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       A D.C. Superior Court judge on Friday found a 16-year-old guilty of second-degree murder as a juvenile in a shooting at a Juneteenth outdoor music festival last year. The gunfire killed a 15-year-old and wounded three other victims, including a police officer.

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       Hundreds of music lovers gathered on June 19, 2022, near the vibrant intersection of 14th and U streets NW to hear go-go bands and celebrate the holiday at a day-long festival called Moechella. Shortly after 8:30 p.m., four gunshots halted the revelry, panicked the crowd and left concertgoer Chase Poole dead.

       The other victims, who survived, included a D.C. police officer hit in a leg by a bullet while assigned to crowd control at the event.

       After more than a week of testimony from a dozen-plus witnesses, Judge James Crowell agreed with prosecutors from the D.C. attorney general’s office that the teenage defendant brought a loaded firearm to the festival and killed Chase.

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       Prosecutors said Chase lived in the Saratoga neighborhood of Northeast Washington. Some young people in that area were involved in a long-standing rivalry with teenagers from a different part of Northeast, where the shooter lived, prosecutors said. Authorities said that when the defendant saw Chase at the festival, he opened fire.

       The Washington Post was allowed to watch the trial on the condition that the identity of the defendant not be published. The Post generally does not identify suspects who are charged in juvenile court, where cases are decided by judges, not juries.

       Sentencing is scheduled for Nov. 17. A defendant convicted in juvenile court cannot be confined beyond their 21st birthday.

       During her closing argument earlier this week, prosecutor Jeanine Howard said the youth “turned the celebration into utter chaos” when he fired into the crowd. “He shot four times,” she said. “He wanted to make sure he hit his target.”

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       Howard’s case included no DNA evidence or eyewitness. The prosecution instead relied heavily on security video and footage from police body cameras.

       The lead D.C. police detective in the case, Gabriel Truby, collected numerous videos, including from stores and homes in the area. Truby testified that many of them show the teenager wearing a black hoodie with white NASA letters on the front and gray-and-green Nike sneakers at the time of the shooting.

       As prosecutors showed footage to the judge, Truby testified that the youth can be seen leaving his apartment and arriving at the music festival, then extending an arm as shots were fired into the crowd. The youth also can be seen running away, Truby said.

       Truby testified that the defendant was seen on a social-media video before the shooting making threats to people in the Saratoga neighborhood. In that video, the teenager was wearing the same clothes he had on later when the shooting occurred, Truby said.

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       In announcing his verdict, Crowell referred to the visual evidence, saying he agreed with prosecutors that it strongly implicated the youth as the shooter.

       “His face is repeatedly visible, as is the hoodie and the shoes, as he walks toward the camera,” Crowell said, citing the teenager’s “distinctive” black hoodie with white lettering, which can be seen in each video leading up to and during the shooting. The judge called the evidence “overwhelming.”

       The defendant, who has been in the custody of the D.C. Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services since his arrest two months after the shooting, sat quietly between his attorneys, often looking back at family members who were in the courtroom gallery as the judge explained his verdict.

       During the trial, the youth’s attorneys also showed the judge still photos from security footage, arguing that dozens of people at the festival were wearing black hoodies and similar sneakers and that officers initially arrested two other suspects in the shooting, only to determine later that they were not involved.

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       Defense attorney Lydia Wade argued that her client was a victim of “misidentification.”

       Prosecutors had charged the youth with first-degree murder, saying his decision to carry the gun to the festival was evidence of planning. But Crowell disagreed and rejected the first-degree murder charge.

       By the time the teenager was arrested, he had cut his shoulder-length hair, which had been part of the lookout description issued by police after the shooting. Prosecutors said this was evidence of his consciousness of guilt.

       Earlier this year, Coachella, the multimillion-dollar annual California music festival, filed a lawsuit in federal court in the District against the two D.C. go-go enthusiasts for creating the Moechella concert series, which was conceived as a protest against gentrification. The lawsuit claimed the shooting harmed Coachella’s reputation. Moechella was not repeated this year.

       The slang term “Moe” in the District is often used by young people as a replacement for “homie,” “buddy” or “man” in conversations.

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