Course description
The Washington Sniper
A sniper is a person who shoots a gun, usually a rifle, and kills someone far away; maybe five hundred metres away, sometimes a kilometre. Most snipers are soldiers killing others in wartime; or special police officers killing terrorists or bank robbers. They are not only good at shooting people at a long distance but they are also good at hiding and planning the kill. Sometimes, not often, the sniper is a criminal. The Mafia use snipers, for example, but the worst kind of sniper is the one who does it for fun – like a deer hunter – laughing at the police who find it hard to catch such a cold-blooded killer.
2nd October was another busy day in Washington. The road system there is huge, covering the capital and the neighbouring states of Virginia and Maryland. There are a lot of shopping malls and petrol stations all across the area. At one of these shopping malls, in the large car park, a young mother and her pre-school aged child heard a loud bang and then saw a man about fifty metres away fall over and lie on the ground. He didn’t move and dark red blood began to appear around him.
The woman phoned the police while she was hiding with her child behind her car. As she was speaking to the police operator, a policeman, who heard the sound of the gun, came to the parking lot and started to help the man on the ground who was shot in the chest and dying fast. The policeman was worried that the sniper would kill him next. He didn’t, but the victim, James Martin, died within minutes.
The next day, the sniper killed five people in five separate attacks all across the capital and its suburbs. The sniper was killing people in the open when they stood still like people at petrol stations filling their cars, outside workers like gardeners or people in car parks while they were putting the shopping into the backs of their cars.
The number of people killed so quickly meant the police had problems dealing with the situation and the alarm caused by a shooting in one place took the police away from other areas. Then, the sniper would go there and shoot more people without the police making any trouble for him.
Who were the victims? They were all kinds: men, women, black, white, Asian, even a thirteen-year-old boy, which made more problems because it was harder for the police to decide who to look for and meant that everyone could be a victim.
However, one thing was clear. The sniper, or snipers, were shooting from a car or truck from a distance of two or three hundred metres. Some people said they saw a white man with a white truck and, at first, this was who the police were looking for.
Then, after another shooting, a man said he really saw the sniper behind a tree and he described a ‘Middle-Eastern’ looking man. But when the police checked videos of the area, they saw that the man who said he saw the shooting didn’t come out of the store until three minutes later. He lied to the police and made things harder. He just wanted to be on TV.
The shootings went on for a couple of weeks until ten people were dead and three seriously injured. By now, the police were sure they were looking for two people: one shooter and one driver. Meanwhile, the whole area was living in fear. Sports events were cancelled and some people would not take their children to school. Even at school, the children could not play outside. People who normally walked, ran down the street and at petrol stations they put up special curtains so that drivers could fill their cars with petrol where nobody could see them.
After one shooting, a special police team, ready to move after sixty seconds, closed the roads around the place where the crime took place so quickly that they could stop the sniper’s car. Inside were two black men, John Muhammad, who was in the army for a time, and his stepson, a sixteen-year-old Jamaican immigrant called Lee Boyd Malvo. They found the gun with them and there was also a little hole in the back part of the car for the shooter, sometimes John, sometimes Lee, to see and shoot out of, without anyone seeing them.
The police soon discovered that the two had killed some people earlier in Mississippi and Alabama; and, that they took it seriously. The older man, John Muhammad, was teaching his girlfriend’s son, Lee, how to be a good killer – a hunter. When the police questioned him, the teenager was proud and excited about what he did, remembering many of the killings in detail.
But why did John Muhammad come to Washington to do his killing? His wife was already in the area to get away from him. They separated and she kept the children. John wanted them and he said he would kill her so she went to the other side of America, far away from John. He came there to shoot her but first he shot all the other people just to confuse the police. If he shot only his wife the police would come for him. If he shot lots of people of all sexes and races, when he shot his wife the police would think she was just another unlucky victim of a crazy sniper, and never think it might be her ex-husband and the father of her children. Surely, nobody could coldly kill ten or more people at random just to cover the murder of his wife.
But that is what John Muhammad did and he also trained a teenager to be his assistant killer. Lee Boyd Malvo went to prison for life and John Muhammad was given a death sentence.
In 2009, he was injected and died.
