The woman jumped from the eighth floor with her legs tied, the police said. (Representative Photo)
A woman in Washington DC is battling for her life after leapt from her eighth-floor house in a high-rise building to escape a gunman. According to a report in NBC, the gunman had bound her arms and legs.
The Metropolitan Police Department said on Twitter that the woman was able to free her partially and “jumped from the building” with her legs still bound.
The police further said in a release that the woman and the gunman “were involved in a dispute inside a residence on the eighth floor," and that the suspect fled the scene after the victim went out of the window.
The incident took place in Northwest Washington, DC, apartment on Thursday and the police found a “rifle-style” ghost gun during their investigation.
The suspect, identified as Kylee Jamal Palmer, was arrested after he came back to the scene of the crime later that night and charged with assault with an intent to kill, possession of an unregistered firearm and possession of a large capacity ammunition feeding device, according to the police.
The woman was taken to a hospital where she is being treated for her injuries.
The incident comes more than a week after US President Joe Biden vowed to crack down on ghost guns in the country.
What are ghost guns?
These firearms have proliferated in recent years in the US, which the White House describes as “unserialised, privately-made guns that law enforcement are increasingly recovering at crime scenes in cities across the country”.
In 2021, about 20,000 suspected ghost guns were recovered by law enforcement in criminal investigations and reported to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). This is a ten-fold increase from 2016, the White House further said.
Ghost guns can be assembled from "buy build shoot" kits or can be 3D-printed.