(NewsNation) — President Donald Trump’s law enforcement takeover in Washington, D.C., is welcome news for the mother of a Capitol Hill intern who was shot in a drive-by shooting.
Eric Tarpinian-Jachym, who worked in Kansas Republican Rep. Ron Estes’ office, is thought to have been an innocent bystander walking down the street when he was fatally shot on June 30 by unidentified assailants near the Walter E. Washington Convention Center.
According to law enforcement officials, multiple suspects got out of a vehicle and opened fire on a group of people around 10:28 p.m. ET, striking Tarpinian-Jachym, a woman and a 16-year-old boy. The other two victims suffered non-life-threatening injuries.
Authorities have recovered the vehicle involved in the shooting, and detectives do not believe Tarpinian-Jachym was the intended target of the ambush, the Metropolitan Police Department said. The police department said in a news release that it is seeking information from the public but provided no additional information about potential suspects.
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Tarpinian-Jachym’s mother, Tamara Tarpinian-Jachym, told “NewsNation Live” on Wednesday that she believes that law enforcement in the district needs a drastic overhaul in order to find those committing violence.
“If people can’t handle 30 days of the National Guard and others patrolling to free up the time of the patrolman in D.C. and the detectives to work on other cases that are unsolved, then there’s a problem,” she said.
She added, “I want them to find his killers, or killer. I’m waiting for the call. I’m just hoping now that they can give time to all these unsolved homicides in DC and find the people who did these heinous crimes.”
Tamara Tarpinian-Jachym said her son, who was a 21-year-old rising senior at the University of Massachusetts Amherst studying finance and political science, was there to learn about D.C. in hopes of pursuing a career in public service.
“He was a good kid. He looked at the world through a bright lens,” she said. “He was there to learn, and he loved DC, and he loved the people of DC.”
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Violent crime down 26% from last year: DC police
Tarpinian-Jachym’s death was the 85th homicide in D.C. this year, according to MPD’s crime reporting system.
However, MPD data shows violent crime is down 26% compared to the same time last year.
D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser has said violent crime in the district has decreased since a rise in 2023. She’s pushed back against Trump’s focus on crime in the district and said the decline in crime is due to the community’s cooperation.
“We had a terrible spike in crime in 2023, but this is not 2023, this is 2025,” she said Sunday on MSNBC. “We’ve done that by working with the community, working with the police, working with our prosecutors, and in fact working with the federal government.”
Bowser argued the focus should be on hiring more prosecutors and judges and improving the city jail, rather than ramping up federal enforcement.
The Hill contributed to this report.
