Unknown gunmen on Monday, October 5, 2020, shot a 23-year-old Nigerian graduate, Alexander Nwogu, dead in upper North-West Washington.

According to Washington Post, police are trying to determine whether the same people involved in the fatal shooting of Nwogu also shot and wounded a 75-year-old Uber driver hours earlier and a mile South in Tenleytown.

“We are exploring the possibility,” said Brianna Jordan, spokeswoman for D.C. police.

She said detectives “are very early in the investigation.”

Police said robbery is a possible motive in both incidents.

The shootings on well-travelled roads have worried residents in some of the district’s more affluent neighbourhoods and come amid a 15 per cent increase in homicides from this point in the year in 2019.

No arrests have been made.

One of his best friends and classmates said Nwogu graduated in May from Virginia Tech with an engineering degree and had just started working at a consulting firm in Northern Virginia.

A police report said Nwogu suffered blunt trauma to the back of his head and a single gunshot wound to the middle of his back.

He was pronounced dead at the scene.

D.C. Council member, Mary M. Cheh (D-Ward 3), said she and her constituents were worried that the crimes were random.

“Shootings, murders are not the normal fare in Upper North-West,” Cheh said, adding that the two incidents “look like random street crimes. That’s the worst because you really can’t protect yourself. It could happen to anybody.”

The shootings come two weeks after a man was fatally shot on September 24 in nearby Friendship Heights in what police described as a robbery involving Marijuana.