A D.C. Doctor Waged War on His Condo Over Black Mold — Months Before the Shooting, He Posted Where to Find the Building Manager

It was just before 8 a.m. on Thursday, and about 50 people were working out at VIDA Fitness, the gym downstairs in a Logan Circle condo building called the Metropole. Outside, rush hour was building in one of Washington’s trendiest neighborhoods, a mile north of the White House.

Then a gunshot cracked across the gym floor.

“Within seconds, there was a man who fell to the ground, and a pool of blood came out,” James Spellman, who was there, told Al Jazeera. “One gym member rushed to help him. He was instantly dead. He had been shot in the neck.”

The man on the floor was James Stuart, 46, the Metropole’s building manager. The man who shot him lived upstairs. And the most chilling part of the story is not what happened in those few minutes — it is that the gunman had been telling people, out loud and online, exactly where the building manager could be found.

Five Minutes, Five Victims

Police say the shooter was Dr. Matt Wade Lambert, 55, a former emergency room physician turned health-tech executive who owned a penthouse on the Metropole’s top floor. After shooting Stuart with a handgun, he walked roughly “20 steps,” as interim Police Chief Jeff Carroll put it, from the gym entrance to the residential entrance and went back up to his seventh-floor apartment.

“He had a patio balcony there, and we believe he shot from that location, striking the four other individuals,” Carroll said. One was hit in the lobby or the alley beside the gym; three were members of a construction crew working across the street, according to WUSA9. One is in critical condition; the other three have injuries police called non-life-threatening.

The entire shooting, Carroll said, took place “within less than five minutes.”

Inside the gym, there was only one way out. “There was no way of getting out of the gym other than going past that scene,” a woman who had been on a treadmill told CBS News. “It was like chaos. It was horrific, honestly.”

When officers reached the seventh floor, Lambert fired through his door twice. He broke the gas line in his fireplace and started a fire that could be seen from outside before sprinklers helped contain it. Police later found containers of what they suspect was an accelerant. Negotiators kept him on the phone for about an hour. Then, Carroll said, “they did hear a single gunshot. At which time, the suspect stopped talking to the officers.” Tactical teams broke in and found him dead.

He used three guns — a handgun in the gym, a rifle from the balcony, a shotgun at the end — and none was registered to him in D.C. “It does appear there was some level of planning associated with this,” Carroll said.

The Post That Now Reads Like a Warning

The planning, it turns out, may have been hiding in plain sight for months.

Lambert ran an X account, @OfMiceandMold, devoted to his war with the Metropole Condominium Association and its management company, EJF Real Estate Services. On April 28, according to CBS News, he posted: “If you’re looking for the building manager, I would check the gym.”

He had said almost the same thing in person. In December 2025, reporter Michael Brice-Saddler — then at The Washington Post, now at The Washington Sun — was inside Lambert’s gutted penthouse when a neighbor complained that “you never get a call back from James.” Lambert chimed in that he knew Stuart’s daily routine.

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

Brice-Saddler wrote Thursday that Lambert never gave any sign he would turn to violence. But he did reach for one name that now lands like a stone. Criticizing the association’s legal strategy in front of a neighbor, Lambert asked: “What are they called? Delay, deny, defend … the Luigi three?” — a reference to Luigi Mangione, accused of killing UnitedHealthcare’s CEO in 2024. On Oct. 1, his X account accused the HOA of “months of ‘Luigi’ tactics.” On Thursday morning, it posted: “My manifesto is an engineering report.”

Inside the Penthouse Nobody Could Live In

By Lambert’s account, the fight started with water.

Lambert bought the top-floor unit in 2016 for $1,095,000, according to D.C. tax records cited by CBS. In 2023 the building began a facade rehabilitation, and he chipped in $15,357 toward it, court documents show. After crews worked on his corner, he said, rain ran down the inside of his windows. In October 2024, two independent experts found “heavy” mold growth in his walls and in the air of his bedroom, according to his lawsuit. By November, black mold had turned up and he had moved out.

He told the Sun he paid $12,000 to strip the apartment to its studs and found black mold from floor to ceiling. When the building’s engineers blamed his own appliances, he went six months without using his shower, his heat or his dryer — showering in the gym downstairs and heating the place only with his fireplace — to prove them wrong.

In March 2025 he sued, alleging negligence, breach of fiduciary duty and nuisance. The association and EJF denied causing the damage, blaming third parties — including, at one point, the gym’s commercial dryer vents — and argued he had failed to limit his losses. By May he was claiming more than $290,000 in damages, and he said he had borrowed against his retirement to keep fighting.

“It’s affected every part of my life — my sleep, dietary habits,” he told the Sun. “They’re trying to make me quit. They’re trying to make me go broke.” A downstairs neighbor told CBS that Lambert grew increasingly upset at HOA meetings and invited people up to see the damage.

The Detail His Lawyer Couldn’t Explain

Stuart was not just a man Lambert resented. According to Lambert’s lawyer, Joel Braithewaite, he was a “central fact witness” in the lawsuit, someone “very pivotal in relaying information to the board.”

Braithewaite said he learned of the shooting from a reporter’s email. They had spoken on Tuesday, and his client seemed to be doing well — he had just given a presentation in Orlando and was about to start a new job. The lawyer said he never knew Lambert had a gun.

And there was one more detail. Thursday, Braithewaite said, was the anniversary of the death of Lambert’s mother, the single mother who raised him in Appalachia and died of cancer during his first year of medical school.

“I don’t know how all of those things coalesce,” the lawyer said. “But unfortunately, this is a choice that I hope that my clients would never make.”

Around 9 a.m., as the standoff dragged on, another Metropole building manager, Charelle Ferguson, called Lambert’s phone. He picked up, she told The Washington Post, and said he was tired of the mold and the water. “The only way people will pay attention, you have to do something,” he told her. Then he said he had shot five people.

James Stuart was in the gym just before 8 a.m. — right where Lambert had told people he would be.