A lawsuit over mold, posts on X, and a shooting: Who was Matt Lamber, the Logan Circle shooter?

For more than two decades, Matt Wade Lambert worked as an emergency room physician. This Thursday, according to the Washington, D.C., Police Department, he carried out a shooting that left one person dead and four injured in the Logan Circle neighborhood.

According to local authorities, Lambert, 55, opened fire around 8 a.m. at the Vida Fitness gym, located in the same building where he lived. He killed the building manager, James Stuart, 46, and wounded four other people. One of the wounded remains in critical condition, while the other three have non-life-threatening injuries.

After the attack, Lambert barricaded himself in his apartment, where he was later found dead. According to the investigation, the motive for the attack appears to have been a long-standing dispute with the building's homeowners' association over problems with dampness and mold.

Who was Matt Lambert?

Lambert received his medical degree in 1997 from Marshall University in West Virginia, and completed his residency in emergency medicine at West Virginia University. On his personal website, he described himself as "a board-certified emergency physician with over two decades of clinical experience."

According to the same website, he was an author, musician, and philanthropist, and divided his time between Washington, D.C., and the mountains of West Virginia. In D.C., he lived in a penthouse valued at $1.1 million at the Metropole, a luxury condominium building in Logan Circle.

The controversy over mold in Lambert's building

In March 2025, Lambert sued the Metropole Condominium Association in the Superior Court of Washington, D.C. According to court documents, he alleged that repair work on the building's facade caused water leaks, moisture buildup, and mold in his apartment.

The homeowners' association blamed the gym for the dampness and mold. In a lawsuit against the property owners and Vida Fitness, it claimed that the moisture stemmed from a faulty exhaust system for the gym's commercial dryers.

Lambert also took his dispute to social media. In recent months, according to the New York Post, he posted dozens of messages on X about alleged "leaks, mold and rodent infestations" in the building, from an account called "OfMiceandMold," along with photos and videos of the damage in his apartment. He also accused the building management of waging a "psychological war" against her.

In July, he wrote sarcastically: a good night to have an uninhabitable penthouse." Last month, he complained about the findings of a technical report on the building: "'Discontinuous Tyvek should be the name of a punk band- not something listed in the conclusions of a building envelope report."

The morning of the shooting

Shortly before 8:00 a.m. on Thursday, Lambert entered the gym and shot Stuart. He then went up to his apartment and fired a rifle from the balcony at four other people.

"We do know the victim was the building manager. There had been an ongoing dispute between the suspect in this case and the building homeowner's association regarding maintenance issues [and] mold. So we believe it is related to that," Jeffery Carroll, acting chief of the Metropolitan Police, said at a press conference.

Lambert then fired at least two shots at the officers through the door with a shotgun and started a fire. When the officers managed to enter, they found him dead with a self-inflicted gunshot wound.