The man who owned and operated a Northwest D.C. rowhome as an illegal “rooming house” was found guilty of murder Thursday in a 2019 fire that killed two occupants on his property.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for D.C. said 67-year-old James Walker was convicted on two counts of second-degree murder and 27 criminal building code violations.
The August 2023 fire at 708 Kennedy St. NW in Brightwood Park killed 40-year-old Fitsum Kebede and 10-year-old Yafet Solomen, who authorities said were unable to escape the heavily modified building.
Unable to escape from the building’s basement, Kebede and Solomen died from thermal burns and smoke inhalation.
Walker’s “knowledge of the danger posed by the conditions of the property and his conscious disregard of the extreme risk that death or serious bodily injury could occur were the but-for cause of the deaths of the decedents,” officials said.
According to prosecutors, Walker did not have a certificate of occupancy for the building and made several alterations to the property that endangered residents, including partitioning the space into a dozen rooms, some of which were too small to be considered habitable.
“The most egregious violation, however, was the failure to provide an unobstructed means to escape the property,” the attorney’s office said in a news release.
Walker had erected multiple security gates that required keys from both sides and installed a double-keyed security gate inside the property that blocked access from the kitchen to the front door, prosecutors said.
Authorities, at the time of the fire, said that a total of eight people — mostly Ethiopian immigrants — were living in the crowded rowhouse.
In March 2019, just months before the fatal fire, D.C. police warned Walker the building was in violation of several building fire safety codes.
“He was instructed to correct the conditions and have the building inspected for residential use. He did not,” the attorney’s office said.
Officials in D.C. also came under scrutiny in the aftermath of the fire, when the D.C. Office of Unified Communications acknowledged it took more than four minutes to dispatch firefighters to the burning apartment.
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