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He was soft-spoken but driven, a standout in classrooms and on football fields in high school in the District and away at college in Massachusetts.
DaVon Fuller had escaped the struggles that, with numbing regularity, ensnare youths growing up in the city’s most troubled wards. He returned home from the University of Massachusetts’s Darmouth campus in May 2018 with a bachelor’s degree in sociology to work on a political campaign, and then for a member of the D.C. Council.
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“He was going to make it,” said David Tansey, one of Fuller’s teachers and a mentor at Dunbar Senior High School.
But Fuller was already having some run-ins with police, court records show, and was distraught over his mother, who was declining in health, according to a relative. In the summer of 2019, he shot a gun at men he said were trying to rob him outside a marijuana pop-up store in Northeast Washington.
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He was arrested, convicted of a firearms offense and fired from his $55,000-a-year job as constituent services coordinator for D.C. Council member Brianne K. Nadeau (D-Ward 1).
His sister and mentors said his life appeared to unravel from there.
On Monday afternoon, the 28-year-old Fuller was fatally shot in a shopping center parking lot on Maryland Avenue in Northeast D.C. after what Nadeau said was an argument that started in a grocery store. Hailed by Tansey as a beacon for youths trying to “escape multigenerational poverty,” Fuller instead became a casualty of the city’s growing homicide count and what his close friends and family described as a combination of bad decisions, a toxic environment and too many guns.
“The system is broken if DaVon Fuller can’t make it,” said Tansey, who now teaches at McKinley Tech High School in Northeast. “He was a gentleman and a scholar. He had been in a very positive place. It finally looked like it was all coming together.”
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D.C. Council member Zachary Parker (D-Ward 5), another mentor and friend who kept tabs on Fuller after his arrest, said he “did everything the city could have asked him to do in terms of getting an education, and trying to follow a path.” Parker said Fuller got a gun for protection in a violent city, “and he made some choices that made life harder for him.”
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Fuller, a father of two boys, ages 3 and 6, had been a success story in a city struggling with escalating violence and desperate to reach people before they are shot, or shoot someone else. He was a young man who defied the odds, left for college and returned to make his city better, friends and loved ones said. His older sister, Natoya Fuller, said his family seized on her brother’s early promise “to change the narrative” of young men in the District.
“It’s easy to get sidetracked,” she said. “The hard part is staying focused.”
Fuller grew up in the Brightwood neighborhood of Northwest, a block from Coolidge High School, with three sisters and two younger brothers. Natoya Fuller, 39, said their mother raised the family on her salary as a pharmacy clerk. She was 59 when she died of breast cancer in 2020, a loss Natoya Fuller said her brother never accepted. And she said he refused to get help through counseling.
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Natoya Fuller said the two older brothers had troubles, and the family focused on keeping the younger Fuller on course. He wanted to play professional football, but Natoya Fuller said she told him: “Do what you want, but your grades have to be the priority.”
At Dunbar, he flourished.
A defensive back for the Crimson Tide, his name graced the first paragraph of a Washington Post story in 2012 when he twice intercepted the Coolidge quarterback in a Fall Homecoming victory, as his family and then-Mayor Vincent C. Gray watched from the stands.
“All the pieces were in place for Davon[sic] Fuller’s big night,” The Post article began. At halftime, his classmates crowned him the senior homecoming king.
But Fuller also remembered his big sister’s words.
The principal at the time, Stephen Jackson, who is now retired, said the entire team decided to do well in school, and they all graduated. Fuller presided over a club called the Gentlemen of Dunbar, a fraternity that explored how Black males can overcome adversity. It was a theme Fuller carried with him when he entered UMass-Dartmouth in Southeastern Massachusetts, a campus of about 5,500 in a region of cranberry bogs between Cape Cod and Providence, RI.
Fuller wrote in his resume that his pursuit of sociology, with a minor in political science, “focused on the origins and effects of historic discrimination and the tools available to communities to overcome such barriers.” He wrote essays on police violence and industries that once used slave labor.
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He also started for the school’s Division III Corsairs. His coach, Mark Robichaud, described Fuller as “an outstanding young man,” recalling him making four interceptions in one game during his rookie season, pivotal in the team’s one-point victory, and earning him the coveted Gold Helmet award for best player in the division.
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Robichaud said Fuller often strolled the campus with headphones on, but was always attentive and interacting with classmates. “He had a huge smile,” the coach recalled. “He had made it.”
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Fuller graduated from UMass-Dartmouth in 2018 and returned to the District, and Tansey said he introduced him to Parker, then running for a seat on the D.C. State Board of Education.
Parker said Fuller “played a big role” in his victory, knocking on thousands of doors during the campaign push, not only reciting the candidate’s positions, but sharing his own success story. “I saw so much promise in him,” Parker said.
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After the election, Parker introduced Fuller to Nadeau, whose daughter played with Fuller’s oldest son at the recreation center in the city’s Park View neighborhood, in Northwest. She hired him to direct her constituent services office, fielding a wide range of complaints, such as broken streetlights. He helped residents navigate the bureaucracies that govern city life. “It is a lot of small tasks,” Nadeau said, “but tasks that mean a lot to people.” She described Fuller as “kind and patient.”
In July 2018, D.C. police arrested and charged Fuller with throwing a punch at an officer who had approached him in a vehicle stopped in a no-parking lane. Police alleged they got suspicious when Fuller put his elbow on the center console and turned his body as if he were “concealing contraband,” according to the criminal complaint.
Police said Fuller refused to cooperate and resisted arrest. Prosecutors dropped the charge, but his sister said the encounter scarred Fuller, who had worried about being shot. “He said he wasn’t in the wrong, but it could have gone bad,” Natoya Fuller said.
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In the following year, 2019, police said Fuller and another man fired at least a dozen shots at would-be robbers in Northeast D.C. No one was injured. Police said at the time that Fuller’s gun was legally registered but that he lacked a carry permit to take the firearm outside his residence.
Authorities arrested Fuller and charged him with assault with a dangerous weapon and possession of a firearm outside a home or business. Natoya Fuller said her brother “understood it was wrong, but he said, what was he supposed to do?”
Tansey said his former student was “doing what made sense for someone in a high crime area to do — protect yourself. It wasn’t unreasonable for him to feel unsafe. … It was him doing what made sense in his reality.”
Fuller’s attorney at the time, Kevin McCants, said Fuller made a deal with prosecutors and pleaded guilty to the illegal firearms charge. Because he was under 25 at the time, McCants said, a judge agreed to sentence him to probation under the city’s Youth Rehabilitation Act, which gives young adults a chance to receive lighter sentences and eventually have their records wiped clean from public view.
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But that legal break could not save Fuller his job in Nadeau’s office, nor the publicity that accompanied the arrest of one the lawmaker’s staff members. News articles about the arrest, including one in The Post, were among the top results of a Google search of his name at the time.
It was also around this time that Fuller’s mother was growing gravely ill, and Natoya Fuller said her brother did not handle it well. “She was his rock” the sister said, noting he was so distraught he didn’t go to the hospital to sit next to her in the final days.
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Fuller’s mentors said it became difficult to reach him after the arrest. Nadeau said he wrote her a letter “about how sad he was that he could not continue” his employment. She said she sometimes saw him in the neighborhood. His friends said Fuller had odd jobs but never the career he had once hoped to pursue.
Natoya Fuller said he was last living in an apartment in Northeast Washington, near Starburst Plaza, where he was killed, with no job and surviving on government assistance.
Police arrested Fuller on Oct. 14 after he apparently became angry that his bank card did not work in a store at Starburst Plaza. Two people alleged Fuller threatened “to shoot it out right now” in the parking lot, and was yelling to customers, “I will shoot everybody in there,” according to an arrest affidavit filed in court. Fuller was charged with making threats and was released pending a court hearing scheduled for next month. Police did not mention a gun in their report.
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Two days later, on Oct. 16, police said Fuller returned to the area where he had been arrested, and was shot outside a cleaning store along Maryland Avenue. He died later at a hospital. Police listed “argument” on a report as a possible motive but made no other comment about the shooting. No arrest has been made, and it could not be learned if there is any connection between the two incidents.
Parker said Fuller made some poor choices, but that “one does not have to be perfect for us to feel empathy.” Added Nadeau: “There is just no reason someone should get into an argument at a grocery store and end up dead.” Both lawmakers said the focus should be on the swarm of illegal firearms that make it too easy for people to settle disputes with deadly force.
“DaVon was the beacon to show there was a way out,” Tansey said. “He was resilient. He would get back up. He kept persevering. I don’t know what beacon to use if I don’t have DaVon.”
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