This Glock 17 responsible for too many shootings in D.C. area
WASHINGTON — The Glock 17 rested in a display case in a gun shop in a Virginia strip mall.
Easy to shoot, easy to handle. A used 9mm. For $325 in cash, it was sold to a man who swore in writing on a federal form that the gun was for him.
It wasn’t.
Within days he’d pass the semiautomatic to a friend who had driven him to the store. That friend passed it to others.
Less than a week after the Glock was purchased on Aug. 4, 2014, it was used in a gunbattle that wounded six at a birthday barbecue in Washington, D.C.
It was fired three days later at a woman driving along a highway, a victim who happened to be an off-duty D.C. police officer headed home from a nightclub. She kicked off her Louboutin heels and punched the gas pedal trying to catch the shooters.
The same night and less than 2 miles away, the Glock was fired again at a man stopped at a traffic light. In a coincidence, he, too, was a cop and a random target, in plainclothes and driving into the District to testify in a murder trial.
Shot four times and desperately trying to get to his service weapon in a gym bag, the officer rammed his SUV into the shooter’s car to try to force it to stop.
The officer never managed to fire a round, and the gunman with the Glock got away.
A buying spree
The Glock 17 was part of a summer 2014 buying spree.
In the span of a month, Jamal Fletcher Baker and his buddy, Lawrence Monte Morgan, visited five Virginia gun dealers, spending more than $3,500 on a dozen firearms, court files show.
Sometimes they bought two at a time. Sometimes they doubled back to a store within days.
A Smith & Wesson pistol in Richmond. A Walther Uzi and a Ruger P345 in Ashland.
And at a Manassas store, the Glock.
Baker and Morgan weren’t experienced street hustlers when they teamed up in the gun scheme that authorities said included posting weapons for sale on Instagram.
Morgan grew up in violent neighborhoods in Maryland and D.C. He had no job, was a new father and at the age of 24 was a rapper known as “Stunna.”
Baker was raised in a strict military family in Prince George’s County, Maryland. He was 23 and selling shoes on the street. The two had met a few years earlier while trying to break into the music industry.
Together, a court case would show, they went to Virginia Arms Co., about 50 miles from D.C., on a late afternoon in early August
and from a display, chose the Austrian-made 9mm Glock 17.
Baker filled out the required paperwork, Federal Form 4473, and declared he was buying the gun for himself, a lie that is a felony. He quickly gave the Glock to Morgan.
A party interrupted
In less than a week, the Glock was used in a firefight.
A birthday party was still going strong just before 2 a.m. on Aug. 10, 2014, at the family home of Romeo and Ronald Hayes in southwest D.C. within blocks of Nationals Park, the baseball stadium.
At the back of the brick townhouse, about a dozen people were at the cookout when a pair of gunmen rolled up in a car on a side street. They jumped out and fired at least 15 rounds. People dove behind sheds and trash cans as the gunmen barged through the yard and toward the house.
A friend of the Hayeses rushed inside, and according to a police affidavit, grabbed a gun he’d recently bought from Morgan. The Glock 17 by then had been tricked out with an extended magazine that held 30 bullets.
The friend passed the gun to Ronald Hayes to return fire against the shooters, who had strafed the party in an apparent feud with one of the guests, police would say later in court filings. He missed.
Six partygoers were wounded, one shot in the neck, stomach, leg and foot. Two people, though not the Hayeses or their friend, were arrested but charges were not pursued when the suspects, victims and partygoers refused to cooperate with detectives.
Police recovered casings from several different guns. Three were from a 9mm that were later tracked to the Glock 17.
At the nightclub
Later that morning, the Hayes brothers, the friend who had bought the Glock and a few others regrouped at a house in Prince George’s County, Maryland, where they hung out for two days, drinking tequila and using drugs.
Sometime after midnight on Aug. 13, Romeo Hayes and the friend decided to go clubbing at the Opera Ultra Lounge in downtown D.C.
By the time Romeo Hayes and his friend left around 2:30 a.m., he was high and irritable and got into a shouting match with men near his parked car, according to court files.
The friend got behind the wheel and Hayes pulled the Glock 17 from the glove compartment.
Off-duty police officer Shaquinta Gaines left the club at around the same time.
A mother of two who had known she wanted to be a cop from the time she wore a safety patrol vest in elementary school, Gaines had been out for a girlfriend’s birthday party, dancing in her red-soled shoes. She had left her gun at home. About 6 miles from the club, gunfire interrupted the R&B music Gaines was listening to in her car. A burgundy Nissan Altima zoomed by. With her heels kicked off, Gaines put her foot to the gas pedal, surging to nearly 90 mph as she tracked the Altima’s taillights on the parkway.
Cresting a hill, she soon caught sight of the car in the distance locked in what looked like a monster truck battle with a big SUV at the D.C.-Maryland line.
She sped up, eventually bearing down on the Altima’s bumper, and called out the license plate to a 911 operator just as Romeo Hayes leaned out
the passenger side window and opened fire with the Glock 17.
Gaines ducked until the shooting stopped and wasn’t hit.
Months in a hospital
From his Yukon Denali, Thurman Stallings watched a car racing toward him from the rear as he sat at a traffic light.
The D.C. detective had left his rural Maryland home before dawn to get to his police district and read up on a new case.
Seeing the car speeding up behind him, Stallings flipped on his handheld police radio and reached for his pistol in the gym bag on the front seat.
When Stallings looked up again, the Altima had pulled up next to him. “I saw the gun staring right at me,” Stallings recalled.
It was, investigators said, the Glock 17 in the hands of Romeo Hayes.
The first shot hit Stallings’ left forearm. Stallings cranked the steering wheel to the left using his right hand.
He hit the gas hard, ramming the front of his SUV into the passenger side of the Altima.
Romeo Hayes fired again, driving gaping holes into Stallings’ windshield. Twelve bullets pierced the SUV, four hitting Stallings in the left shoulder, stomach and chest before the Altima pulled away.
Stallings stayed behind the car for only a few more blocks before he saw flashing police lights.
Dizzy, he came to a stop as officers rushed to help him. By then, the Altima — and the Glock — were gone.
As recently as this spring, Stallings underwent more than 20 hours of surgeries and spent more than two months in a hospital.
Catching the suspects
Police swarmed the area in the hours after the Glock was fired at Gaines and Stallings. The friend of the Hayeses sped in the Altima back to the Prince George’s hangout with Romeo Hayes, and, according to court documents, told Ronald Hayes, “I think your brother just killed someone.”
After running through backyards and a chase that involved a hovering police helicopter, Romeo Hayes was caught. He told police he’d just left a club in downtown and had done nothing wrong. He was charged with two counts of assault with intent to kill.
The Glock 17 wasn’t on him.
Rebecca Tomlinson and Michael Brittin came together on a case for the first time in the aftermath of the Glock 17 shootings.
An agent for a decade with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Tomlinson often teams with D.C. police and prosecutors in gun investigations. Brittin has spent more than three decades prosecuting major crimes for the U.S. attorney’s office for D.C.
On the day the two officers were attacked, Brittin, a meticulous senior prosecutor, took over the investigations. Romeo Hayes was in custody in the District and the friend who had driven the Altima was quickly arrested. Tucked into the friend’s waistband was a Ruger P345 pistol, one of the guns purchased in the summer buying spree in Virginia.
The friend told D.C. investigators about another gun, a Glock 17, that he had pulled from a hiding spot in a flower pot and taken to an underground gun trader called “Poppa.”
Tomlinson and her colleagues set to work tracking the sale of the Ruger. Using the serial number, ATF traced it to a sporting goods store in Ashland, Virginia, court records show, and to the Ruger’s buyer of record, Jamal Baker. Records also showed that Baker had bought a dozen guns in his own name during an August buying binge.
Surveillance footage from some of the Virginia gun buys showed Baker was not alone during the purchases. But when ATF investigators went to Baker, he would not name his partner.
Brittin, meanwhile, wanted the Glock. Interviews and crime scene analysis had confirmed that 9mm casings at the birthday party and the attacks on the officers had all come from a Glock 17.
Tomlinson had assumed the Glock had been made to disappear as part of the cleanup in the days after the shootings but had asked to be alerted if any gun Baker had purchased surfaced at a crime scene.
So she waited. And Brittin continued plowing through internal police reports.
They got their hit in early 2015.
The Glock had been tossed under a car after a police chase by a man whose relatives lived in Poppa’s housing complex.
Tomlinson and Brittin finally had their gun. Heading to court
With the Glock 17 in hand, prosecutors were able to go to court with the weapon used to fire on law enforcement.
Both Baker and Morgan entered guilty pleas. Each was sentenced to more than a year in prison.
The Hayes brothers’ friend pleaded guilty to a long list of crimes that included possessing the unregistered Ruger and Glock and his role as the driver on the night of the police shootings.
In February 2016, Ronald Hayes was sentenced to 16 months in prison. The shooter, Romeo Hayes, got 10 years in prison.
Gaines, who is still on the force, was at the sentencing, but a prosecutor spoke on her behalf. The shooting was terrifying for the officer and remains “frightening and difficult” to comprehend, the prosecutor said.
When it was Stallings’ turn, he rose with his wife and mother watching.
“Anybody could have been at that light that night,” Stallings said in court. But if not for his training and instinct to go after Romeo Hayes, there would have been a different outcome.
“If I had stayed the hunted and not become the hunter, I would not be here, your honor.” If Stallings had been a civilian and not a cop, the detective told the judge, “Mr. Hayes would have got out of that car and finished me.”
The Glock 17 is now in a vault in D.C.’s forensics lab, waiting to be incinerated.
Of the 12 guns that Baker and Morgan bought in August 2014, six have not been found.