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DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA COURT OF APPEALS
No. 24-CF-0992
WILLIE FRAZIER, JR., APPELLANT,
V.
UNITED STATES, APPELLEE.
Appeal from the Superior Court
of the District of Columbia
(2023-CF2-002750)
(Michael Ryan, Judge)
(Andrea L. Hertzfeld, Judge)
(Argued April 29, 2026 Decided September 10, 2026)
Victoria Hall-Palerm, Public Defender Service, with whom Jaclyn S. Frankfurt, Public Defender Service was on the brief, for appellant.
Mary C. Fleming, Assistant United States Attorney, with whom Jeanine Ferris Pirro, United States Attorney, and Chrisellen R. Kolb, Eric Hansford, and Ariel Lieberman, Assistant United States Attorneys, were on the brief, for appellee.
Before BECKWITH and DEAHL, Associate Judges, and GLICKMAN, Senior Judge.
GLICKMAN, Senior Judge: Willie Frazier, Jr., appeals his convictions for
carrying a pistol without a license, possessing an unregistered firearm, and
2
unlawfully possessing ammunition. 1 These charges stemmed from the recovery of a
loaded handgun from Frazier’s waistband by a crime suppression team police officer
who frisked Frazier after seeing an unexplained L-shaped bulge in the groin area of
his pants. At issue in this appeal is the trial court’s denial, after an evidentiary
hearing, of Frazier’s Fourth Amendment motion to suppress the handgun and
ammunition. Frazier contends the trial court erred in concluding (1) the officer had
reasonable articulable suspicion that Frazier possessed a gun after seeing the bulge
to justify a pat down; and (2) Frazier was not seized prior to that observation when
three officers positioned themselves around him. In this opinion, we reject both
contentions and affirm Frazier’s convictions.
I.
Metropolitan Police Officer Thomas Schemmel testified at the hearing on
appellant’s motion, and the relevant video footage (with recorded sound) from his
and another officer’s body-worn cameras was put in evidence. No other witness
testified, and appellant presented no evidence to refute the government’s evidence.
As Officer Schemmel testified (and as his body-worn camera footage for the
most part showed), he and three other members of the Sixth District Crime
Suppression Team were on patrol together in a marked police car on the afternoon
1
In violation of D.C. Code §§22-4504, 7-2502.01, and 7-2506.01.
3
of May 3, 2023. The officers were in uniform and were armed with their service
weapons. They were patrolling an area “between Simple City and 37th Street” in
Southeast D.C., in response to “the high violence” that had been occurring there,
particularly in the summertime, and the “sounds of gunshots within that area.” In the
course of that patrol, the officers pulled into the parking lot of a residential apartment
complex at 4800 Alabama Avenue Southeast and stopped near a group of about nine
young men who were gathered in a circle on a cement patio outside a laundry room
and adjacent to the parking lot. Schemmel had been there before and had recovered
“several firearms and narcotics from that laundry room.”
The officers exited the police car and “walked over towards [the group of
young men] just to talk to everybody and say hello.” Schemmel recognized several
of the men, including appellant, whom he had encountered in the past. From his
“personal experience,” Schemmel testified, he knew that appellant previously had
been arrested while possessing a firearm.
When Schemmel reached the men on the patio, he asked, “How’s everyone
doing today?” in a casual tone. At the start of this encounter, two men were seated
on one of two benches located at the center of the patio in front of the laundry room,
while appellant and several others formed a circle around them. Appellant, who
stood the nearest to Schemmel, was looking down at his cell phone. Appellant was
wearing a black unzipped jacket; under it, a black hoodie with a large front pouch
4
pocket; and fitted light blue jeans with rips down both legs. Schemmel walked past
appellant toward the center of the group, while a second officer walked around and
behind the group. Schemmel repeated “How you doing today?” to another member
of the group and asked, “Feeling a little bit better?” He proceeded to “engag[e] in
conversation with numerous people that were over there.”
Schemmel’s questioning was not accusatory or intimidating. He did not ask
whether anyone was armed or committing other offenses. Without being prompted
to do so, one member of the group raised his sweatshirt to reveal his waistband.
Schemmel asked him again, “How you doing?” to which the man responded, “Why
you in my face?” Officer Schemmel responded, “I’m just talking to you.” Nothing
came of this encounter. The man remained on the patio for another minute and half,
watched what was going on further down the parking lot, and then walked off in that
direction, passing behind the police car. No officer pursued him or tried to stop him
from leaving.
Shortly after the police arrived, another one of the young men in the group
took off running. While Schemmel remained with the group, two of the officers
chased and caught the runner, and announced that they had recovered a firearm from
him. Schemmel testified that this announcement “gave us a little bit more of an alert
that a firearm was presently there or previously there.”
5
Some of the other men in the group chose to walk away instead of speaking
with the police. The police did not attempt to stop any of them.
Another man walked into the laundry room. Schemmel followed him and
asked him whether he was “okay.” The man pulled his cellphone and charger from
the wall outlet and then walked back outside and departed. The police did not attempt
to detain him.
Schemmel next walked up to appellant, who was still standing in
approximately the same place on the patio, and asked, “You been doing okay?”
Appellant answered that he was “good.” Another young man who was openly
counting a wad of money walked between Schemmel and appellant, and Schemmel
said, “What’s up man? I don’t know you.”
Schemmel then walked away from appellant and along one side of the patio
before turning and looking at him again. By this time, four young men, including
appellant, were still on the patio. Schemmel watched appellant sit down on the back
of one of the benches, with his right leg propped up so that his foot rested on the
bench seat. In that position, appellant continued to look at his cell phone, with his
right forearm rested on his knee and his cell phone in his right hand, hovering across
his lap.
When appellant sat down, Schemmel noticed a bulge in his pants “protruding
from his leg and his waistline area.” Schemmel also noticed that appellant had
6
“placed his phone in front of his groin area.” Based on his training and experience
(which included his arrests of other individuals whose bulges proved to be firearms)
and his awareness of appellant’s prior arrest for firearm possession, Schemmel began
to suspect that appellant had a firearm in his pants and was using his phone to
“creat[e] a barrier” between the weapon and the officers.
Schemmel then walked over to appellant, stood next to him, and saw that
appellant was watching what Schemmel took to be a TikTok video on his phone.
Another young man standing close by asked Schemmel what was “up,” and
Schemmel answered jocularly that he was trying to “get on TikTok.” “You want to
watch with me?” the bystander responded, and he reached toward appellant’s phone
(apparently trying to take it from appellant to show it to Schemmel). Continuing to
joke, Schemmel said, “Yeah, let’s get on TikToks.” Appellant held on to his phone,
however, and he remained seated and continued watching it as the bystander then
walked away. Schemmel inferred that the bystander might have been “trying to take
the attention away from [appellant]” because he “may have known that [appellant]
was in possession of a firearm.”
Schemmel then addressed appellant in a friendly and nonaccusatory manner.
“Because I knew [appellant],” Schemmel explained in his testimony, “I spoke with
him a little bit more about if he was okay.” “You doing all right?” Schemmel asked.
Appellant answered, “Yeah I’m cooling.” Schemmel asked, “Staying out of
7
trouble?” and appellant answered “Yeah.” Schemmel said, “Good, I’m glad to hear
that.” Appellant volunteered that he was “going to school” and “staying out of the
way.” Schemmel responded, “Yeah? Good for you.” This conversation lasted about
ten seconds.
During this brief exchange, Officers Moore and Laielli, who had come to 4800
Alabama Avenue with Schemmel, walked over and stood beside each other behind
appellant, in the open area between him and the parking lot. Initially, it appears in
the body-worn camera footage that Moore and Laielli stood roughly ten feet back.
During Schemmel’s conversation with appellant, the two officers moved a bit closer
to appellant, who remained seated with his back to them and continued looking down
at his phone. It does not appear from the camera footage that appellant was aware
that police officers were behind him; he did not turn to look at Moore and Laielli or
react to them in any way.
While talking with appellant at this time, Schemmel testified, he again
observed the bulge in appellant’s groin area and he now perceived that it was Lshaped. Schemmel’s subsequent actions and statements were recorded in his and
Moore’s body-worn camera footage. Suspecting the L-shaped bulge was a gun,
Schemmel turned so that his body-worn camera could face appellant’s groin and
photograph it. (The resulting camera footage fails to show the bulge, however, as
Schemmel himself confirmed in his testimony at the hearing on appellant’s motion
8
to suppress the gun.) Schemmel then pointed down at appellant’s torso and said,
“Okay, so, right under that, see that little L right there.” On hearing this, Moore and
Laielli moved up closer to appellant.
In response to the inquiry, appellant did not attempt to leave; nor did he object
to the questioning or decline to answer. He purported to be cooperative. As recorded
in the camera footage, appellant opened his jacket, pulled something that appears to
be the interior pocket lining from the left side of his pocket, and asked, “Right here?”
Schemmel responded, “No, under your jacket” and continued to point at appellant’s
pants. Schemmel asked, “That’s not another firearm?” and appellant pulled the cloth
lining from his sweatshirt pouch and responded, “No this is my hoodie.”
“No, what about this L-shaped bulge right here?” Schemmel asked again, this
time outlining the L-shape with his finger (without touching appellant or his clothing
when he did this). As can be seen in the body-camera footage, the L-shape that
Schemmel delineated with his finger was consistent with the size and shape of a
handgun. Appellant then removed what appears to be a cloth ski mask from his
pocket. Schemmel declared he was going to do a protective pat down, and he
proceeded to do so (though appellant resisted it). Upon patting the bulge, Schemmel
immediately felt a hard object that he recognized to be a handgun in “the groin area
of [appellant’s] waist.” Recovering the gun, the officers then placed appellant under
arrest.
9
Based on the foregoing evidence, the trial court denied appellant’s motion to
suppress. The court found Schemmel to be a credible witness, and his testimony to
be consistent overall with the video evidence. Regarding the one area of disparity,
the court found that Schemmel saw an L-shaped bulge in appellant’s groin area as
he testified, and as his recorded behavior in asking about it corroborated, even
though the bulge “was not obvious from looking at the body-worn camera” footage;
“it’s not obvious,” the court said, “that the body-worn camera picks up everything
that a person’s eyes do.” The court ruled that after Schemmel saw an L-shaped bulge
in appellant’s groin, he had a reasonable articulable suspicion that appellant was
carrying a firearm there.
In addition, the court found that appellant had responded evasively to
Schemmel’s inquiry about the bulge by removing items from his jacket and
sweatshirt and showing them to Schemmel instead of the object concealed below his
waist to which Schemmel was pointing. This attempted evasion, the court found,
was another “objective bit[] of evidence” supporting Schemmel’s reasonable
articulable suspicion that the L-shaped bulge was a firearm. That suspicion, the court
ruled, justified a frisk of appellant to determine whether he was armed. The court
found that Schemmel did not physically touch appellant at all before he had the
reasonable articulable suspicion required for a protective frisk and had told appellant
he would pat him down.
10
The trial court also ruled that “there was no seizure [of appellant] until the
time when” Schemmel perceived the L-shaped bulge and had a reasonable
articulable suspicion that appellant was armed. Up to that point, the court found,
appellant was free to walk away and leave the area unimpeded by the police like
several of the other young men had done. There had been, the court noted, “no show
of authority beyond the number of the police officers . . . all in uniform and armed.
No weapons were removed from the holsters. No commands were given.”
Moreover, the court found, before Schemmel observed the L-shaped bulge,
his questioning of appellant had “not even implicitly” been threatening or accusatory
in substance or in tone; rather, the content of his brief conversation with appellant
had been “trivial.” And throughout that conversation, “there were avenues of egress
that [appellant] had open to him”; there “wasn’t obvious surrounding of [appellant]
or blocking of the egress that [appellant] had.”
After the trial court denied appellant’s motion to suppress, appellant
proceeded to a stipulated trial, preserving his right to appeal the ruling on the motion.
This trial was held before a second Superior Court judge, who found appellant guilty
of all three counts in his indictment.
II.
“Whether and when [appellant] was seized within the meaning of the Fourth
Amendment and whether and when law enforcement had the requisite reasonable
11
articulable suspicion to stop and frisk him are questions of law that we review de
novo, deferring to the trial court’s factual findings, unless those findings are clearly
erroneous.” 2 We view the evidence in the light most favorable to sustaining the trial
court’s ruling. 3 In assessing whether the evidence supports that ruling, we are not
limited to the trial court’s express findings and may consider all the evidence
presented at the suppression hearing. 4
We begin our discussion by addressing when appellant was seized within the
meaning of the Fourth Amendment. There is no dispute that Schemmel seized
appellant when the officer frisked him after observing the bulge in his groin area.
The question posed by appellant is whether he was seized by the police officers even
before Schemmel saw and inquired about the bulge, meaning before it is claimed
that Schemmel had grounds to stop and frisk appellant. There is no claim, nor any
basis to claim, that appellant was physically restrained then, nor even a claim that he
was physically touched or directed to move or submit in any way. Rather, appellant
contends that he was compelled to submit to the assertion of police authority, and
therefore seized, “at the time that three officers—Officers Schemmel, Moore, and
Laielli—stood immediately around him, hemming him in and blocking his paths to
2
Golden v. United States, 248 A.3d 925, 934 (D.C. 2021) (citation modified).
3
See Mayo v. United States, 315 A.3d 606, 617 (D.C. 2024) (en banc).
4
Id.
12
egress, while Officer Schemmel repeatedly asked him if he had been staying out of
trouble.” 5
A. Seizure
For the following reasons, we consider that appellant was not seized at the
time he postulates. Ultimately, his contention founders on our determination that the
trial court did not misapply the law or clearly err in finding, as a fact, that the police
did not hem appellant in or block his “paths to egress” prior to Schemmel’s
observation that the bulge in appellant’s groin area was L-shaped and the officer’s
ensuing inquiry of appellant.
5
In his appellate brief, appellant also asserts that “[t]he officers’ arrival on the scene, too, evinced an impressive show of police authority . . . with multiple marked police cars, each containing several uniformed officers, pulling into the parking lot and blocking the cars in the lot from exiting.” The government disputes the accuracy of this assertion, and the record does appear to contradict it. We understand the evidence to be that a total of four officers arrived, all of them in a single police car, and that their parked car did not preclude other vehicles in the lot from leaving.
We also note that appellant does not claim he had a vehicle in the parking lot that he was prevented from accessing.
13
“Law enforcement officers do not violate the Fourth Amendment’s
prohibition of unreasonable seizures merely by approaching individuals on the street
or in other public places and putting questions to them if they are willing to listen.” 6
“[I]n a street encounter such as this one, the test for determining whether a person
has been seized is whether, taking into account all of the circumstances surrounding
the encounter, the police conduct would have communicated to a reasonable person
that he was not at liberty to ignore the police presence and go about his business—
in other words, that he was not free to leave” 7 or “otherwise terminate the
6
United States v. Drayton, 536 U.S. 194, 200 (2002); see also, e.g., T.W. v. United States, 292 A.3d 790, 795 (D.C. 2023) (“While there is invariably some inherent pressure to cooperate with police officers, ‘a seizure does not occur simply because a police officer approaches an individual and asks a few questions.’” (quoting Florida v. Bostick, 501 U.S. 429, 434 (1991)).
7
Jones v. United States, 154 A.3d 591, 594-95 (D.C. 2017) (quotations and citations omitted).
14
encounter.” 8 Importantly, “[t]he hypothesized ‘reasonable person’ in this test is an
innocent person,” not a guilty person who has something incriminating to hide. 9
Circumstances that might signify a seizure in a person’s encounter with police
include the following: (1) the presence of several officers; (2) the display of a
weapon by an officer; (3) physical touching of the person by the officer; (4) the use
of language or a tone of voice indicating that compliance with the officer’s request
might be compelled; (5) the person is alone “so that the police presence was
apparently focused exclusively on him”; (6) the location of the encounter is
“secluded or out of public sight”; (7) the officers are in uniform or their weapons are
visible; (8) the officers block the person’s potential exit paths or means of egress;
(9) the officers’ questions are accusatory; and (10) the officers repeat accusatory
questions in the face of an initial denial, signaling that they refuse to accept the
8
Maye v. United States, 314 A.3d 1244, 1253 (D.C. 2024) (quoting Bostick, 501 U.S. at 439). For example, someone who, like appellant, is seated and wishes to remain in that position undisturbed (or who is motivated to stay by the inconvenience or difficulty of leaving) may seek to “terminate the encounter” and “go about his business” there by declining to answer the police officer’s inquiries in lieu of physically getting up and leaving. (A refusal by the police officer to accept that rejection and refrain from allowing the person to “go about his business” there in peace likely would then effectuate a de facto seizure.) See, e.g., Bostick, 501 U.S. at 435-36 (“[W]hen the person is seated on a bus and has no desire to leave, the degree to which a reasonable person would feel that he or she could leave is not an accurate measure of the coercive effect of the encounter” because the person’s “freedom of movement was restricted by a factor independent of police conduct[.]”).
9
Jones, 154 A.3d at 595 (footnote and emphasis omitted).
15
answer given. 10 “Conversely, an encounter’s ‘brevity’ and the officer’s ‘cordiality’
during it are factors that often weigh against finding a seizure.” 11
What is striking about this case is that nearly all the foregoing circumstances
potentially indicative of a seizure did not exist here prior to the time that Schemmel
frisked appellant. Yes, there were three uniformed officers in appellant’s vicinity.
But in the initial phase of the encounter—before the bulge in appellant’s pants
became an issue—the only officer appellant interacted with was Schemmel.
Appellant had no contact with, and it appears he was not even aware of, the two
officers (Moore and Laielli) who came up and remained a distance behind him as he
continued to sit on the bench and look fixedly down at his phone or respond briefly
to Schemmel’s benign questions.
During this pre-frisk period, Schemmel did not display or draw his weapon,
and he had no physical contact with appellant. The officer did not assert his authority
by directing appellant to do anything. Schemmel spoke to appellant in a normal tone
of voice and what he said to him was, as trial court said, “not even implicitly
accusatory.” His questions about whether appellant was “doing all right” and
10
T.W., 292 A.3d at 795 (quoting Justice Stewart’s opinion in United States v. Mendenhall, 446 U.S. 544, 554 (1980), for the first four factors, and citing this court’s decisions in Jones, 154 A.3d at 596, and Golden, 248 A.3d at 935, 938-39, for the other factors).
11
Id. at 795 (quoting Jones, 154 A.3d at 598).
16
“staying out of trouble” did not accuse appellant of criminal activity. Rather, before
Schemmel saw that the bulge in appellant’s waist was L-shaped, their interchange
was brief, cordial, and, in the trial court’s words, “trivial.” Appellant asserts that the
“clear import” of Schemmel’s questions was that the officer “suspected him of
something.” The trial court did not clearly err in disagreeing with that assertion. The
questions were friendly and innocuous—no less so because appellant may have been
nervous speaking with Schemmel because he did have something incriminating to
hide.
After Schemmel saw the shape of the bulge, he asked appellant what it was.
While Schemmel found it necessary to repeat his question, that was only because
appellant did not answer it responsively (and not because Schemmel refused to
accept an innocent explanation given by appellant for the bulge). Schemmel did not
command (or even ask) appellant to remove the object creating the bulge and show
it to him; he had been polite and unintimidating up to that point, and his tone,
demeanor, and behavior did not change when he asked about the nature of the bulge.
Asking what the bulge was, though it was a pointed question, was not a coercive
one; by itself, it did not signal that appellant (or a reasonable person in his situation)
17
would not be allowed to leave if he declined to answer. 12 We have held that a police
officer does not effect a seizure merely by asking such a question, even though an
honest answer might be incriminating and would trigger a seizure. 13
As to the other pertinent circumstances: The patio where the encounter took
place was not secluded or out of public sight, and appellant was not alone or isolated.
On the contrary, it was daytime, other young men were on the patio with appellant,
and at least one of them not only observed appellant’s encounter with Schemmel, he
12
See INS v. Delgado, 466 U.S. 210, 216-17 (1984) (“Unless the
circumstances of the encounter are so intimidating as to demonstrate that a reasonable person would have believed he was not free to leave if he had not responded, one cannot say that the questioning resulted in a detention under the Fourth Amendment. But if the person refuses to answer and the police take additional steps—such as those taken in Brown [v. Texas, 443 U.S. 47 (1979)]—to obtain an answer, then the Fourth Amendment imposes some minimal level of objective justification to validate the detention or seizure.”). (In Brown, two policemen physically detained the defendant to determine his identity after he refused their request that he identify himself, 443 U.S. at 49.)
13
“There must be more than mere questioning before a court will find that a seizure has occurred.” Kelly v. United States, 580 A.2d 1282, 1286 (D.C. 1990) (holding that detective’s inquiry whether defendant’s shopping bag contained drugs did not amount to a seizure absent evidence of compulsion). See also, e.g., Towles v. United States, 115 A.3d 1222, 1231 (D.C. 2015) (holding that “the encounter between Officer Katz and appellant had not evolved into a stop or seizure either at the point when Officer Katz asked appellant, in a ‘normal’ tone of voice, whether he had a gun on his right side and appellant showed the officer the cell phone that had been clipped to his waistband; or before Officer Katz saw something heavy (that the officer had good reason to believe was not a cell phone) in appellant’s right jacket pocket; or before appellant acted as if he was trying to hide something from the officer when he ‘bladed’ his right side away as the officer approached him” (brackets omitted)).
18
intervened in it (which Schemmel treated as a joke, underscoring the casual and
unintimidating nature of his exchange with appellant at that point). Moreover,
appellant could see that several of the young men around him walked away from the
officers and left the area without hindrance (while a few remained on the patio along
with appellant, so he was not left to be confronted by the police alone). No reason
appears why appellant would have thought the police were unwilling to allow him
to get up and walk away as well. 14 Instead, appellant evidently wished to stay seated
where he was, engrossed in whatever he was watching on his phone, despite
Schemmel’s interest in chatting with him. In fact, while appellant did not get up and
walk away, he apparently did consider himself “at liberty to ignore the police
14
See Brown v. United States, 983 A.2d 1023, 1025-26 (D.C. 2009) (holding that Brown was not seized when two uniformed, armed police officers approached her and several other persons standing with her on a sidewalk, some members of the group walked away without hindrance, and the officers then questioned Brown, who did not walk away). Appellant argues that he was deterred from trying to leave because, when another man on the patio ran away to avoid an encounter with the police, two officers chased and caught him (and recovered a firearm from him). No doubt observing this would have discouraged appellant from running away himself, but since he could see others walk away without being chased or impeded by the police, we see no reason he would have been discouraged from walking away too. Unprovoked headlong flight upon sight of the police is frequently “suggestive” of wrongdoing, leading to a chase, see D.W. v. United States, 359 A.3d 166, 175 (D.C. 2026) (en banc), but merely walking away is ordinarily not.
19
presence and go about his business,” 15 for he studiously persisted in watching the
video on his cell phone while Schemmel sought to engage him in a conversation. 16
After watching the camera footage on which appellant relies to argue that he
was effectively trapped between Schemmel and the two officers behind him, the trial
court found that the officers did not block appellant’s paths to leave (before
Schemmel asked appellant about the bulge). 17 Our own viewing of the video footage
satisfies us that this finding was not clearly erroneous. The footage shows that the
officers did not form a circle around appellant, hemming him in; Moore and Laielli
quietly stood back at a distance, watchful to be sure, but affording appellant space
and not standing in his way or otherwise signaling that they would stop him if he
15
Michigan v. Chesternut, 486 U.S. 567, 569 (1988).
16
Perhaps appellant feared that by standing up and walking away, he might expose to the police the presence of the bulge in his groin area. But if that was his reason for staying put, it was not attributable to any coercive show of authority by the police.
17
Appellant asserts that the only practical means of egress available to him necessitated his leaving by way of the parking lot to his rear. For the sake of argument, we shall assume that is so, though there is no finding by the trial court to that effect (appellant did not request one) and the evidence in the record appears to us to be inconclusive on the point.
20
chose to get up and leave. 18 There remained considerable open space around and
behind appellant, and the routes he could have taken past Moore and Laielli to the
parking lot were unblocked. Nor does the camera footage indicate that appellant
reasonably understood the police officers to be blocking his exits to the parking lot. 19
On the contrary, appellant evinced no awareness of the situation behind him. He did
not look around to see whether he was blocked. And Moore and Laielli did not
communicate any intention to block appellant from walking away; they did not
interact with appellant at all until later, when Schemmel frisked him. 20 In fact, as we
have noted, appellant evidently did not realize the two officers were present behind
him.
18
Cf. Ervin v. United States, 349 A.3d 702, 704-06 (D.C. 2026) (“Ervin’s partner was at his 12 o’clock, on the play structure, while . . . five officers stood approximately at Ervin’s 2, 3, 6, 9, and 11 o’clock….” “[T]hey encircled him, leaving him no obvious exit paths”); see also id. at 707 (“[F]ive officers had surrounded Ervin from all sides and exclusively targeted him for investigation through accusatory questioning…. When a person is encircled by five police officers who are focused exclusively on them, the virtually inevitable result is they would not reasonably believe they are free to terminate that encounter, so that they have been seized.”). The instant case is not like Ervin.
19
This court has said that the “relevant question” is not whether the police actually did block a defendant from leaving, but rather whether the defendant “would have reasonably understood the officers to be blocking his exits.” Id. at 706 (quoting T.W., 292 A.3d at 799).
20
And prior to that frisk, Schemmel, too, did not express any intent to block or confine appellant.
21
In sum, appellant has not identified anything the police officers said or did
that would have led a reasonable (innocent) person in his position to believe (before
Schemmel observed the shape of the bulge in his groin and asked him about the
bulge) that he was not free to terminate his conversation with Schemmel and
continue about his personal business or get up and walk away. Accordingly, we
reject appellant’s argument that he was seized during his conversation with
Schemmel before Schemmel inquired about the bulge. We turn now to address
whether Schemmel’s observation and the attendant circumstances supported a
reasonable articulable suspicion that appellant was hiding a gun and therefore
justified Schemmel’s seizure and protective frisk of appellant.
B. Reasonable Articulable Suspicion
Even a brief restraining stop of a person by the police is a seizure subject to
the requirements of the Fourth Amendment. Such a stop is constitutionally
permissible if it is conducted for investigatory purposes based on “a reasonable
suspicion supported by specific and articulable facts that the individual is involved
in criminal activity.” 21 During such a lawful investigatory seizure, an officer may
21
Mayo, 315 A.3d at 620 (quoting Golden, 248 A.3d at 933) (quotation marks and brackets omitted); see Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 21 (1968).
22
conduct a protective frisk for weapons if the officer has a reasonable, articulable
suspicion that the person detained is armed and dangerous. 22
The standard of reasonable articulable suspicion requires “considerably less
than proof of wrongdoing by a preponderance of the evidence, and obviously less
than is necessary for probable cause.” 23 In determining whether this standard has
been met, a court must consider “the totality of ‘the facts available to the officer at
the moment of the seizure,’” 24 as viewed “through the eyes of a reasonable and
cautious police officer on the scene, guided by his experience and training.” 25 The
standard “allows officers to draw on their own experience and specialized training
to make inferences from and deductions about the cumulative information available
to them that ‘might well elude an untrained person.’” 26
In this case, considering all the circumstances, we conclude that the trial court
did not err in ruling that the seizure and frisk of appellant was supported by the
22
See Robinson v. United States, 76 A.3d 329, 336 (D.C. 2013).
23
Kansas v. Glover, 589 U.S. 376, 380 (2020) (internal quotations marks and citation omitted).
24
Mayo, 315 A.3d at 620 (quoting Terry, 392 U.S. at 21-22).
25
Singleton v. United States, 998 A.2d 295, 300 (D.C. 2010) (internal quotation marks and citations omitted).
26
United States v. Arvizu, 534 U.S. 266, 273 (2002) (quoting United States v. Cortez, 449 U.S. 411, 418 (1981)).
23
requisite reasonable articulable suspicion that he was armed with a firearm. 27 We
base our conclusion on the following considerations.
To begin with, there was Schemmel’s observation of a gun-sized, L-shaped
bulge in the groin area of appellant’s pants. What Schemmel described was not a
“generic” bulge that could be virtually anything (a package, a cell phone, a wallet,
and so forth), nor was it a purely subjective or conclusory characterization.28 The
size and L-shape of the bulge were specific physical characteristics of a handgun.
Past decisions of this and other courts confirm that an officer’s credited account of
27
Appellant has not argued that Officer Schemmel lacked sufficient reason to suspect it was a crime for appellant to carry a concealed firearm; nor has he argued that the Second Amendment to the Constitution protected his right to carry the handgun. Presumably appellant has refrained from making such claims because Schemmel, based on his prior law enforcement contact with appellant, knew appellant did not qualify for the necessary license to carry a firearm because he was under 21 years of age. See D.C. Code §§ 7-2509.02(a)(1) and 7-2502.03(a)(1); Picon v. United States, 343 A.3d 57, 63-67 (D.C 2025) (holding that the District’s agebased firearm registration and licensing statutes are constitutional because they are consistent with our Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation).
28
Cf. Golden, 248 A.3d at 942 (bulge on the defendant’s hip “was not in the shape of a gun and was not distinctive in any way; in the officer’s own words, he recognized at the time that it ‘could be anything’”).
24
having observed not just any bulge in a person’s clothing, but one that is L-shaped
and the size of gun, may “weigh[] heavily in favor of reasonable suspicion.” 29
Appellant argues that because no bulge was visible in Schemmel’s body-worn
camera footage, his observation lacked “objective verification” and whatever he saw
was “too faint and ambiguous” to support a reasonable articulable suspicion that
appellant was armed. But those objections do not establish, and appellant does not
contend, that the trial court clearly erred in crediting Schemmel’s testimony that he
observed an L-shaped bulge in appellant’s groin area. In this respect, this case is
similar to our recent decision in Williams. There, too, the trial court credited an
officer’s testimony that he saw a bulge in the defendant’s groin area even though the
body-worn camera footage was unclear on this point. We held that the absence of
confirmation in the footage did not indicate that the trial court clearly erred, and we
29
Doby v. United States, 359 A.3d 875, 881 (D.C. 2026) (L-shaped bulge in jacket pocket); see also, e.g., Williams v. United States, 354 A.3d 306, 313 (D.C. 2026) (thin, rectangular bulge, resembling a “slide” or “receiver” of a gun, in groin area); United States v. Taylor, 743 F. Supp. 3d 168, 176 (D.D.C. 2024) (finding that an officer’s testimony that he observed a distinct L-shaped bulge in defendant’s satchel was “the most significant evidence offered in support of the government’s contention that the officers had reason to believe that [defendant] was armed and dangerous”).
25
therefore deferred to its credibility finding on the point.30 We do so here as well.
Schemmel had an unobstructed view and ample opportunity to observe a bulge in
appellant’s groin, and his contemporaneous behavior—angling his body to make it
easier for his camera to photograph the bulge, announcing his perception of the
bulge, and delineating the bulge with his finger—corroborates his testimony about
what he saw.
We do not “view [an officer’s observation of a suspicious bulge] in isolation
when assessing its weight in the reasonable suspicion calculus.” 31 (Nor did
Schemmel or the trial court.) The second articulable circumstance strengthening the
suspicion that the bulge was indeed a handgun, rather than an innocent object that
just happened to have the same size and shape as one, was its location on appellant’s
body—not in his pocket or other place where people normally hold things they are
carrying innocently, but concealed under his pants in his groin, where even a police
officer might overlook it. To be sure, one can imagine rare circumstances in which
30
Williams, 354 A.3d at 314 n.2; see also, e.g., United States v. Veney, 444 F. Supp. 3d 56, 65 (D.D.C. 2020), aff’d 45 F.4th 403 (D.C. Cir. 2022). In United States v. Veney the district court credited an officer’s testimony that he saw an “abnormal bulge” in defendant’s waistband, even though the bulge was not visible in post-arrest photos. The court appreciated that “two-dimensional photographs sometimes do not fully capture what the human eye observes.” 444 F. Supp. 3d at 65. The court also considered that “as a police officer, [the arresting officer] is guided by experience and training that allow him to pick up on suspicious bulges that may elude untrained eyes.” Id.
31
Doby, at 881.
26
a person may stow something innocently held in that unusual location—say, for
example, to protect a wallet with a lot of money in it from the threat of robbers while
walking at night in a dangerous neighborhood. But certainty is not required here,
only a reasonable suspicion that one can articulate. We think it is reasonable to
suspect that an object secreted in a person’s groin is not being carried innocently;
and if the object has the shape and size of a gun, that suspicion supports the inference
that it is a gun.
A third factor that supported the reasonableness of Schemmel’s suspicion was
appellant’s other seemingly secretive or evasive behavior. Appellant’s concealment
of something in his groin is only one example of his secretiveness. In addition, there
is Schemmel’s perception that appellant seemed to be holding his cell phone as a
“barrier” to block his waist area from view; based on “their own experience and
specialized training,” police officers may make such “inferences from and
deductions about the cumulative information available to them that might well elude
an untrained person.” 32 And more obviously and, perhaps, persuasively, there is the
trial court’s finding that appellant responded evasively to Schemmel’s inquiry about
the bulge by removing items from his jacket and sweatshirt and displaying them to
Schemmel instead of the object concealed below his waist to which Schemmel was
32
Arvizu, 534 U.S. at 273 (internal quotations and citation omitted).
27
pointing. That factual finding was not clearly erroneous. In past cases this court has
deemed such evasive behavior to contribute to reasonable articulable suspicion that
a person may be hiding a firearm. 33 Where “the defendant’s behavior suggests an
attempt to conceal something from police, reasonable suspicion does not require
unmistakable evidence that what the defendant was trying to hide was a weapon.” 34
Here too, we are satisfied that the evasive actions supported a reasonable suspicion
that the object causing a bulge shaped like a handgun was indeed a handgun.
Lastly, this court has recognized that evidence of ongoing or recent criminal
activity in the immediate vicinity also may be “a relevant consideration in a Terry
analysis.” 35 There was such evidence presented here: not only Schemmel’s
testimony as to the high prevalence of violence and the sounds of gunshots in the
general area, but also his more specific testimony that he personally had recovered
“several firearms and narcotics” from the laundry room behind appellant and the
other young men; and the fact that the police actually recovered a firearm from one
of those men (the one who fled the police) only a few minutes before Schemmel
33
See, e.g., Williams, 354 A.3d at 315 (reasonable articulable suspicion supported by officer’s interpretation of appellant’s “blading” of his body as an attempt to conceal a hidden weapon in his groin area); Singleton, 998 A.2d at 302 (appellant’s “hand movement that seemed to be protective of a firearm secreted in the pocket” supported the reasonableness of officer’s suspicion).
34
Champion v. United States, 307 A.3d 425, 431 (D.C. 2024).
35
Mayo, 315 A.3d at 632.
28
frisked appellant. Relatedly, there also was the fact that, as Schemmel knew,
appellant himself had been arrested previously for possession of a firearm. Taken
together, we think it fair to say that this information lent some additional credibility
to the suspicion that the L-shaped bulge in appellant’s groin was indeed what it
looked to be—a handgun.
Considering the totality of the circumstances, we hold that the government
met its burden of proving that Schemmel had reasonable articulable suspicion that
appellant was illegally carrying a firearm, sufficient to support his seizure and a
protective frisk of appellant. Accordingly, we affirm the trial court’s ruling on his
motion to suppress and his conviction of the three charged firearms offenses.
So ordered.