On July 3, 2025, a Washington, D.C. jury delivered guilty verdicts against six people for a triple murder committed nearly four years earlier, over Labor Day weekend in 2021. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia announced the convictions, closing out one of the city's most closely watched recent prosecutions — a coordinated mass shooting that left three people dead and three more wounded.
The defendants found guilty included Erwin Dubose, Kamar Queen, Damonta Thompson, and William Johnson-Lee, the four men whose names anchor the case in the court record. They were not the only people held responsible. In all, six were convicted, among them a woman from Rockville, Maryland — a detail that underscored how far the violence prosecutors described reached beyond the immediate scene of the shooting. What began as a holiday-weekend bloodbath in the District ended, years later, with a courtroom full of people awaiting a verdict that touched households well outside the city limits.
The crime traced back to the long holiday weekend of 2021, a stretch of late summer when Washington, like many cities, sees more people gathered in its streets and parks. According to the government, the shooting was not a spontaneous flare of tempers but part of a planned act of violence. By the time the case reached trial, prosecutors had built it as a conspiracy — an agreement among multiple people to carry out the attack — alongside charges of first-degree murder for the three lives that were taken. The framing mattered: it meant the jury was asked to weigh not only who pulled triggers, but who agreed in advance to make the killings happen.