The D.C. sniper attacks (also known as the Beltway sniper attacks) were a series of coordinated shootings that occurred over three weeks in October 2002 throughout the Washington metropolitan area, consisting of the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia. These were preceded by a series of murders and robberies in several states starting in February 2002. Five people were killed, and five others were injured in the preliminary shootings, and ten people were killed and three others were critically wounded in the October shootings.
In total, the snipers killed 15 people and wounded 8 others in a 10-month span. They shot 16 people in the D.C. metro area based on both events that took place that year. The perpetrators, John Allen Muhammad (41 years old at the time) and Lee Boyd Malvo (17), traveled in a blue 1990 Chevrolet Caprice sedan. In 2003, Muhammad was sentenced to death. He was executed by lethal injection in 2009. Malvo, a juvenile, received six life sentences in Maryland and three in Virginia.
Preliminary shootings
On February 16, 2002, 21-year-old Keenya Nicole Cook was shot and killed by Lee Malvo at the front door of her aunt's home in Tacoma, Washington. Cook's aunt, Isa Nichols, had been good friends with John Allen Muhammad's ex-wife Mildred and had encouraged her to seek a divorce.
On March 19, 2002, Jerry Taylor, 60, was killed by a single shot to the chest fired from long range as he practiced chip shots at a Tucson, Arizona, golf course. Muhammad's sister lived near the golf course, and he was visiting her at the time of the shooting.
On August 1, 2002, John Gaeta, 51, was changing a tire slashed by Malvo at a parking lot in Hammond, Louisiana. Malvo then shot him in the neck. The bullet exited through Gaeta's back, and he pretended to be dead while Malvo stole his wallet. Gaeta ran to a service station after Malvo left and discovered that he was bleeding; he went to a hospital and was released within an hour.
On September 5, 2002, at 10:30 p.m., Paul LaRuffa, a 55-year-old pizzeria owner, was shot six times at close range while locking up his Italian restaurant in Clinton, Maryland. LaRuffa survived the shooting, and his laptop computer was found in Muhammad's car when he and Malvo were arrested.
On September 14, 2002, 22-year-old Rupinder "Benny" Oberoi, an employee of the Hillandale Beer & Wine liquor store in Silver Spring, Maryland, was shot in the back outside the store. Oberoi survived the shooting. The shooting was officially linked to Muhammad and Malvo by the Montgomery County Police Department.
On September 15, 2002, Muhammad Rashid was shot while closing Three Roads Liquors in Brandywine, Maryland. Rashid later identified Malvo as the shooter in court.
On September 21, 2002, at 12:15 a.m., 41-year-old Million A. Woldemariam was fatally shot in the head and back with a .22-caliber pistol in Atlanta, Georgia. Woldemariam was helping the owner of a Sammy's Package Store close up for the night when the shooting occurred.
Nineteen hours later on the same day, Claudine Parker, a 52-year-old liquor store clerk in Montgomery, Alabama, was shot in the chest and killed during a robbery. Her coworker, 24-year-old Kellie Adams, was critically wounded with a shot through the neck but survived. Evidence found at the crime scene eventually tied this killing to the Beltway attacks and allowed authorities to identify Muhammad and Malvo as suspects, although this connection was not made until October 17, almost four weeks later.
On September 23, 2002, at 6:30 p.m., 45-year-old Hong Im Ballenger was shot in the head and killed with a Bushmaster rifle in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Muhammad and Malvo were later linked to the killing.
In addition to the shootings above, Muhammad and Malvo were considered suspects in the May 27, 2002 murder of 37-year-old Billy Gene Dillon in Denton County, Texas.
Attacks in the Washington, D.C. area
Washington, D.C. and Montgomery County, Maryland
At 5:20 p.m. on Wednesday, October 2, 2002, a shot was fired through the window of a Michaels craft store in Aspen Hill, Maryland. The bullet narrowly missed Ann Chapman, a cashier at the store. Since no one was injured, the shot was assumed to be random, and no serious alarms were raised. However, approximately one hour later, at 6:30 p.m., James Martin, a 55-year-old program analyst at NOAA, was shot and killed at 2201 Randolph Road, in the parking lot of a Shoppers Food Warehouse grocery store located in Wheaton.
On the morning of October 3, four people were shot dead within a span of approximately two hours in Aspen Hill and other nearby areas in Montgomery County. Another was killed that evening in the Takoma neighborhood of the District of Columbia:
At 7:41 a.m., James L. Buchanan, a 39-year-old landscaper known as "Sonny", was shot dead at 11411 Rockville Pike, near Rockville, Maryland. Buchanan was shot while mowing the grass at the Fitzgerald Auto Malls.
At 8:12 a.m., a 54-year-old part-time taxi driver, Prem Kumar Walekar, was killed in Aspen Hill in Montgomery County, while pumping gasoline into his taxi at a Mobil station at Aspen Hill Road and Connecticut Avenue.
At 8:37 a.m., Sarah Ramos, a 34-year-old babysitter and housekeeper, was killed at the Leisure World Shopping Center in Norbeck. She had gotten off a bus at Connecticut Avenue and was seated on a bench reading a book at the time of her murder.
At 9:58 a.m., 25-year-old Lori Ann Lewis-Rivera was killed while vacuuming her Plymouth Grand Voyager at the Shell station at the intersection of Connecticut and Knowles Avenues in Kensington, Maryland.
The snipers waited until 9:20 p.m. before shooting Pascal Charlot, a 72-year-old retired carpenter, while he was walking on Georgia Avenue at Kalmia Road, in Washington, D.C. Charlot died less than an hour later.
In each shooting, the victims were killed by a single bullet fired from some distance, and, in each case, the killers struck and vanished. This pattern was not detected until after the October 3 shootings occurred.
Fear quickly spread throughout the region as news of the shootings spread. At a press conference meeting, Chief of Police for Montgomery County, Charles Moose, informed parents that schools were on a code blue alert, keeping children indoors. He said that the schools were safe. Many parents picked up their children early at school, not allowing them to take a school bus or walk home. Montgomery County Public Schools, District of Columbia Public Schools, and private schools went into a lockdown, with no recess or outdoor physical education classes. Other school districts in the area also took precautionary measures, keeping students indoors. During the course of the shootings, law enforcement agencies from neighboring states became embedded in the investigation through telephone tips.
Police had only a few pieces of evidence to work with. One initial report said that right after the Silver Spring attack, someone had reportedly heard a popping noise and had seen a white box truck hurriedly leaving the scene. After the murder in Washington, D.C., witnesses began telling police that they had seen a blue Chevrolet Caprice rather than a white box truck. The police initially believed that all of the murders were carried out with a .223 caliber rifle.
Virginia and other areas
At this point, Malvo and Muhammad started covering a wider area and taking two or three days between shootings:
On October 4, 43-year-old homemaker Caroline Seawell was shot and wounded in the chest at 2:30 p.m. in the parking lot of another Michaels store at Spotsylvania Mall in Spotsylvania, while she was loading purchases into her minivan. By this point, hundreds of journalists had converged to cover the unfolding events. School officials reassured the public that they were taking every measure possible to protect children, by tightening security and canceling all outdoor activities. The weekend passed without incident, but when lessons resumed, so did the shootings.
On October 7, at 8:09 a.m., Iran Brown, a 13-year-old student, was shot in the chest and critically wounded as he arrived at Benjamin Tasker Middle School on 4901 Collington Road in Bowie, Maryland, in Prince George's County Brown survived the attack and ultimately testified at Muhammad's trial. At this crime scene, the authorities discovered a shell casing as well as a Tarot card (the Death card) inscribed with the phrase "Call me God" on the front and, on three separate lines on the back: "For you mr. Police." "Code: 'Call me God'." "Do not release to the press." Despite police efforts to honor the request not to release information about the card to the press, details were made public by WUSA-TV and then by The Washington Post, just one day later.
On October 9 at 8:18 p.m., 53-year-old civil engineer Dean Harold Meyers was shot dead while pumping gasoline at a Sunoco gas station on 7203 Sudley Road in Prince William County, Virginia, near the city of Manassas.
On the morning of October 11 at 9:30 a.m., 53-year-old businessman Kenneth Bridges was shot dead while pumping fuel at an Exxon station off Interstate 95 in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, near Fredericksburg.
On October 14, at 9:15 p.m., 47-year-old Linda Franklin (née Moore), an FBI intelligence analyst who was a resident of Arlington County, Virginia, was shot dead in a covered parking lot at Home Depot in Fairfax County, Virginia, just outside Falls Church at Seven Corners Shopping Center. The police received what seemed to be a very good lead after the October 14 shooting, but it was later determined that the witness was inside the Home Depot at the time and was lying. The witness, Matthew Dowdy, was subsequently convicted of interfering with the investigation.
By this point due to public concerns about safety, gas stations had begun to put tarps up to conceal their customers (see below). Some people crouched over to pump gas, while others waited in their cars. Malvo and Muhammad did not commit any more shootings for five days before striking again.
On October 19 at 8:00 p.m., 37-year-old Jeffrey Hopper was shot in a parking lot near the Ponderosa Steakhouse at State Route 54 in Ashland, Virginia, about 90 miles (140 km) south of Washington, near Interstate 95. His wife Stephanie called out to passersby, who phoned for an ambulance, enabling Hopper to survive his injuries after being transported to VCU Medical Center. Authorities discovered a four-page letter from the shooter in the woods that demanded $10 million and made a threat to children.
On October 21, Richmond-area police arrested two men, one with a white van, outside a gas station. The men turned out to be undocumented immigrants with no connection to the shooter. The pair were subjected to cavity searches and remanded into federal custody (what was then the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which subsequently deported them).
On the next day, October 22, Ride On bus driver Conrad Johnson, 35, was shot at 5:56 a.m. while standing on the steps at the 14100 block of Grand Pre Road in Aspen Hill, Maryland. Johnson died of his injuries. On the same day, Chief Moose released part of the content of one of the shooter's letters, in which he declares, "Your children are not safe, anywhere, at any time."
While no shootings occurred on October 23, the day is significant for two events. First, ballistics experts confirmed Johnson as the 10th fatality in the Beltway shootings. Second, in a yard in Takoma Park, Maryland, police searched with metal detectors for bullets, shell casings, or other evidence that might provide a link to the shooters. A tree stump believed to have been used for target practice was seized.
Public's reaction
With seven shooting victims, including six deaths, in the first 15 hours of the D.C. area spree, the North American media soon devoted extensive coverage to the shootings. By the middle of October 2002, all news television networks provided live coverage of the aftermath of each attack, with the coverage often lasting for hours at a time. The Fox show America's Most Wanted devoted an entire episode to the shooters in hopes of aiding in their capture. Much of the coverage of the case in The New York Times was written by Jayson Blair and subsequently found to be fabricated. The ensuing scandal resulted in the resignations of the newspaper's two top editors, Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd.
During the weeks when the attacks occurred, public fear mounted of the apparently random shootings, especially in relation to such sites as service stations and parking lots of large stores, where many had taken place. People pumping gasoline at gas stations kept moving, hoping to present a smaller target. Also, many people with access tried to fuel their vehicles at the naval base of the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, as they felt it was safer inside the guarded fence. Government buildings such as the White House, U.S. Capitol, and Supreme Court building, and memorial tourist attractions at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., also received heightened security. For the duration of the attacks, United States Senate pages received a driven police escort to and from the United States Capitol every day and were not allowed to leave their residence hall for any reason except work. Drivers of white vans and box trucks were viewed with suspicion from other motorists as initial media reports indicated the suspect might be driving such a vehicle.
After the specific threat against children was delivered, many school groups curtailed field trips and outdoors athletic activities based upon safety concerns. At the height of the public fear, some school districts, such as Henrico County Public Schools and Hanover County Public Schools, after the Ponderosa shooting, closed school for the day. Other schools, such as the MJBHA, canceled all outdoor activities after the shooting at the Connecticut and Aspen Hill intersection. Others changed after-school procedures for parents to pick up their kids to minimize the amount of time children spent in the open. Extra police officers were placed in schools because of this fear. Joel Schumacher's film Phone Booth was deemed potentially upsetting enough that its release was delayed until April 2003.
Investigation
The investigation was publicly headed by the Montgomery County Police Department (MCPD) and its chief, Charles Moose. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), US Marshals Service, FBI, the U.S. Secret Service, the Virginia Department of Transportation, and police departments in other jurisdictions where shootings took place provided assistance in the investigation.
Police responded within minutes to reports of attacks during the three weeks of the sniper attacks, cordoning off nearby roads and highways and inspecting all drivers, thereby grinding traffic to a halt for hours at a time. Police canvassed the area, talking to people, and collected surveillance tapes.
By Friday night, October 4, the five shootings on October 3 and two on October 2 were forensically linked to the same gun.
Eyewitness accounts of the attacks were mostly confused and spotty. Hotlines set up for the investigation were flooded with tips. Early tips from eyewitnesses included reports of a white box truck with dark lettering on the outside and two men inside speeding away from the Leisure World shopping center. Police across the area and the state of Maryland were pulling over white vans and trucks. A gray car was spotted speeding away after the October 4 shooting in Spotsylvania.
The shooter attempted to engage the police in a dialogue, compelling Moose to tell the media cryptic messages intended for the sniper. At several scenes of shootings, Tarot cards were left as calling cards, including one Death card upon which was written "Call me God" on the front and on the back, on three separate lines, the words "For you mr. Police." "Code: 'Call me God'." "Do not release to the press." This information was leaked to the press and misquoted often as "I am God" or similar misquotes of the actual words on the tarot card. At later scenes of crimes the shooter left long, handwritten notes sealed inside plastic bags, including a rambling one that demanded $10,000,000 and threatened the lives of children in the area.
A telephone call from the shooter(s) was traced to a pay telephone at a gasoline station in Henrico County, Virginia. Police missed the suspects by a matter of a few minutes and initially detained occupants of a van at another pay telephone at the same intersection.
On the phone call, the sniper, boasting of his cleverness, mentioned a previous unsolved murder in "Montgomery". This was identified as the September 21 shooting at a liquor store in Montgomery, Alabama. On October 17 authorities said they matched Malvo's fingerprint found at the Benjamin Tasker Middle School site with one lifted from the Montgomery liquor store scene. After confirming the link between these two crime scenes, the FBI was able to link these fingerprints to Malvo due to his fingerprinting during a previous arrest in Washington state. After further research into Malvo's background, the police found he had close ties to John Allen Muhammad.
Lack of progress
Despite an apparent lack of progress publicly, federal authorities were making significant headway in their investigation and they developed leads in Washington state, Alabama, and New Jersey. They learned that Muhammad's ex-wife, who had obtained a protective order against him, lived near the Capital Beltway in Clinton, an unincorporated community in suburban Prince George's County, Maryland, adjacent to Montgomery County. Information was also developed about an automobile purchased in New Jersey by Muhammad.
Police discovered that the New Jersey license plate number issued for Muhammad's 1990 Chevrolet Caprice had been checked by radio patrol cars several times near shooting locations in various jurisdictions in several states, but the car had not been stopped because law enforcement computer networks did not indicate that it was connected to any criminal activity and they were focused exclusively on the "white van".
On October 3, 2002, police in Washington, D.C., stopped the Caprice for running two stop signs, two hours prior to the shooting of Pascal Charlot. Witnesses later reported seeing a Caprice near the scene of his shooting.
On October 8, 2002, Baltimore Police Department investigated a dark blue Chevrolet Caprice parked near the Jones Falls Expressway at 28th Street in Baltimore with a person sleeping inside it. The officers were concerned that the driver's license was from Washington state while the vehicle was registered in New Jersey. Although the vehicle was suspicious enough for them to investigate, and it fit the description of a vehicle associated with the shooting in Washington, D.C. five days earlier, the officers did not question the occupants extensively, nor did they search the vehicle.
On October 23, Montgomery County police chief Charles Moose relayed a cryptic message to the sniper, "You have indicated that you want us to do and say certain things. You have asked us to say, 'We have caught the sniper like a duck in a noose.' We understand that hearing us say this is important to you". Moose asked the media "to carry the message accurately and often". This statement may refer to a Cherokee fable.
Around midnight on October 24, 2002, authorities issued a media alert to the public to be on the lookout for a dark blue 1990 Chevrolet Caprice with New Jersey license plates. For the public, as well as for law enforcement agencies throughout the region, this was a major change from the mysterious "white box truck" earlier sought based upon reported sightings.
Arrest
Just after midnight on October 24, 2002, refrigerator mechanic Whitney Donahue called 911 at a rest stop off Interstate 70 near Myersville, Maryland. Donahue said he saw a dark blue 1990 Chevrolet Caprice with New Jersey license plates, which matched the description that law enforcement had said they were looking for.
Trooper First Class D. Wayne Smith of the Maryland State Police was the first to arrive at the scene and immediately used his light blue unmarked police vehicle to block off the exit by positioning the car sideways between two parked tractor-trailers. As more troopers arrived, they effectively sealed off the rest area at both the entrance and exit ramps without the suspects being aware of the rapidly growing police presence. Later, as truck driver Ron Lantz was attempting to exit the rest area, his tractor-trailer was commandeered by troopers who used the truck, in place of the police car, to complete the roadblock at the exit. With the suspects' escape route sealed off, the SWAT officers moved in to arrest them.
At 3:19 a.m., Muhammad and Malvo were found sleeping in their car and were arrested on federal weapons charges.