2 shot at Maryland cemetery during funeral of 10-year-old murder victim

Two people were shot, one fatally, at a Maryland cemetery on Tuesday during the funeral of a 10-year-old murder victim from Washington, D.C., police said. 

Calls came in about a disturbance at Washington National Cemetery around 1:15 p.m., Prince George’s County Major Crimes Division Commander David Blazer said during a press conference. When officers arrived, they found an adult man and an adult woman who’d been shot. 

The man, who has not yet been publicly identified, succumbed to his injuries, Blazer said. The woman was being treated for injuries that were not considered life-threatening. 

“What we can tell you about these two individuals, that they were not directly related to the funeral of the 10-year-old girl,” Blazer said. “We believe that this was a dispute totally unrelated to what was going on with the funeral, the circumstances leading up to the funeral, the circumstances to the investigation in D.C., this was totally independent of that.”

Police took one person into custody after Tuesday’s shooting, Blazer said. 

Mourners were at the cemetery to bury 10-year-old Arianna Davis, CBS Baltimore reported. She was shot while riding in a car with her family in Washington, D.C. on Mother’s Day. Davis died three days later. The FBI is offering a reward of up to $10,000 for information that leads to the arrest and conviction of the girl’s shooter.

Violence has erupted at funeral homes and cemeteries in the recent past. In April, several people were shot outside of a funeral home in northeastern Washington, D.C. after a service. Six people were injured in a shooting outside a Pittsburgh church where a funeral was underway for a gun violence victim in October last year. In July 2020, 15 people were wounded in a shooting at a funeral home in Chicago.