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Beltway sniper John Allen Muhammad is scheduled to die Tuesday by lethal injection on Virginia's death row, nearly 200 miles from where he terrorized Montgomery County. But some policies county police enacted during the October 2002 killing spree continue to be followed.

"We had our backs against a wall, and we had to work fast and we had to work quickly to stop them," said Assistant Police Chief Drew Tracy, who led the tactical response teams during the sniper attacks. "It was a very tense situation for 22 days."

From leading to an increase in the number of ballistic shields for officers to forcing the need to arm many officers with M4 assault rifles to match the firepower of Muhammad and his then-teenaged accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, who carried out their attacks with an AR-15 assault rifle, the sniper saga changed how county police operate today.

The attacks in the county began on Oct. 2, 2002, with the death of James D. Martin, 55, of Silver Spring, who was gunned down as he stepped out of his car at a grocery store. At the time, police thought it was an isolated case, but the next morning, Muhammad and Malvo shot and killed four others in Montgomery County. By the end of their spree, 10 people in the region were dead, and three others were wounded.

Malvo, who was 17 at the time of the killings, is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole.

At his November 2003 murder trial, Muhammad was sentenced to die for the shooting death of Dean H. Meyers of Gaithersburg on Oct. 9, 2002. Meyers, the seventh victim of the snipers, was felled with a single bullet after filling up his car at a Sunoco station near Manassas, Va., on his way home from work.

"It was a rapidly evolving situation," Tracy said. "We didn't plan for anything like this in the past. We had to address it immediately."

Although Montgomery County police took the lead in most of the investigations because six of the murders occurred in the county, none of the local police officers plans to attend Muhammad's execution.

Still, Montgomery County Police Chief J. Thomas Manger said, "There are but a small number of people whose execution really serves justice. Mr. Muhammad is among those few."

Muhammad is scheduled to die at 9 p.m. next Tuesday at the Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt, Va., said Virginia Department of Corrections spokesman Larry Traylor.

In Virginia, condemned inmates are given the choice between lethal injection and electrocution. Those who do not state a preference die by lethal injection. Muhammad had not stated a preference, Traylor said.

His attorneys filed an appeal Tuesday with the U.S. Supreme Court on the grounds that Muhammad was insane. Muhammad also was expected to file a petition for clemency with Virginia Gov. Timothy Kaine.

Just as the shootings by Muhammad and Malvo led to changes in how county police respond to shootings now, an earlier killing spree at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999 led to preparations used to counter the snipers.

Following Columbine, county police trained in "active shooter" situations, in which officers move in more aggressively rather than just securing an area, Tracy said. Officers used the same approach at the scenes of the sniper attacks.

But other changes came from the sniper attacks.

County police rolled out portable radios to allow officers to communicate with adjacent departments. Also, the sharing of information with surrounding departments and the federal government reached an "unprecedented" level, Tracy said.

While there had always been cooperation, "one of the things we learned is when it's this large of scale, you have to use all of your resources on hand, and you also have to reach out and get additional help from adjacent jurisdictions and the federal government," Tracy said.

A representative of the county sheriff's department, a state trooper and an FBI hostage rescue team member were teamed up to deploy rapidly to the shootings to secure the scene for police officers and emergency rescue personnel, Tracy said.

Because many of them had not trained together, they had to quickly rehearse how to work jointly, Tracy said.

While Tracy was put in charge of the tactical units, plainclothes officers and the aerial surveillance units, the officers under him were from other police agencies, he said.

"People put their egos aside to work together," he said.

Other departments from around the country and internationally have studied how police responded to the Beltway snipers, Tracy said.

Investigators had little solid information to go on initially, he said. Each shooting led to more than 10 to 15 reports of motorists speeding away, and the large number of telephone tips overwhelmed officers, Tracy said.

Former Fraternal Order of Police president Walter Bader said he and other county police officers at the time were worried about the community they served as well as the people they knew.

"I generally don't favor the death penalty, but if ever there was a case that needs the death penalty — a case that terrorized hundreds of thousands of people in two states and the District of Columbia — if ever there was a good case for the death penalty, this one is it," Bader said.

Bader disagrees with Tracy that there was enough cooperation between different police agencies.

"A lot was done wrong, and a lot was done right," Bader said.

Too often departments kept secrets from each other and even information from patrol officers on the street, he said.

"Now we have a written agreement that when information of potentially dangerous suspects comes forward to administrators, they'll notify officers immediately," Bader said.