What the Logan Circle Shooter Told Me

Matt Lambert, a former emergency room physician and health care technology executive, shot five people and then himself on Thursday in D.C., apparently motivated by a bitter, ongoing and all-consuming legal dispute with the Metropole Condominium Association and the building’s property manager.

The back-and-forth had been dragging on for more than a year, draining his retirement savings and fueling a deepening desperation.

Just under a year ago, I spoke to him about it. Lambert reached out to me in late 2025 when I was a reporter at The Washington Post, pitching a story about how his million-dollar Logan Circle penthouse had been rendered unlivable. I continued reporting the story into the new year, but the article was abandoned when I was laid off from the Post in early 2026.

In a series of interviews in late November and December 2025 — including two visits inside his gutted penthouse at the Metropole on 15th Street Northwest — Lambert described how a dispute over severe water leaks and black mold had turned into “psychological warfare” between himself, building manager James Stuart, the management company EJF Real Estate Services and their insurance defense attorneys.

“It’s affected every part of my life — my sleep, dietary habits,” Lambert told me in December. “I pride myself on my resilience, and I’ve been kind of surprised at how much it has been affected.”

On Thursday, D.C. police said, Lambert shot and killed Stuart at the VIDA Fitness Center located on the ground floor of the building in a targeted attack just before 8 a.m., then shot four more people in the vicinity and barricaded himself in his apartment before shooting and killing himself. Of the other four people who were shot, one was in critical condition, while three others had non-life-threatening injuries.

While at no point in the reporting process did Lambert give any indication he would resort to violence, he did frequently use intense, combative language — and at one point, his frustration bled into what at the time felt like dark humor. During a December visit with a neighbor, Lambert criticized the condo association’s legal strategy by making an offhand reference to Luigi Mangione, the suspect in the 2024 shooting death of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO who is accused of inscribing “delay, deny, depose” on his ammunition.

“What are they called? Delay, deny, defend … the Luigi three?” Lambert said.

Lambert, who bought the $1.1 million top-floor unit in 2016, had recently put the penthouse on the market with plans to relocate to New York. But he said the conflict trapped him in D.C., beginning after a building facade rehabilitation that ran from April 2023 to August 2024. While the project was underway, he said, water began running down the interior of his windows and wetting his floors after rainstorms — with cracks, peeling paint and visible mold spreading across his walls once crews finished work on his corner in August 2024. When he hired independent testers in October 2024 to show Stuart and contractors evidence of widespread moisture and airborne mold, Lambert said, the meeting ended abruptly.

According to Lambert, when his attorney asked Stuart whether he could smell the mold, Stuart replied that the apartment “smelled like cologne,” walked out and turned the matter over to the building’s lawyers.

Because my reporting on the dispute was not completed at the time, I was never able to present Lambert’s allegations to Stuart or EJF Real Estate Services to get their perspective. The Washington Sun was unable to reach the management firm earlier Thursday.

In November 2024, Lambert said, he paid $12,000 out of his own pocket to strip his apartment down to the metal studs and subflooring, uncovering floor-to-ceiling black mold. When the building’s engineers blamed the moisture on Lambert’s own appliances, he said he went six months without using his shower, heat or dryer — instead showering downstairs at VIDA Fitness, and heating his unit solely with his fireplace — to try to prove them wrong.

In March 2025, Lambert sued the Metropole Condominium Association in D.C. Superior Court, accusing the association of negligence, breach of fiduciary duty and nuisance over what he alleged were botched renovations and rebuffed repair requests. The association denied responsibility but lost a bid to have the case thrown out last year, court records show. When leaks persisted after rainstorms, Lambert said, the building’s defense counsel pivoted to blaming humidity from VIDA Fitness’s industrial dryer vents, which ran behind his unit, and moved to pull the gym into the lawsuit, delaying the case by another 90 days.

By December 2025, Lambert, who was 54 at the time, said he had spent nearly $200,000 on legal and engineering fees — borrowing against his retirement savings to fund the litigation — while living with only a couch and a desk inside his stripped-down apartment.

Lambert said in an interview at the time that he was preparing to have his attorney pull every email exchanged between him and Stuart for court discovery, accusing Stuart of giving conflicting answers to residents and fabricating maintenance history.

Inside the Metropole last year, Lambert said the standoff had made him “radioactive.” He repurposed a whiteboard he normally used for work into a timeline tracking the building management’s slights. Feeling stonewalled by Stuart and the condo board, he launched an anonymous social media troll account called “Of Mice and Mold” to target Stuart and EJF over unfinished building repairs. He placed flyers on streetlights and trash cans around Logan Circle and hosted open houses in his gutted unit to show neighbors his engineering reports.

He compared the building’s gossip and factions to being trapped in petty drama.

“High school never ends. Michael, we are stuck in high school,” Lambert told me. “And it would be humorous if it wasn’t significant investment at risk, and really spending a lot of money that I’ve saved my entire life that I wanted to spend for retirement — I’m spending it right now with no end in sight. I’ve become increasingly aggressive in my messaging, not only in the building, but also with that Twitter page.”

A Thursday morning post on the X account said, “My manifesto is an engineering report,” and contained screenshots of documents describing how problems with the facade and balcony had caused extensive leaks in Lambert’s unit.

Standing in his deconstructed living room in December, Lambert pointed to a copy of Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” sitting in his unit.

“I go through every emotion every day on this. … Do I keep fighting? Do I not fight? And ‘The Art of War’ talks about, you know, the battle’s won before it’s ever fought. It says if you’re going to commit, don’t half commit, fully commit.”

Lambert said part of the reason he was willing to fight was that he was a single man with no children.

“They’re trying to make me quit. They’re trying to make me go broke,” Lambert said of the legal fight. “If I come out of this and I don’t get a satisfactory outcome, I won’t have a bunch of money, but I can live with that better than rolling over. … They don’t have my permission to treat me this way.”

Raised in Appalachia by a single mother who died of cancer during his first year of medical school at Marshall University, Lambert worked as an ER doctor for 20 years before pivoting to health care IT. He moved to D.C. around 2010, later serving as chief medical information officer for major hospital systems in Seattle and New York City and working remotely as a chief medical officer for a Los Angeles-based health data company.

During one December visit inside Lambert’s gutted unit, a fellow resident who had also been waiting months for leak repairs complained that when he called the management company, “you never get a call back from James.”

Lambert immediately chimed in that he knew Stuart’s daily routine at the VIDA Fitness downstairs.

“If you want to see the building manager,” Lambert said, “he comes in the gym about 8 o’clock.”