Wife of slain DLA Piper lawyer told police 'everything seemed fine' when they last spoke
The wife of a DLA Piper associate found fatally stabbed on Tuesday told Washington, D.C., police in a missing persons report that “everything seemed fine” when they last spoke on the phone.
Kim Vuong called police at about 1:50 a.m. on Tuesday to report that her husband, David Messerschmitt, had not returned home that night, the Washington Post reports. Police found the 30-year-old lawyer’s body later Tuesday morning at the Donovan, a Washington, D.C. boutique hotel.
Vuong said Messerschmitt told her in a text sent at 7:34 p.m. on Monday that he would be home in about an hour.
Police are seeking a person of interest who entered the hotel lobby soon after that, the Post says. The hotel video is here. Police are offering a $25,000 reward for information that leads to a conviction.
Metropolitan Police Department Chief Cathy Lanier told ABC News that police are investigating several angles. “We really have no idea what the motive is at this point, so everything is open,” Lanier said.
Messerschmitt attended high school in the Cincinnati area before enrolling at Ohio State University, the Cincinnati Enquirer reports. At Ohio State, he spent a summer at Oxford University as part of a prelaw program, according to the National Law Journal (sub. req.).
After graduating college in 2006, Messerschmitt interned for U.S. District Judge Susan Dlott of Cincinnati. He attended Boston University School of Law and graduated in 2009. He worked at Mayer Brown before joining DLA Piper in April 2014 as an intellectual property associate who negotiated technology and commercial agreements.
“He was a star, an absolute star,” Dlott told the Enquirer. “I’m just so sick about this. He was the nicest, most wonderful kid you could ever want to meet.”
