who was fourth in the pickup line waiting in her SUV to bring Phoenix and his best friend home. Bullets hit her car and one of them grazed her shoulder, giving her a bruise, she said.
On the way to the school, Gault-Brown checked her phone and saw a barrage of texts from her son. The first read: “I love you so much mom.” The second: “There’s shooting at.” The third: “School.” The fourth: “I can’t call you.” The fifth: “We have to be silent.” The sixth: “The gun fire hasn’t stopped.”
Gault-Brown wrote back: “Are you okay we love you.”
“I’m hiding. I’m [in] an office,” he wrote.
“We’re coming,” Gault-Brown said.
“There are sirens everywhere.”
“We love you. It is going to be ok.”
“I love you too. There are cops I think.”
“We are going to be there in 15 min.”
“There’s shooting. And shouting. It’s close.”
“Stay down.”
“I’m still ok.”
“We love you so much and we’re going to be there soon.”
When they finally arrived at nearby Tilden Street, Gault said she and her wife didn’t know what else they could write their son to help him.
“I just said, ‘You’re doing great, keep doing what you’re doing,’ and, ‘I love you,’” Gault recalled. “But I was thinking, ‘Should I be telling him to fight or barricade himself’? I figured the teachers knew what they were doing. I just felt so helpless, standing there not knowing what was going on.”
By about 4:15 p.m., the school sent out an email with the subject line, “Emergency Notice.” In all-red font, the message said, “As you may have heard, there was a shooting outside the school after classes ended. Police and SWAT are on site, so you cannot enter the buildings at the time. Please know we are not able to answer calls and emails at this time. We will follow up when we know more.”
While Phoenix was stuck inside the foreign language office, he and others in the room began barricading the door with filing cabinets and boxes of books. At one point, he surveyed the room, eyeing potential weapons for self-defense.
“I didn’t have one in mind,” Phoenix said. “If worse came to worst, I would just pick up my backpack and swing it around.”
He and others in the office were checking their phones, scouring the Internet for news alerts or official updates. Shouts from police officers outside filtered into their room. They felt safe, he said, but not entirely.
Soon, police entered the school and ushered everyone downstairs to the upper school’s basement gym. As the students milled about, everyone chatted and compared notes. Where were you when the shooting started? Who were you hiding with?
“One person told me, ‘I guess this is what you can expect when you go to school in America,’” Phoenix recalled. “One of my friends said, ‘It sucks that we knew what we had to do in a situation like this.’ It definitely helped to be able to talk it through. It grounded the situation more to hear it from multiple perspectives.”
As the hours ticked by, Burke blasted out more emails with all-red font messages. At 5:10 p.m., “At this time, the buildings are secure, and all the students and adults who were in the buildings are safe and in secure areas with law enforcement. We will likely be here for some time, and we will share more when we can.” About an hour later, the school told parents that police officers were interviewing students and when those sessions were over, they would be transported to the Cleveland Park library, about a half-mile south on Connecticut Avenue, the designated “reunification point.”
By about 8 p.m., Gault and her wife made their way to the library. On the first floor, the parents congregated inside a meeting room where, one by one, their children’s names were announced as ready to be picked up in the foyer. Every time a name was called, many of the parents clapped and cheered. Once they heard Phoenix’s name, Gault and her wife bolted out of their chairs and ran-walked out of the meeting room and into the foyer, where the three of them embraced and celebrated.
“It felt reassuring to see his smile. I felt like he’s probably going to be okay,” Gault said.
“It was just incredibly relieving,” Phoenix said. “The stress of the day had left. I hugged both of them and said, ‘I just want to go home.’ My moms were touching my hair. They were making sure I was actually there.”
Peter Hermann and Marc Fisher contributed to this report.