## Facts

- A strip club in the District of Columbia caught fire while employee Vladimir Djordjevic was inside.
- Djordjevic escaped through a back door severely burned, screaming, and appearing frantic and in shock.
- Coworkers and a law-enforcement officer immediately asked Djordjevic what happened; he stated he saw a man with a gas can and tried to stop him.
- Shortly thereafter, Djordjevic told a coworker to “stay calm,” then became nonresponsive and stared into the distance.
- The government prosecuted Vasile Graure for arson-related offenses and multiple counts of assault with a deadly weapon (ADW), each tied to a different victim endangered by the fire.
- At trial, the court admitted coworkers’ testimony repeating Djordjevic’s out-of-court statements under the excited-utterance exception to hearsay.
- Graure was convicted and appealed, challenging both the hearsay ruling and the non-merger of multiple ADW convictions arising from a single act of arson.

## Issues

1. Whether Djordjevic’s statements made minutes after escaping the fire—though responsive to questions and including a brief effort to calm another person—qualified as excited utterances admissible under a hearsay exception.
2. Whether multiple ADW convictions based on a single act of arson must merge when each count corresponds to a different victim and the prosecution proceeds on an attempted-battery theory of assault.

## Decision

- The D.C. Court of Appeals affirmed the convictions.
- The court held Djordjevic’s statements were properly admitted as excited utterances.
- The court held the multiple ADW convictions did not merge because each count involved a separate victim endangered by the arson, even under an attempted-battery theory.

## Legal Principles

- An excited utterance is a statement relating to a startling event made while the declarant remains under the stress of excitement caused by the event.
- The time lapse between the event and the statement is relevant but not controlling; the focus is the declarant’s continuing stress, as shown by physical condition and demeanor.
- A statement may qualify as an excited utterance even if made in response to questioning, so long as the declarant is still dominated by the event’s stress and the exchange is not calculated.
- Under D.C. merger and unit-of-prosecution principles, a single violent act that endangers multiple victims can support multiple non-merging convictions—one for each victim—because the offense is treated as separately committed against each person placed at risk.

## Conclusion

The court upheld admission of a badly burned victim’s immediate post-fire statements as excited utterances and ruled that arson-based ADW convictions do not merge when each count corresponds to a distinct victim endangered by the single act.


Graure v. United States, 18 A.3d 743 (D.C. 2011)