(2 of 5)
Meanwhile, regular folks have awkwardly adapted to the presence of a sniper intheir community. After a 13-year-old boy was shot in the stomach walking into school on Oct. 7, events were summarily canceled: field trips, all outdoor school sporting events, four homecoming celebrations, even SAT exams. Park rangers have been spotted monitoring soccer fields--the de facto town squares for Montgomery County's affluent families. From the backseat of a Fairfax, Va., woman's car, a 5-year-old who has been newly forbidden from riding his bike asks, "Mommy, will it hurt if I get shot?" At the scene of the first, victimless shooting, employees now walk zigzag across the parking lot. They still take smoking breaks, but now they stand pressed up against cement columns, trying to act nonchalant.
The day the shootings began, Oct. 2, it took several hours for the bewildered Michaels employees to realize they might be part of something bigger. That's when they heard that a middle-aged man had been gunned down walking through a Shoppers Food Warehouse parking lot, a little more than 2 miles away. Not only did the killer brazenly fire in the waning daylight hours of rush-hour congestion, he shot James Martin right across the street from a police station.
Just 5 miles away, James (Sonny) Buchanan was mowing a patch of grass near the clogged Rockville Pike artery the next morning when a bullet ripped open his chest. Five miles northeast and half an hour later, Premkumar Walekar crumpled to the ground, murdered while putting $5 worth of gas into his cab. His daughter, watching the live bulletin on TV, recognized the American flags in the back window of his cab and rushed with her mother to the scene, where they identified him. Two miles away, unaware of the rippling circle of violence, Sarah Ramos was killed while sitting on a park bench, waiting for a ride. A witness reported seeing a white van with two occupants screech out of the area. Police began frantically stopping white vans, but a little more than an hour later, Lori Lewis Rivera was struck down while vacuuming her minivan outside a Shell station. At 9:20 p.m., about a 5-mi. drive from the last shooting, Pascal Charlot, 72, was cut down with a shot below the neck as he crossed the street.
The victims were carrying out the banal tasks of everyday life, their last unremarkable moments juxtaposed with the killer's lightning brutality. Officials speculated thatthis could be a terrorist attack but searched in vain for any overt political message. The victims, if they were lined up side by side, would roughly resemble a random sampling of the Washington metropolitan area. They were white, black, Hispanic, Indian, male, female. There was a government analyst, a landscaper, a housekeeper, a nanny.