William Charles Dismuke, a 40-year-old White male, spent the late afternoon of Friday, July 10, 2020, in a hotel just off Washington Circle, in the 1100 block of New Hampshire Avenue Northwest in Washington, DC. Shortly after 6 p.m., a call went out reporting an unconscious person inside one of the rooms. Members of the Metropolitan Police Department’s Second District arrived around 6:22 p.m.
and made their way up through the corridors of what is known as the Yours Truly Hotel, a stylish property in the city’s Dupont Circle area. Inside one of the rooms, they found Dismuke, an adult with no fixed address, lying gravely wounded from a gunshot to the neck.
Paramedics from DC Fire and Emergency Medical Services followed officers into the room, but there was nothing more they could do. On scene, they determined that Dismuke showed no signs of life. His body was left in place until it could be taken to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, the quiet journey beginning the formal process of cataloging his death as one more homicide in a year that was already spiraling toward a grim milestone for the District. Police later released his name and age and noted that he had no permanent address, a detail that underscored how vulnerable he may have been in the days and weeks before he was killed.
Outside the hotel, traffic continued to move around Washington Circle, and the city’s evening routines went on even as detectives from the Homicide Branch began methodically working the scene. They documented the room, photographed the evidence, and canvassed hallways and neighboring rooms for potential witnesses, trying to reconstruct who had been with Dismuke and how a gunshot could be fired in a busy hotel without immediate alarm. That night was only part of a wider wave of violence: four people were killed in separate shootings across the city on that Friday alone, and seven homicides would be counted over the weekend, pushing DC’s total for the year past one hundred and prompting the police chief to speak publicly about an alarming surge in gun violence. In that litany of names, Dismuke appeared briefly in news stories as one more life cut short, found shot in a hotel room off New Hampshire Avenue.
In the weeks that followed, the Metropolitan Police Department formally listed him as a homicide victim and circulated his case on public notices and online bulletins. They described the basic outline of what had happened on July 10 and offered a reward of up to $25,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of whoever was responsible. Community-based case trackers repeated those appeals, summarizing how officers answered the call for an unconscious person, discovered Dismuke in the room, and watched as emergency medical crews confirmed he was already gone. On those sites, his details are recorded carefully: his full name, the date and place of death, the address of the hotel, and the classification of his death as “death by force” due to gunfire.
Even years later, the case remains unresolved in the public record. Case summaries and police releases continue to describe the investigation in the present tense, stressing that detectives are still seeking information and urging anyone who knows what happened in that room to come forward through the MPD homicide tip line or text tip system. Publicly available documents do not report any arrest, indictment, or publicly named suspect in connection with Dismuke’s killing, and crime-tracking sites updated as recently as 2025 still classify the homicide as open and unsolved, emphasizing that the investigation is ongoing. His story, as it stands in those records, is of a man found alone in a hotel room on a summer evening in 2020, his death folded into a violent weekend that drew citywide attention, while the question of who pulled the trigger remains unanswered.
