A 28-year-old Washington, D.C. man has been sentenced to 33 months in federal prison after firing three shots at an unidentified scooter rider near a Northeast D.C. apartment complex, with a later search of his apartment turning up three loaded guns and a stash of drugs. Cornelius Welch, a previously convicted felon, admitted to the shooting and to illegally possessing a firearm as part of a guilty plea.
Welch fired three shots at a scooter rider on Benning Road NE.
Welch and his girlfriend were arrested on the day of the search.
Apartment Raid Turns Up Loaded Guns and Drugs
Weeks after the shooting, on January 10, Metropolitan Police investigators and DEA agents searched the Benning Road NE apartment where Welch had been staying with his girlfriend, the station's report notes. Investigators say they found three loaded guns inside — a privately manufactured semiautomatic rifle, a privately manufactured .40-caliber pistol, and a Glock 43X 9mm handgun.
Welch ultimately pleaded guilty to federal charges of unlawful possession of a firearm by a felon and endangerment with a firearm.
Welch Had a Prior Felony Conviction
Welch had a felony conviction. That history echoes an earlier run-in with D.C. police: the Metropolitan Police Department reported that Welch, then 23, was arrested in March 2021 alongside two others on charges including carrying a pistol without a license and unlawful possession of a firearm.
Welch was sentenced to 33 months in prison.
Part of a Broader Pattern of Trafficked Guns in DC
Welch's case lands amid a steady flow of illegally trafficked firearms into the District. Law enforcement recovered and traced 3,106 crime guns in Washington, D.C. in 2023, according to Everytown Research. Roughly half of those guns had been purchased less than three years before they were recovered, the group found, and between 2017 and 2021 only 5 percent of recovered crime guns were still in the hands of their original buyer.
Everytown also estimated that 1,032 of the crime guns recovered in D.C. in 2023 were likely trafficked illegally after being bought from federally licensed dealers, with 94 percent of all recovered crime guns that year originally sold by out-of-state dealers. Sixty-four percent traced back to states along the I-95 corridor, a pipeline that funneled 1,412 trafficked guns into shootings across the District between 2019 and 2023, per the same research.
