Beltway sniper fights execution as region remembers terror
By: Bill Myers
Examiner Staff Writer
November 8, 2009
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| (Getty Images) |
Convicted Beltway sniper John Allen Muhammad is filing last-minute appeals, trying to avoid a Tuesday appointment in Virginia's death chamber.
The legal scramble is reviving memories for countless in the D.C. region who lived through the three weeks in October 2002 when Muhammad and his ward, Lee Boyd Malvo, went on a rampage that terrorized the capital region.
Picking out strangers at random, they opened fire from a hole cut in an old car, leaving notes behind to taunt police and to celebrate the carnage they inflicted. By the time the pair was finished, 10 were dead, three were wounded and many more who had already lived through the Pentagon attack on 9/11 and an anthrax scare were traumatized.
"In many ways it was more tramautic than 9/11. Nine-eleven was something on television," said Maryland Attorney General Doug Gansler, who at the time was Montgomery County's state's attorney and lead the law enforcement task force chasing Muhammad and Malvo. "Here, the victim was potentially anybody."
After seven years, Muhammad's number has come up in Virginia's lethal injection lottery. He is scheduled to be executed Tuesday but his lawyer has filed papers claiming he is mentally ill and ought to be spared. It now rests with Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, or the U.S. Supreme Court, to intervene. Kaine said last month he didn't anticipate a commutation.
The terror started on Sept. 5, 2002, with what seemed like a brutal, but routine robbery in Clinto. Restaurateur Paul LaRuffa climbed into his car after a long day. Malvo walked up and shot him five times.
"How I wasn't killed, it was just amazing," LaRuffa recalled in an interview with The Examiner. "I was shot in the chest, stomach, diaphragm, spine -- none of them did me in."
The pair made off with LaRuffa's laptop and $3,500 in cash -- the cash they would use to finance the later carnage. A few weeks later, they robbed a liquor store in Alabama in Montgomery County, killing a clerk and wounding another.
On Oct. 2, 2002, Muhammad and Malvo pulled their 1990 Chevy Caprice into the parking lot of a Shoppers Food Warehouse in Glenmont. Peeking through a special hole cut in the back of the Caprice, they set their sights on program analyst James Martin and shot him dead.
The next morning, they shot and killed five others. For the next three weeks, Muhammad and Malvo roamed the area, striking people at random.
Law enforcement huddled, now knowing they had a maniac on their hands. For ordinary people in the D.C. area, ordinary life became a struggle against the fever of fear.
"They told people to crouch when they were pumping gas and told us to stay out of the suburbs," said Ted Blumenthal, then a George Washington University student who now lives in Manhattan.
Melissa Dennis, had just moved to the area for law school. She recalled seeing a co-worker's little girl, "bobbing and weaving, going from her left foot to her right foot.
"When we asked her why she was doing that, she said, 'So the sniper doesn't get me,'" Dennis said. "It was like a game."
It was like a game to Muhammad and Malvo. On Oct. 7, they shot Iran Brown, 13, as he tried to get into his school in Bowie. The snipers left a tarot card -- the Death card -- at the scene. "Call me God," it read.
"It took it to a new level of evil," Gansler said.
Eventually, it was Muhamad's psychopathic arrogance that did him in.
"They called and said, 'Have you looked into this shooting in Alabama?' " Gansler said. "We checked the fingerprints and then within hours we had an all-points bulletin."
The pair were arrested, sleeping in a rest stop in their Chevy.
However the justice system decides Muhammad's fate, Gansler, at least, is gratified that the system moved at all.
"The reality is, very few people thought they were going to come in alive," he said. "People this evil -- that would look through a scope and just shoot mothers, kids, whomever -- everyone assumed that they would go out in a blaze of glory."
— Staff Writer Freeman Klopott contributed to this report.
