The days of living under the gun

Five years ago this month, two unseen snipers left 10 victims dead and the region in a state of daily tension

Gazette file photo On Oct. 11, 2002, shortly after Kenneth Bridges of Philadelphia was shot at a service station in Massaponax, Va., Jeanne Paul sought cover while refueling at the corner of Rockville Pike and North Washington Street in Rockville. It was a familiar sight while the snipers had the region on edge. Featured Jobs Loading...

‘‘I turned around and saw a man grabbing his heart saying, ‘Please, help me,’” a painting contractor, Eber Albanez, said later.

Moments later, Martin, 55, of Silver Spring was dead. The shooting was a mystery, but for that evening it was a seemingly isolated murder.

The next morning — five years ago today — all hell broke loose.

As county residents settled into their morning routines, a sniper killed four more people between 7:41 a.m. and 9:58 a.m. — a landscaper as he mowed at a North Bethesda car dealership, a taxicab driver pumping gas in Aspen Hill, a babysitter reading a book on a bench near an Aspen Hill bus stop, a mother vacuuming out her minivan at a Kensington service station.

For the next three weeks, John Allen Muhammad and his teen protégé, Lee Boyd Malvo, held the Washington region hostage as they killed 10 people, including six in Montgomery County, and wounded three others.

Victims were targeted at random: white, black, male, female, young and old.

Five years later, what are we left with? Muhammad and Malvo have been convicted in Virginia and Maryland, with Muhammad awaiting execution and Malvo sentenced to life in prison without parole.

But what, if anything, is the legacy of those dark days of crouching behind the car to pump gas, running through parking lots from car to store, shepherding schoolchildren from home to school? And what did it all do to our collective psyche?

‘‘That single event paralyzed this community for 23 days,” said Montgomery County State’s Attorney John McCarthy, who was deputy state’s attorney at the time. ‘‘This criminal act victimized everyone in this community to some extent.”

‘‘Everybody at some level thought they might be in the crosshairs of the snipers,” said Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler, the county’s top prosecutor at the time.

‘I knew we had a problem’

No one saw it coming.

Montgomery County schools Superintendent Jerry D. Weast was meeting with deputies around 9:50 a.m. on Oct. 3, 2002, when Robert B. Hellmuth, the assistant director of school security, asked Weast for a moment of his time.

Hellmuth, a former county police officer who now heads security for the school system, told Weast that he had a friend, a lieutenant, who was responding to a shooting by an unseen gunman.

Weast had already been briefed that morning about the fatal shooting of a county parent the night before in which no one had seen the gunman.

‘‘[Hellmuth] and his friend had put two and two together that something didn’t smell right,” Weast said.

Weast was told that all anyone had seen in the latest shooting was a woman slump over on the bench she was sitting on.

‘‘And I knew we had a problem,” Weast said.

Weast convened a ‘‘kitchen cabinet” of advisers to discuss how the state’s largest school system should respond.

Some of Weast’s advisers who knew about guns concluded that the shots were being fired from a long gun that allowed it to go undetected at long range. What that meant: ‘‘Nothing’s safe,” Weast said. ‘‘So we’re going to go to the far end of the extreme in terms of protection.”

Weast ordered schools countywide to go Code Blue, implementing security provisions taken when an emergency occurs at or near a school.

At Gaithersburg High School, one of the county’s largest schools, 2,000 students were kept in their fourth-period classes from 10 a.m. until the end of the school day at 2:10 p.m.

And while schools were securing their campuses, nearly everyone had trained their eyes on white box trucks, as the suspected getaway vehicle had been described.

Siege mentality

‘‘Has it been five years already?” Sharon Layni, a 32-year-old building contractor from Gaithersburg, asked as he gassed up his white van at a pump near where cab driver Premkumar Walekar, 54, of Olney was killed.

At the time of the shootings, Layni lived in Rockville. After experiencing terrorism on a routine basis as an Israeli native and veteran of the Israeli army, the sniper attacks did not scare him at first, he said.

Then on Oct. 14, FBI analyst Linda Franklin, 47, was killed in the parking garage of the Home Depot at Seven Corners Shopping Center in Falls Church, Va.

‘‘I had been at that Home Depot the day before,” Layni said. ‘‘When I saw it on the news that night — how do you say? — the hairs raised up on my arms ...

‘‘It’s not a big deal when you used to see a bus blowing up every day,” he said. ‘‘It’s the same feeling because there’s nothing you can do. But yeah, it’s the same feeling as when I was in Israel.”

Layni said he had not thought about the shootings in years.

Gansler said he doubts if many people think of the snipers now.

‘‘It still deeply affects the victims and the families of the victims,” he said.

At the time, Gansler said, the snipers held the community in fear.

‘‘I believe the sniper attacks had as strong, if not stronger, psychological effect on the young children who were locked up in their schools,” he said. ‘‘The sniper shootings directly affected the children. They were told bad people were determined to harm them. There was a concern.”

Wakeup call

That the entire region was experiencing the shootings together, and that schools needed to be particularly vigilant, was brought home on Oct. 7 when 13-year-old Iran Brown was wounded on his way into Benjamin Tasker Middle School in Bowie.

‘‘It was a wakeup call to us about what our level of exposure was,” Weast said.

With more than 130,000 students, Montgomery County school officials learned that they could give students and staff some semblance of safety inside the county’s nearly 200 schools.

The sense that school was a safe place was important, Weast said.

‘‘One thing I’ve learned from both the sniper and 9⁄11 is how integral the school system is to the community functioning or malfunctioning,” he said.

Outside schools was trickier. The school system replaced several thousand safety patrols with employees and adult volunteers.

‘Holding it together’

Police headquarters in Rockville became the command post for the task force of local, state and federal agencies investigating the shootings.

A canopy of satellite dishes from television trucks hid the building from the road as reporters from around the world descended on the spot where police Chief Charles A. Moose led daily briefings.

Moose, who left the department in June 2003, after the county ethics commission ruled he could not profit from his book about the ordeal, could not be reached for comment.

‘‘With September 11, it was one day and it was done, but with the sniper shootings it went on for weeks and was totally random,” former Montgomery County Executive Douglas M. Duncan said. ‘‘People were very fearful during that time and it just went on and on and on. We were struggling to keep a community together over three weeks. We didn’t have time to think.”

Police throughout the region worked double shifts, trying to track the killers, said Montgomery County Police Chief J. Thomas Manger, who was the Fairfax County, Va., police chief and a member of the regional task force investigating the shootings.

During the worst of the crisis, Manger said, he thought of murder cases that took years for the killer to be caught.

‘‘As we learned later at one of the trials, [the snipers’] original plan was to kill six people a day for some period of time,” he said. ‘‘It was pretty darn frightening listening to that testimony.”

With no end in sight, Weast tried to calm fears by visiting schools.

‘‘I was beginning to see wear and tear on employees and parents and the community at large,” he said. ‘‘After 21 days we were developing habitual behavior that was akin to all fear.”

As the shootings continued into late October, some people began to wonder whether Halloween trick-or-treating should be canceled.

Others worried about suppressed voter turnout for the Nov. 5 general election, in which the entire Maryland General Assembly and governor were up for grabs, as well as seats in the U.S. Congress.

People wondered when it would end.

‘‘There was a lot of discussion at our table, among our advisers, of ‘How long can we persist in holding it together?’” Weast said.

Weast said the shootings taught him the value of having well-defined emergency plans and leaders who could handle a crisis.

‘‘You have to have courage to take action,” he said. ‘‘To tell people the truth and help them deal with it. You have to be able to motivate people to do things that are unnatural for them to do. Drive a bus when people are shooting at buses. Show up at work when it means putting your life in danger. Teaching school when everybody is willing to focus on something else. Try normalcy when nothing like normalcy exists. You have to call on the better angels of people.”

An ‘eerie’ reminder

The shootings were not the first traumatic events to put Montgomery on edge.

‘‘It was one year after 9⁄11,” said Jane de Winter, president of the county council of PTAs. ‘‘As a society, as a culture, as a community, we were still feeling very vulnerable. And then for this to happen ...”

Jim Nalls was a newly ordained deacon at St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in Rockville five years ago.

‘‘It was eerie going up to where that chicken place was at Leisure World Plaza, and there was a [bullet] hole in the window,” the lifelong Montgomery County resident said of the spot where Sarah Ramos, 34, of Silver Spring was killed while sitting on a bench. ‘‘It took ’em a week or so to get that fixed, and it was just an odd, odd thing. It was a visual reminder that this tragedy had taken place right where you live.”

There were not calls from people who needed to talk or to be consoled during the sniper shootings like there had been after Sept. 11, Nalls said.

‘‘Looking back on it five years later, I can definitely say our parish has a stronger vitality,” he said.

That vitality comes from questioning mortality, Nalls said.

‘‘Between 9⁄11 and the sniper shootings, there definitely was a large movement of people just re-evaluating their lives,” he said. ‘‘In the Washington area, we get so wrapped up in jobs, career, money, kids, soccer games, that sometimes all the frantic activity gets in the way of stopping to think, ‘What is life all about? What is the meaning of life?’ Those events prompted many people to take time out to consider that. When they can shoot you in the head, drop a plane out of the air, you have to stop and consider that.”

Monsignor Kevin Hart of St. Patrick’s said church attendance did not surge after the sniper attacks as it did after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

‘‘Maybe because people were hiding indoors,” he said.

Making it through

Many people were hiding, according to a May 2003 survey of 1,200 residents of Montgomery and Prince George’s counties and Washington, D.C.

‘‘Psychological Responses to the Sniper Attacks,” published in the October 2006 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, found that more than 45 percent reported going to parks and shopping centers less than usual during the three weeks of violence.

Nearly 6 percent reported missing at least one day of work because of the shootings. More than half said they felt less safe in their neighborhoods.

‘‘A lot of people changed their routines,” Manger said. ‘‘I didn’t let my wife go out and get gas in the car and made sure she put the car in the garage and not in the driveway. I can remember going to a gas station at the middle of Tysons Corner. It was like a ghost town.”

The end to the siege came abruptly, and with an overwhelming sense of relief.

Muhammad and Malvo were arrested in the early hours of Oct. 24 at an Interstate 70 rest stop in western Frederick County, asleep in the blue 1990 Caprice they had modified so they could fire the shots from the trunk.

A telephone call made by Malvo to a Virginia priest as part of an extortion scheme had referenced an earlier robbery and murder in Montgomery, Ala., and a fingerprint found at the scene was traced to Malvo, leading to a break in the case. A photo of Muhammad and a description of their vehicle led to a truck driver spotting them at the rest stop and alerting police.

‘‘After these two were caught, there was this collective sense of relief like nothing else I’ve ever seen before,” Manger said. ‘‘It was like something you read about when World War II ended.”

Duncan concurred.

‘‘The sense of relief, I don’t think I ever experienced anything like that in my life,” he said.

After authorities tried the pair in Virginia, Gansler held a separate trial for Muhammad in 2006 where Malvo testified against his accomplice. While some criticized Gansler for the added trial costs for a pair already convicted, Gansler has defended the action as ensuring the pair are never released in case they ever win an appeal.

Looking back, Weast said, he sees those three weeks as an example of how a community can pull together.

‘‘As strange as this may sound, actually I think it’s made us better because we now know we are able to do much more than we thought we were [able to do] over an extended period of time,” he said. ‘‘... We had that opportunity to live through something where everybody had to be able to have everybody’s back.”

In the end, the community came together in celebration just as it had come together in need. Balloons and flowers flooded police headquarters in Rockville. A week after the arrests, trick-or-treaters took to the streets.

‘‘There’s a psychological legacy for everybody who lived through it, but at the same time there’s a need for normalcy and amazingly people came back and recovered afterwards,” McCarthy said. ‘‘... I can remember going out on Halloween night and everyone — I mean everyone — was out for Halloween. It was this collective sigh of relief that the worst was over.”

Staff Writer Janel Davis contributed to this report.

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