Quotes of the Day
First came the boom. Ed Cable heard it driving home Nov. 21 on a lonely stretch of highway about eight miles south of downtown Columbus, Ohio. It was loud enough to make him hit the brakes. Then came the explosion--"right beside me," Cable says. "I immediately got off the highway and got out of the car." Shaken, the retired corrections officer saw the driver's-side window of his minivan was splintered and the roof had a hole "the size of a 50¢ piece." A policeman stopped to help, but Cable, 53, says he could not convince him that the shard on the floorboard had come from a bullet, and the officer went on his way.
Four days later, after Gail Knisley, 62, was killed by a gunshot while riding in a car near that same strip of highway, Cable called the police. They matched the fragment in his van to the bullet that killed her. Authorities in Ohio last week said 14 recent shootings in the area were linked, five of them through ballistic evidence. All were clustered in a sevenmile patch of Interstate 270, a semirural community of cornfields and strip malls. The first, in May, hit a car that had been left without gas on the shoulder. The next, in August, hit a trailer towing a horse. In October and November, the frequency accelerated. Since Oct. 10, three tractor-trailers, seven cars and a nearby school have been struck. Last Monday a woman who lives 150 yds. north of 270 came home to find a bullet in her living room. Police refuse to use the word sniper, but Franklin County feels that menace just the same.
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Ohio authorities are clearly hoping to avoid the leaks and red herrings that marred the investigation of last year's deadly shooting spree in the Washington area. The Franklin County sheriff's office has released no details about the weapon, suspect profiles or even the reasons for believing all the incidents are connected, fearing that doing so would hinder the search. No note has been found near the shootings — at least nothing has been announced — leaving people in the area struggling to figure out motives and methods. Helena Young, 26, has to drive along 270 several times a day for her job as a health-care aide, so she can't avoid the area, as some now do. Instead, she tries to guess the shooter's patterns. "I try to stay beside a semi. If I'm heading east, I stay to the left of the truck. If I'm heading west, I stay on the right," she says.
The shot fired into Hamilton Central Elementary School in Obetz on Veterans Day has left children in the area frightened. Young's daughter, 8, says she doesn't feel safe even inside her day-care center. Hamilton parents are angry that police waited for nearly a week after Knisley's death to tell them about the school incident. A stream of them now drive up to the school and one by one slide into an empty parking spot, leaving the car idling while the driver walks the child to the door. But in a rural area around deer-hunting season, police say, a stray shot into an empty school on a holiday is not necessarily big news. Says Obetz police chief Rick Minerd: "It could have been kids using their father's gun."
Not everyone has bent his or her life around the danger. Bill Briggs, 56, has been driving a Yellow Transportation tractor-trailer for 14 years. On Oct. 4 he was five miles from home, listening to a cassette of blues guitarist Walter Trout, when he heard the boom, then felt glass shatter across his face. He pulled over and found a hole near the roof. When he jerked open the passenger-side door, a bullet fell to the ground. Briggs was back on the road 10 hours later. "The chances of getting shot at twice like that are like me hitting the Powerball and the Ohio lottery on the same day," he says.
The drivers along 270 these days are also playing the odds. Franklin County police closed a four-mile stretch of the highway Saturday night to take measurements of the area, seeing how long it takes to drive from one point to another. The ATF assisted with laser sights. So far, police have made no arrests. An FBI profiler is working 14-hour days trying to pin down a suspect or suspects; police brought in the agent whose psychological sketch helped capture Thomas Lee Dillon, who pleaded guilty a decade ago to five sniper killings in southeastern Ohio. Franklin County's civilians have their own theories about who the shooter is — an angry loner, a reckless teenager, a bored aimless adult. What scares them most is the real possibility that it is one of them.
- Jyoti Thottam