On the evening of June 30, a young congressional intern was shot while walking in the 1200 block of 7th Street on Washington, D.C.’s northwest side. “After all lifesaving measures failed, the adult male victim succumbed to his injuries at a hospital,” the Metropolitan Police report states.
Eric Tarpinian-Jachym was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The University of Massachusetts Amherst senior who was majoring in finance with a minor in politic science had bright future in front of him. Tarpinian-Jachym was interning in the office of Rep. Ron Estes, R-Kansas, when he was caught in a hail of gunfire that wasn’t intended for him. Another collateral damage victim in the nation’s capital, one of the most dangerous places in the United States of America.
According to the police report, multiple suspects exited a vehicle at the intersection of 7th and M Street, northwest, and began firing at a group.
“Detectives believe [Tarpinian-Jachym] was not the intended target of the shooting,” the police report states.
The young man’s mother, Tamara Tarpinian-Jachym, told ABC News earlier this month that President Donald Trump should take control of law enforcement in D.C., dealing with, among other societal afflictions, a wave of juvenile and gang violence.
“As far as I’m concerned, if Trump feels that he needs to take it over until they [city leadership] can get their act together and start prosecuting these juveniles and these people to the fullest extent of the law and not slap their hands so they can go out and do it again and get into more violent crime as they age, I feel it’s a good idea,” the Massachusetts mother said.
‘The Middle Finger’
The president listened to the pleas. He deployed National Guard troops and sent in federal law enforcement officials via a public safety emergency order that put D.C.’s police department under the control of the federal government.
The Trump administration tapped Drug Enforcement Administration chief Terry Cole to oversee the Metropolitan Police Department. Park Police picked up their pace in clearing homeless encampments. The New York Post reported that federal officials have removed some 75 camps since March, when Trump signed his “Making the District of Columbia Safe and Beautiful” executive order.
Washington, D.C., Democrat members of Congress have decried Trump’s moves to bring law and order back to the nation’s capital as the actions of a “dictator.” Trump fired back.
“Already they’re saying, ‘He’s a dictator.’ [Washington, D.C.] is going to hell, and we’ve got to stop it,” he said at a press conference. “So instead of saying ‘He’s a dictator,’ they should say, ‘We’re going to join him and make Washington safe.’”
They are not. Instead, Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat in a long line of Democrat DC mayors who have turned the nation’s seat of government into a sanctuary for violent criminals, has, as The New Republic socialist rag put it, given “the middle finger” to Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi. Bowser and crew insist they’re tackling a surge of crime that spiked during lockdowns. They claim that murder, armed robbery, other violent crime, and crimes in general have significantly fallen.
Bowser acknowledged “the District still has work to do” in “making DC the safest city in the country.” A lot more work. D.C. last year was near the top of the list of homicide rates per 100,000 citizens, according to a 2025 report from the Rochester Institute of Technology.
“Indeed, the District of Columbia now has a higher violent crime, murder, and robbery rate than all 50 states, recording a homicide rate in 2024 of 27.54 per 100,000 residents,” Trump’s executive order states.
Broken System ‘From the Inside Out’
The Heritage Foundation’s Charles Stimson in May reported on an eye-popping statistic that underpins the district’s crime problem and screams nothing will truly change without drastic shifts. Between 2018 and 2022, only 1.7 percent of people arrested for carrying a pistol without a license in the nation’s capital were sentenced to prison, the crime expert reported.
“This dismal record comes from the District of Columbia Sentencing Commission, which analyzed arrest and sentencing trends in the District’s Superior Court for carrying a pistol without a license,” Stimson wrote.
As he notes, National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform data show that 95.8 percent of homicide suspects in the district are male, and 96.8 percent of those are black. More than 70 percent of suspects are between 18 and 34 years old. Among victims, 89 percent are male, and 94.1 of those are black. Some 62 percent of homicide victims are between 18 and 34 years old.
Stimson asserts Bowser must think Trump, Bondi, and other critics of the district’s handling of public safety “are oblivious to how much higher crime rates are in D.C. compared to other cities, and how broken the system is from the inside out. Perhaps she doesn’t realize just how bad it is here in D.C.”
‘Nobody Deserves That’
The danger is felt by the nation’s congressional representatives, their staff, and the many thousands of annual visitors to the nation’s capital. It’s not simply an embarrassment; it’s an unrelenting hazard to the people who live, work, and travel to the home of U.S. government.
“I can’t tell you how many eighth-grade school class trips or senior high school class trips come to Washington, D.C., to learn more about our federal government,” Rep. Bryan Steil, R-Wis., told The Federalist Friday on the Jay Weber Show in Milwaukee. “It’s those students, those families that in the summer take a family vacation and maybe drive out to Washington, D.C. to the Smithsonian and visit the capitol. Those families have a right to be safe.”
Steil chairs the House Administration Committee, which bears the responsibility of overseeing security on and around the Capitol campus. He said the violence in the district is happening in Democrat-run cities, where citizens feel like prisoners to crime.
“They don’t understand the importance of supporting law enforcement and actually enforcing the law to make our community safe,” the congressman said.
The families of the many victims of violent crime understand.
“My son didn’t deserve what happened to him. Nobody deserves that,” Tamara Tarpinian-Jachym told ABC News.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
