2 teens arrested in D.C. shooting that killed UMass student, officials say

Two suspects have been arrested in the fatal shooting earlier this year of a 21-year-old congressional intern near the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro and D.C. Police Chief Pamela A. Smith said Friday.

Officials have said Eric Tarpinian-Jachym, a college student who was in D.C. as an intern for Rep. Ron Estes (R-Kansas), was shot by a group of people who exited a car and opened fire in the Shaw neighborhood of Northwest Washington on the night of June 30. Tarpinian-Jachym and a woman who was injured were bystanders caught in a conflict between the shooters and a 16-year-old who was also injured, Smith has said.

Before Pirro and Smith announced the arrests at a news conference Thursday, D.C. police were working with the FBI to enhance grainy video footage of the shooting, officials had said, and were offering a $40,000 reward for information leading to suspects.

Pirro said two 17-year-olds had been arrested and charged as adults in D.C. Superior Court with first-degree murder while armed. A third suspect remains at large, she said.

At the news conference Friday, Pirro said the shooting reinforced the need for D.C. Council members to give her authority over criminal matters involving 14- to 17-year-olds, who under current law are prosecuted in juvenile court by the D.C. attorney general’s office.

“Eric didn’t deserve to be gunned down – and the system failed him, the system that allows juveniles to be coddled,” Pirro said, flanked by Smith, D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) and other officials.

Tarpinian-Jachym, of Granby, Massachusetts, was a rising senior at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst majoring in finance with a minor in political science.

The shooting was among several cases in recent years in which Capitol Hill staff members have been victims of violent crimes, including an armed carjacking and a stabbing. The month after Tarpinian-Jachym was fatally shot, a former employee of the Trump administration’s U.S. DOGE Service, Edward Coristine, was assaulted in a D.C. carjacking attempt and became a rallying cry for President Donald Trump and supporters pressing for an unprecedented, and ongoing, federal takeover of law enforcement in the city.

As Trump announced the takeover from the White House and deployed the National Guard to D.C.’s streets, Tamara Tarpinian-Jachym said she wept.

“Eric, you didn’t die in vain,” she said of her son. “If we would’ve known the city was so dangerous, we wouldn’t have let him go,” she said in a phone interview. But listening to the president gave her hope, she said. “Hope that my son won’t just be a statistic. And hope that these changes will mean no other innocent people will get shot.”

When reached by phone Friday afternoon, she said she had “no comment right now.”

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