RICHMOND, Va. — The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to block today’s scheduled execution of sniper mastermind John Allen Muhammad.
The court did not comment Monday on why it refused to consider his appeal.
Muhammad is scheduled to die by injection at a Virginia prison for the slaying of Dean Harold Meyers at a gas station during a three-week spree in 2002 across Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C.
Muhammad and his teenage accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, were also suspected of fatal shootings in other states, including Louisiana, Alabama and Arizona. Malvo is serving a life sentence.
Muhammad still has a clemency petition before Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine.
Muhammad’s attorney, Jonathan Sheldon, said “Virginia will execute a severely mentally ill man who also suffered from Gulf War Syndrome the day before Veterans Day.”
As the execution nears, echoes of the weeks of terror during the spree are reverberating throughout the region.
“I don’t think anybody felt safe,” said Bernice Easter, of Wheaton, Md., now 82. “I was afraid to go out in my yard.”
Paula Jean Hallberg, 54, of Silver Spring, Md., felt a shiver every time she walked across the expanse of her YMCA’s wide open parking lot.
“I would move about a lot,” she said.
Ginger Pinchot, 67, a learning specialist from Kemp Mill, Md., would start the gas pump and then sit inside her car.
“It was just that random feeling,” she said. “It feels like a roulette wheel when you don’t know where it’s going to hit next.”
Steve Murchake, 59, a tax accountant from Silver Spring, remembered helicopters roaring overhead seemingly every morning as he started his commute to Herndon, Va., and the checkpoints that snarled Beltway traffic after nearly every shooting.
Police focused on white utility vans and white box trucks, which witnesses had spotted – coincidentally, it turned out – near some of the shootings.
House painter Jose Romero, 39, of Silver Spring, parked his white van and took his car to work to avoid being stopped by police. Like everyone else, he imagined crosshairs trained on him whenever he stopped for gas.
“Keep moving around, don’t be a target – that’s what I heard on the news,” Romero said.
Christian Torrenegra said he and his friends at Newport Mill Middle School in Kensington, Md., quit walking to a nearby mall after school and took the bus straight home instead.
Safe on board, they made a game of pretending to spot the sniper.
“It was like, ‘Oh, I see the van!’ ” said Torrenegra, now 19 and a student at Montgomery College.
“We didn’t want to take it seriously because we were so young, but at the same time we were scared.”
At Brookside Gardens, a botanical park in Wheaton, a granite monument to the region’s 10 slain sniper victims invites quiet reflection on a time that was anything but tranquil. Spokeswoman Leslie McDermott said she hopes Muhammad’s execution will bring calm at last.
“I think everybody was victimized,” McDermott said. “I think everybody lost a sense of freedom and innocence during that time. They were scared.”
