McFadden’s had its liquor license suspended Tuesday after a stabbing inside the bar early Saturday morning left five people seriously injured.
The D.C. Alcoholic Beverage Control Board stripped McFadden’s of its license after finding that the popular bar presented “an imminent danger to the health and safety of the public,” according to the suspension notice.
The suspect had gotten into a verbal altercation with a group that went to McFadden’s to celebrate a birthday, according to the notice. A 23-year-old and 27-year-old were both stabbed in the back. A 20-year-old was stabbed three times in the lower body, and a 25-year-old was stabbed three times. Another 23-year-old man was stabbed in the chest and the back, leaving him with a punctured kidney and cuts on his left arm.
MPD expects all five victims to survive, and University spokeswoman Maralee Csellar said Monday that none of the victims are GW students.
The notice states that security personnel inside the restaurant did not initially cooperate with police.
“Even though they escorted a patron who may have been the alleged assailant outside, they did not offer any details of his identity to the investigators,” according to the notice.
Two witnesses told investigators that they saw someone in the restaurant mopping up blood on the floor after the stabbing. The manager confirmed that a bar back washed the floors, “thereby not preserving the crime scene,” the notice reads.
The bar was also over capacity the night of the stabbing, and video footage from cameras inside the restaurant have not been used during the investigation because the quality is too poor.
On Sunday, Metropolitan Police Department Chief Cathy Lanier closed the restaurant for 96 hours, writing in a notice that the establishment was a threat to public safety.
A GW alert described the suspect, who was last seen heading east down Pennsylvania Avenue early Saturday morning after the incident, as a 5’7” or 5’8” black man wearing a plaid shirt, black or blue dress pants and a tan trench coat.
