More than eight months after a masked gunman walked into a day laborer agency in Northeast D.C. and opened fire on two employees, killing one, a man has now been arrested and charged with murder.
Matthew Walker, 21, of D.C., has been charged with premeditated first-degree murder while armed in the death of David Anthony Remen, 32, of La Crosse, Wisconsin.
Remen was working in the back office of the the Trojan Labor temp agency in the 1700 block of Hamlin Street Northeast shortly before 6 a.m. on Feb. 14 when he was shot several times.
The owner of the company was also wounded in the shooting.
Police never publicly released a motive for the attack, saying only that it didn’t appear to be a robbery because the shooter, who was wearing a mask and gloves, didn’t take anything.
Walker’s connection to the day-laborer firm is still unclear, but online court records reveal a string of violent, sometimes bizarre acts that police said Walker committed in the months after the shooting. They include carjacking a stranger’s car with a toddler strapped in the backseat, and stabbing a friend while playing video games in an attack that paralyzed the other man, according to court records.
In March, Walker — who also goes by the name Malik Just — was charged with unarmed carjacking and kidnapping after police said he hopped into a running car in Northeast D.C. and drove off with a 2-year-old boy in the backseat.
The mother of the toddler, who had stepped outside of the car to fix her child’s car seat when Walker took the wheel, jumped into another car and followed him. Eventually, Walker parked the woman’s car and began walking away before he was apprehended by police, according to court documents. The boy was not hurt.
In April, a judge released Walker to a halfway house as he awaited trial, but court records said he went missing from there. About two weeks later, police said Walker was hanging out with friends playing a video game when he stabbed one of his friends in the neck with a kitchen knife.
The other man was rushed to MedStar Washington Hospital Center where doctors said he was unable to breathe on his own and would likely be paralyzed from the neck down.
Police arrested Walker in May and charged him with assault with intent to kill.
Awaiting trial on the new charge, court records said, over the summer, Walker twice attacked other inmates in the cellblock of D.C. Superior Court.
He was later ordered to undergo a full mental competency evaluation, before being found not incompetent to stand trial in August and ordered to St. Elizabeths.
Earlier this month, about two weeks before he was arrested in the shooting case, a judge found Walker competent to stand trial.
He is due in D.C. Superior Court for a status hearing in the stabbing case on Friday.
WTOP’s Megan Cloherty contributed to this report.
