Tuesday, October 22, 2002. We now knew their names. After three weeks, ten killings, and four injuries, more than a dozen of us were sitting in our makeshift command center looking at the faces of the two people who had done so much killing.
In front of me on the computer screen was a photo of Lee Malvo. Christ, he was just a kid—seventeen years old. A Jamaican immigrant kid. Could this really be a mastermind of one of the worst shooting rampages this country had ever seen? Could this kid really have pulled the trigger on so many people?
He and his mentor, John Allen Muhammad, had terrorized the Beltway area of Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia in one of the most bizarre crime sprees ever—targeting random people, shooting to kill, and holding the tristate area hostage for twenty days now. For eighteen of those days, we at the Sniper Murder Task Force (SNIPMUR) had pored over thousands of tips, phone calls, and minimal evidence trying to track down one thing, anything, that would help us identify the perpetrators. Now we had names.
For three weeks, federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies had been working together to stop the rampage. We were exhausted; we had been at it around the clock, taking breaks only when ordered to, and chasing dead ends for way too long. We had searched in vain for a white van, which witnesses claimed to have seen at several of the crime scenes. And time wasn’t on our side—the victim totals were rising, and every day that these killers stayed on the streets meant more victims.
Not that there were many people still on the streets. Throughout the area, residents were in hiding. They hid behind their cars while pumping gas. Restaurants’ shades were drawn, and their parking lots were nearly empty. Grocery stores, shops, and otherwise busy streets looked abandoned. Schools were in lockdown during school hours, and heavily armed troopers, officers, and SWAT teams patrolled the perimeters. Playgrounds were empty, activities were canceled. Life had come to a standstill as residents held their collective breath.
But now we had names. With those names, the details were falling into place. No more white van; the vehicle was now identified as a blue Chevrolet Caprice. Inside the joint operations center for SNIPMUR, the excitement was palpable.
As Tuesday turned into Wednesday, I was ordered to go home and get some sleep. I left the joint operations center—the JOC, as we called it—and headed home after 1 a.m. Then back to the JOC by 5:30 a.m. Once again, I spent most of the day with the team reviewing what we knew and strategizing our next moves. Little did we know that our luck was about to change. At 10:30 that night, I was sent home to rest. Then my police radio crackled and came alive. It was Sergeant Bob Hundertmark.
“Car 662, we just received a cell phone call from a citizen in the westbound rest area on I-70. The caller advised that there is a Caprice in the rest area parking lot, and then repeated the tag that we had put out over the air.”
They say that fighter pilots train for years honing a combat skill set that they may never get a chance to use—and if they do, it may all be over in less than a minute. I was about to put to the test every skill I had learned in my twenty-two-year career as a law enforcement officer: courage, tenacity, control, command. Everything I did, everything my team was about to do, had to be executed with precision. Failure meant troopers could die and more residents would be at risk.
We couldn’t fail. We had no choice.