A National Guard member is shot in the leg while breaking up a fight on Capitol Hill, and the gunman is shot in the abdomen

The fight started on a sidewalk, and it ended with two men in hospital and a police investigation running into Monday morning. At about 10 past 11 on Sunday night, in the 400 block of 8th Street Southeast, near the Eastern Market Metro station and in front of a District fire station, a group of seven or eight National Guard members riding in a van saw a brawl break out on the pavement and got out to stop it.

One of the men in the fight pulled out a gun and began shooting. Interim Police Chief Jeffery Carroll told reporters at the scene in the early hours of Monday that the Guardsmen ordered the man to drop the weapon, that he pointed it at them and fired, and that he then ran into an alley and fired again. Three Guardsmen returned fire. One Guardsman was hit in the leg. The gunman was hit in the abdomen and was arrested. Firefighters brought both wounded men inside the fire station while police were called. Carroll said there is no further threat to the public.

The other people in the fight ran when the shooting started, and investigators do not yet know how it began. Carroll said it appeared to involve people who had been inside a nearby establishment earlier in the evening, on a block of Barracks Row that residents have complained about at recent police meetings for rowdy weekend nights. The police Internal Affairs and Criminal Investigations divisions are both working the case, and detectives say they want to speak with everyone who was in the fight and anyone who saw it. Neither wounded man has been named, and no charges have been announced, as of October 19.

The shooting lands in the middle of a legal fight over the Guard presence itself. Troops have been deployed in the capital since August 2025, at a peak of roughly 5,000 and about 2,900 in early October 2026, according to Associated Press reporting of the court case. A district judge ruled the deployment illegal last November, an appeals court stayed that ruling, and appeals arguments were heard on October 14. It also comes less than a year after two West Virginia Guard members were shot in the city, one of them fatally. On Sunday night the Guardsmen were doing the thing the deployment puts them in position to do, stepping into a street fight, and one of them took a bullet in the leg for it.