The Beltway Snipers

Early in the morning on Wednesday, October 2, 2002, the first of many shots began a reign of terror transforming Washington, D.C., and surrounding areas into a killing field. Routine activities such as pumping gas, shopping, sitting on a bench, or waiting in a bus became matters of life and death. No one in public view was safe until the suspects were apprehended on October 24, 2002.

The story, however, did not begin in the D.C. “Beltway” area. Eight months earlier, in Tacoma, Washington, Keenya Cook was home alone with her 6-month-old daughter. She rose to answer the doorbell and was shot point-blank in the face with a .45-caliber handgun. The bullet that killed Keenya was meant for her aunt, who lived in the same house. She had taken sides with Mildred, wife of John Allen Williams, during their divorce, and he had intended that she pay for that decision with her life. Instead, her niece was dead.

After the shooting, John Allen Williams, also known as John Allen Muhammad, left Tacoma with 17-yearold John Lee Malvo, his protégé and self-proclaimed stepson. On September 21, 2002, Kellie Adams was locking up the ABC Liquor Store in Montgomery, Alabama. She later recalled how she felt as if “she had been hit by lightning” when a bullet entered her head. A moment later, Claudine Lee Parker, a coworker, was shot in the back and died almost instantly. Police, arriving at the scene, saw someone rummaging through a victim's purse. John Lee Malvo escaped, leaving nothing behind except one fingerprint.

Two days later, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Malvo and Muhammad were suspected of firing a single shot that killed Hong Im Ballenger as she left her job at the Beauty Depot. Malvo stole her purse and fled through the woods, evading bloodhounds and police. Ballistic examination linked the rifle used in the Louisiana shooting to the shooting in Alabama.

The South was no longer a safe haven for the two fugitives from Washington State. They began to move north and east, eventually ending up in the area surrounding the U.S. Capitol. At 5:20 p.m. on Wednesday, October 2, 2002, an unsuspecting shopper was walking in front of a craft store in Aspen Hill, Maryland. A shot rang out, but it missed the shopper's head and shattered a plate glass window, narrowly missing a clerk at the cash register. After that attack, there were no more misses. A few minutes later, in Silver Springs, Maryland, just 2 miles from the craft store, shots rang out again. James D. Martin was killed in the parking lot of a grocery store, where he had stopped to run an errand for his wife. He was a Vietnam veteran, working as an analyst for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The killers hid for the remainder of that evening in preparation for the massacre they would commit the following day.

A lot of killing would be done on October 3, 2002, and the snipers started early. At 7:41 a.m. in Rockville, Maryland, James Buchanan Jr. was mowing a client's lawn when he was shot once in the torso. He died a few minutes later. Three miles north and 31 minutes later, Premkumar Walekar was filling his cab with gasoline in preparation for his workday. A single gunshot rang out, and he fell to the ground, dead. A few minutes later and 2 miles north of the gas station where Walekar was shot, Sara Ramos was sitting on a bench in a small shopping center enjoying the fall morning. She was shot once in the head and died at the scene. Five miles from the shopping center in Kensington, Maryland, at 9:58 a.m., Lori Ann Lewis-Rivera had stopped to vacuum out her minivan when a shot to the torso killed her. The snipers did not strike again until 9:15 p.m., when they killed an immigrant from Haiti, 72-year-old Pascal Charlot, of Washington, D.C., while he was walking his dog in his neighborhood.

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