On a big screen inside Temple of Praise church in Southeast, a video from a December 2025 cheerleading competition played before Julian Marquette Bailey’s funeral. The film captured hundreds of girls filling a Baltimore arena, their uniforms bright with glitter and bows. Speakers blasted music as a dozen Black fathers stood sheepishly waiting for the beat to drop.
“Watch me crank it/ Watch me roll/ Watch me crank that Soulja Boy/ Then Superman/ That ooooooooooh.”
The fathers started performing the Soulja Boy dance. In the front was Julian Bailey, 43, father to three daughters in the crowd—twins Chloe and Journey, both 10, and 6-year-old Juliana. His smile was impossible to miss.
The videos shown at Bailey’s funeral in March captured the man his family remembers. Those same family members are still trying to get answers about how Bailey’s life ended and who is responsible for ending it.
On the afternoon of Feb. 11, 2026, Bailey, who was on his way to pick up his family from work and school, was shot nine times by U.S. Marshals in the 3700 block of Hayes Street NE. At least six of those bullets entered his body from the rear, according to the autopsy. The Metropolitan Police Department’s report says lifesaving measures were administered on the scene by the Marshals. Bailey died later that day from his injuries.
The US Marshals declined to speak with City Paper about Bailey and denied our request to obtain a copy of their report, citing that the matter was under investigation. MPD also declined to comment, instead referring City Paper to their police report, a news release, and the Interim Police Chief’s statement at the D.C. Council Performance Oversight Hearing from February. Likewise, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for D.C., which reviews MPD’s investigations, also declined to comment because of the ongoing investigation.
For nearly nine months, Bailey’s family has been trying to piece together the final moments of his life. They’re still waiting to see body camera footage from MPD and the U.S. Marshals, and the currently available public records fail to provide a full account of the events that led to his death. Both MPD and the U.S. Marshals denied City Paper’s FOIA request to review body camera footage, citing that the footage was a part of an ongoing administrative investigation.
To those who knew Bailey, the unanswered questions are especially painful. His widow wants closure.
“Why were the U.S. Marshals involved?” Trenise Wells–Bailey said at a DC Council Oversight Hearing 14 days after her husband’s death. “Why doesn’t our government want to release more details? What are they hiding? I want answers.”
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Bailey, known as JuJu or Jules to close friends, was charismatic. His father, Gibson Bailey, described him as a people person right from the beginning. “He was a wonderful child,” the 70-year-old Landover resident tells City Paper. “He got along with everybody. He had his group of friends. We would come home sometime, and there may have been seven or eight kids in there.”
Gibson remembers his son’s affinity for cooking and says he considered becoming a chef. “He would make top-of-the-line breakfasts for his mother and I, and he was about 10 or 11 years old.”
Bailey was always determined to make something of himself, according to many who knew him. Like many young people, he made some stumbles along the way. At 18 he became a father to his first child, Sean. Three years later, his son Jalien was born. He was intermittently employed and, according to his father, not mature enough to raise children.
Bailey also had a few run-ins with the law. He racked up traffic violations and was charged with assault and disorderly conduct in his early 20s, but most of the charges were dismissed. In 2005, Bailey was found guilty of possession of a narcotic with intent to distribute in Prince George’s County and sentenced to 11 years. He was released after serving four years but violated his parole and was sent back to prison to serve the remainder of his sentence.
In March 2014, as Bailey was nearing the end of his sentence, he saw a picture of Trenise Wells hanging on his cousin’s wall during a video call and was immediately smitten. That cousin connected Julian and Trenise, who built a friendship writing letters to one another. By the time he was released in July 2015, Bailey had a mission: marry Trenise. He returned to D.C., where their romance bloomed.
Trenise remembers him telling her, “God told me that you’re gonna be my wife and we’re gonna have children.” She repeats his words with a laugh.
At the time, Trenise was hesitant about having children—she’d already raised two nephews following her sister’s death. But Bailey was resolute in his decision to marry her and start a family.
When Trenise discovered she was pregnant with twins, Bailey was overjoyed. He ran down the street screaming, Trenise says. “He was just so excited, because he always wanted to be a part of his children’s lives. He couldn’t do that with his older two sons because he was incarcerated.”
The two married in a church ceremony in July 2021 and built a home in D.C. centered around their daughters. Their days settled into a predictable rhythm: school, work, cheerleading practices and competitions, plays, and church. Bailey was there for all of it—driving to practices, attending performances, and showing up for the everyday moments that make a family.
“I do believe that with us being together, we were a team,” Trenise tells City Paper, while fighting back tears. “We really did love each other. I loved him, and I still love him. He loved our girls. It’s very hard, very, very, very hard to wake up every morning and not hear him or see him.”
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The sky was overcast and the snow was barely melting on Wednesday, Feb. 11. Bailey, who was working as a delivery driver for Spectrum Foods in Landover, took the day off to rest a shoulder injury. In the morning, he dropped his kids off at school and drove Trenise to work. The couple planned to help their daughters write Valentine’s Day cards for classmates that evening.
At approximately 2:20 p.m., Bailey entered the Circle 7 convenience store on Kenilworth Avenue NE in Mayfair, according to the MPD report City Paper obtained via FOIA request. Inside the store, the report states that Bailey got into a verbal altercation with a woman identified in the report as Dianca Bishop, who called 911.
According to MPD’s report, Bailey followed Bishop, identified as “victim 1” in the report, to her vehicle and told her, “I’m never bullshitting” before brandishing a gun. The report says Bishop drove away and Bailey left the area before either MPD officers or the U.S. Marshals arrived. Shortly after, Marshals located Bailey in his gray Honda Odyssey less than two blocks away on Hayes Street—near Cesar Chavez Public Charter School, where he was shot nine times by a deputy U.S. Marshal, according to the repot.
MPD’s report says only that a “shooting occurred involving a Deputy US Marshal, with rounds taking effect. MPD arrived shortly after.”
Though not mentioned in MPD’s report, Trenise tells City Paper that the Marshals rammed into the back of Bailey’s car before the shooting took place and that an unknown woman was with Bailey at the time of his murder. When asked who the unknown woman was, Trenise’s lawyer Andrew Clarke told City Paper via email, “I do not have the authority to release her information at this time.” When asked to confirm Trenise’s claims that the Marshals rammed Bailey’s car before he exited and that a woman was present in the car at the time of the incident, Brady McCarron, the Marshals’ deputy chief of the Office of Public Affairs, said via email, “Unfortunately since this matter is still under investigation, we are not making any comments or able to answer any questions.”
In March, Clarke submitted a FOIA request to MPD asking to obtain a copy of the closed-circuit surveillance camera footage of the 3700 block of Hayes Street NE from 2 to 4 p.m. on Feb. 11. That request as well as the appeal to the Mayor was denied.
An autopsy of Bailey’s body found that six of the nine bullets entered his body from the rear: Two bullets entered through his back and into his chest cavity—one passed through his heart, the other injured his left lung. Two others struck the backs of his thighs, fracturing both femurs. The fifth hit his left knee; the sixth entered his body from the right buttocks and passed through his lower abdomen. The toxicology report found phencyclidine (PCP) and alcohol in Bailey’s system. (Cassie Leigh, a freelance certified forensic technician and crime analyst who is not involved in the case, tells City Paper via email that “The toxicology findings document substances that were present at the time of death, but they do not, by themselves, establish that intoxication caused or contributed to the death.”)
The MPD police report lists items retrieved from the scene, including a brown wallet with an ID inside, a black phone, a brown pair of sunglasses, and keys. NBC4’s early reporting from the site of the shooting said a gun, along with gun casings and a gun clip, were collected from the scene, but there is no mention of a gun in MPD’s report.
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It seems that the aforementioned 911 call, which came through the Office of Unified Communications, city’s emergency call center, set the deadly shooting in motion. The call, according to Interim Police Chief Jeffery Carroll at the D.C. Council Performance Oversight Hearing two weeks after the shooting, was not assigned to the U.S. Marshals Service. According to Carroll’s testimony, MPD officers were dispatched to the Circle 7 convenience store after receiving a report of a person armed with a gun. Officers for both the U.S. Marshals and U.S. Park Police arrived at the scene after allegedly hearing the call on MPD radio traffic, Carroll said. (An MPD spokesperson later told City Paper that the Marshals do not have access to MPD’s radio traffic.) At the hearing, Carroll also testified that the Marshals then went looking for Bailey while MPD remained at the original scene to gather information from the complainant.
“The Marshals do not normally respond to 911 calls,” Carroll told Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George during his February testimony. A communications specialist from OUC tells City Paper via email, “OUC dispatches MPD and FEMS exclusively.”
When City Paper asked the U.S. Marshals to explain their role in street-level patrol activity in the D.C., McCarron said via email, “There are various answers to this question. Some teams have special missions to include serving warrants, augmenting MPD, sex-offender compliance and so on. There are multiple roles. The overall role of every member of the [D.C. Safe and Beautiful] task force is to make the District safe.” On Nov. 9, McCarron denied City Paper’s request to discuss the shooting, writing via email, “Unfortunately since this matter is still under investigation, we are not making any comments or able to answer any questions.”
MPD officers were not present when Bailey was shot; seven D.C. cops arrived shortly afterward, according to Carroll’s testimony. He did not describe what occurred on Hayes Street during his testimony or what led federal officials to use lethal force on Bailey. What he did note, however, is that the U.S. Park Police have authority to take police action throughout the District without MPD present. The U.S. Marshals do not.
According to Carroll’s testimony, Marshals can only search for a suspect if MPD has shared a callout with them; they can also make traffic stops, detain, and arrest people as long as a D.C. officer is present. When asked who is responsible for answering calls for service, McCarron told City Paper, “This question is better asked of the Metropolitan Police Department.”
Ms. B, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation from her employer, was working nearby when the shooting took place. She tells City Paper that she came outside moments after the shooting and saw deputies surround a man who she presumed to be Bailey lying in the street as they attempted lifesaving measures. “They went over there and they started trying to resuscitate him. I was saying, ‘Get off him! You know you killed him already. So now you want to fake in front of everybody, because you know people saw it.’”
City Paper reached out to Bishop, the woman who made the original 911 call on Feb. 11, but she declined to comment.
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More than eight months later, Bailey’s family aren’t the only ones looking for answers. Local activists are asking questions too.
On Aug. 16, Free DC, Harriet’s Wildest Dreams, and Black Lives Matter DC hosted a rally in Bailey’s honor outside the U.S. District Courthouse on Constitution Avenue. Attendees carried signs demanding “Justice for Julian,” while National Guard troops circled the block on foot—their presence met with jeers from the crowd.
The event kicked off Free DC’s One Year of Occupation: 11 Days of Action in response to the one-year anniversary of the Trump administration’s takeover of MPD and the deployment of the National Guard in D.C. But even prior to the troop’s deployment, the White House’s D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force, created by a presidential executive order in March 2025, launched a multi-agency enforcement initiative that brought together dozens of federal and local law enforcement agencies to target crime and other “quality-of-life” offenses across D.C.
“I look at D.C. so much differently now,” Trenise Wells-Bailey told the crowd, mic in hand, that day in August. “I didn’t understand why I would see so much going on, so many soldiers … and my children: ‘Mommy, why are they here?’ I don’t know why they’re here. I still don’t know.”
She expressed regret for not paying more attention to protests she saw while growing up in D.C. and asked the city for help. “I ask this mayor, MPD, please give my husband justice and if you don’t care for him, think about Journey, Chloe, Juliana, Jalen, and Sean—they deserve it. … Children deserve more than what they’re receiving.”
Despite her plea, many questions remain unanswered. The U.S. Marshals Service has not publicly released body camera footage. Authorities have not publicly explained what prompted Marshals to open fire, whether Bailey was armed at the time of the shooting, or what happened during the roughly 30 minutes between the original 911 call and the fatal encounter. The investigations remain ongoing.
Trenise continues to work full time while raising her three daughters as a widow and single mother. She says she desperately misses her husband and is still unsure how she will navigate life without him. “I didn’t choose to be without my husband,” she tells City Paper. “Even when people get a divorce, they get options of counseling to stay together. I have no option. My husband is gone. I’ll never see him again.”
She continues, “My daughters will never see their dad again, and I’m afraid that they’re gonna forget him.”
