It was the crime that finally shamed the nation’s capital.

On August 3, Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old Elon Musk protégé, was attacked on the street and left battered and bleeding.

A week later, at the intersection where it happened, the scene remains just the kind that that President Trump wants to eradicate by sending in 800 National Guard troops to end ‘bloodshed, bedlam and squalor’.

Close to where Coristine – nicknamed ‘Big Balls’ – was brutally assaulted, the front window of a Post Office is covered in graffiti, and so are the walls of other buildings. Cans, pizza boxes and detritus litter the streets while garbage cans overflow.

Homes have bars on the windows and security alarm signs planted prominently outside, along with guard dog warnings in English and Spanish.

According to local residents, things have got worse since the pandemic.

‘What I see are more homeless people suffering from addiction and severe mental health issues,’ said one woman.

In another hangover from the pandemic, criminals are now wearing Covid-era medical masks to disguise themselves as they launch late-night attacks and carjackings. 

Pictured: Edward Coristine, 19, an Elon Musk protégé who was attacked a mile north of the White House

A pedestrian walks past the tents of unhoused people at Washington Circle in Washington, DC

In the surveillance footage police released in the Coristine case, a suspect is wearing one.

Meanwhile, Washington’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, has argued that there is no crimewave in the city.

After Trump adviser Stephen Miller suggested the murder rate was worse than Iraqui capital Baghdad, Bowser said that was ‘hyperbolic and false’.

She accepted there was a spike in 2023 but said there was a significant drop after that, with violent crime currently down 26 percent compared to last year.

However, what Bowser didn’t say is that the sense of spiraling crime in the city comes partly from where it is happening – in central areas, including close to the White House, rather than long-blighted outlying zones.

A man is seen interacting with Border Patrol and FBI agents along U Street before he was arrested

Washington, DC, mayor Muriel Bowser denies there is a crimewave

Members of the US Park Police patrol the streets near the Washington Monument along the National Mall in Washington, DC

The attack on Coristine happened in an trendy enclave popular with young Republican and Democrat staffers, just a mile north of the White House.

A few minutes down the road, in early July, congressional intern Eric Tarpinian-Jachym, 21, was shot dead.

That fatal shooting happened in a seemingly quiet residential neighborhood at 10:30pm

It began with an altercation between two groups that escalated into gunfire near a block of apartments, an underground station and a Metro outlet, according to police reports.

Pictured: Eric Tarpinian-Jachym, 21, a congressional intern who was killed in a triple shooting

Pictured: Tamara Tarpinian-Jachym (left) with her son Eric, who was killed in a shooting in Washington

On Sunday night, Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agents were standing guard in Dupont Circle. President Donald Trump ordered an increased presence of federal law enforcement to Washington, DC, in an effort to curb crime

Eric’s mother, Tamara Jachym, accused the city’s council of treating violent crime like a ‘joke’.

‘Your constituents are dying. They’re getting killed and maimed. This isn’t OK,’ she appealed to municipal authorities.

She called on the council to lean on the federal government for help.

Pictured: The scene where 21-year-old Eric Tarpinian-Jachym was shot about a mile north of the White House

Near the White House itself, it is common for people to take crack cocaine or relieve themselves in little-patrolled alleyways.

One homeless man on a street corner, within sight of the White House, told the Daily Mail the crime he was witnessing at night was ‘getting worse’, including a recent incident involving a man with a rifle.

When told the president was sending in the National Guard, the man said he may head for Nevada. 

FBI and Border Patrol officers walk along the U Street corridor as part of Trump’s federal law enforcement deployment to the nation’s capital

Meanwhile, the brazenness of car break-ins is now so bad one Washington restaurant worker left a note in their window pleading for criminals to leave them alone, following four previous attacks.

It read: ‘There is nothing of value in this car. Only restaurant supplies and broken dreams.

‘Plz don’t break the windows for the fifth time.’