Taking less than five hours, a Maryland jury has found John Allen Muhammed guilty of six murders in connection with the 2002 D.C. area sniper shootings.
A jury deliberated less than five hours yesterday before finding John Allen Muhammad guilty in each of the six sniper slayings in Montgomery County, marking the second time he has been held responsible in the 2002 rampage that terrorized the Washington area.
The verdict, returned in the county where the snipers killed most of their victims, ended a four-week trial that brimmed with new claims about the mechanics of the slayings and the motives behind them. The source of those claims was Muhammad’s younger accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, who agreed to plead guilty and testify for the first time against the man he once regarded as a father.
For those of us who lived through it, October 2002 was a surreal time in the Washington DC area. Little more than a year had passed since the September 11th attacks and the still-unsolved anthrax attacks.? Beginning in early October and continuing on a chillingly unpredictable basis for nearly four weeks, people were shot at random, at random times, and random locations throughout the Washington, D.C. area and reaching as far South as suburban Richmond.
Different rumors circulated every day, as did speculation. Was this an al Qaeda hit team ? A lone nut ? For more time than I can remember law enforcement and the media seemed to be on a chase for what turned out to be a non-existent white box truck. In the end, it turned out to be one hate-filled man and the boy he’d managed to corrupt. Lee Malvo, the boy, is guilty and will spend the rest of his life in a Virginia. Justice of a more premanent kind cannot come soon enough for John Muhammed.
