By the time I got to Rockville Barrack, I had worked up a head of steam. I was angry that somebody was out there bushwhacking citizens with no obvious reason or motive. But that anger had to wait. There were troopers heading here from all over the state, and they needed to be brought up to speed. As they arrived, I briefed them with what little information we had. The case was still very much in the initial phase, and the Maryland State Police had yet to be given any specific assignments.
Captain McAndrew and senior leadership were tasked with the responsibility of contacting the Montgomery County police chief, Charles Moose, and his investigative team to determine what, specifically, the state police were being requested to do. One thing I knew for sure: the killers weren’t going to show up at the Rockville Barrack to turn themselves in. So it did absolutely no good to have thirty or forty extra troopers and their rollers sitting in the barrack parking lot.
As the troopers trickled into the barrack, I briefed them in small groups before sending them back out on the road. “Here’s what we know,” I told them. “The shooters are using some type of high-speed bullet, most likely from a long gun or an assault-type weapon. Your vests likely won’t stop this bullet.”
A few troopers exchanged glances, but they all stood fast.
“If this is a terrorist attack, law enforcement are likely targets. It would be a way for them to further drive panic in the community and among our ranks.”
The room was silent, but the troopers were resolute. They knew the risks and understood what they were being asked to do. They understood that they were outgunned and had to play by rules, while the shooter could kill at will. But no one expressed any reservations. Every one of them willingly headed out.
I instructed them to concentrate mainly on the interstate highways: I-270 and the Beltway, as well as State Route 355. All the murders had taken place along the 355 corridor. I wanted our troopers to be everywhere, visible, and making their presence known by stopping every white van, white box truck, or any other vehicle they deemed suspicious or out of place. My hope was that the heavy police patrol would get these killers to lie low for a while, giving us time to sort things out and come up with a plan.
I told the troopers to call out every traffic stop to the barrack communications officer. “Make sure you know exactly where you are,” I said, “and for god’s sake, back each other up out there.”
As the deadly morning of October 3 turned to afternoon, the shootings ceased. Maybe our strategy was working. Using this gift of time, we contacted the FBI and the ATF—the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives—to get them involved. Since the ATF had a lab in the area, they agreed to make their ballistic experts available, and the sniper case was made a lab priority. It was during that unexpectedly quiet afternoon that one of the bullets recovered from the numerous crime scenes was identified. It was a high-velocity .223-caliber round. A ballistics match was going to take a little time, but it wasn’t going to be a stretch to assume that all the bullets recovered to this point in the investigation likely came from the same rifle.
Once all the troopers had been briefed, I was sent over to Montgomery County police headquarters to assist in answering telephone calls and working tips that had already started to flood the police station. As I pulled up to Montgomery County HQ, I saw several news trucks parked outside. Obviously the case was no longer a secret. But the news crews could help spread the word. The public needed to know that we were actively stopping every white van and truck on the road.
I was escorted into the building and directed upstairs to a smallish second-floor room, a combination conference room and bullpen area for the county’s Criminal Investigation Unit. At least twenty cops were crammed into this space that had been designed for six or seven investigators. Phones were ringing, police radios were on high volume, everyone was talking at once. Cops on phones took notes, answered questions, processed information from cops in the field, and fielded inquiries from other police agencies in the tristate area.
I pulled up a folding chair and started answering calls. I had no clue what questions I needed to ask. None of us did. All we knew was what we had heard on the police radio and in news reports on commercial radio and TV. I was working at a folding table—the kind you would see in a church community room—along with five or six other cops. Several telephones had been pulled from somewhere and plugged into a multiple phone jack. The cord stretched over the table, under a desk, and across the floor. A fistful of tip sheets had been shoved in front of me, and I got to work.
My first call was from a woman in North Carolina who was convinced that her ex-husband was the shooter. She said her ex was a violent man with a long, violent criminal record. He was a white supremacist and owned multiple high-powered rifles and firearms, even though it was a federal offense for a convicted felon to be in possession of any guns. She was sure it was her ex because she hadn’t seen him for several days. As she put it, he had always wanted to go to Washington and kill all the “niggers that had led the country down the toilet.” He owned a white van, she said. I took down all the investigative information, including his date of birth, address, and physical description.
After I hung up, I ran a quick check on the guy in the numerous state and national databases. Just as the caller had said, her ex had a long, violent criminal history. He also owned a white van and was a known member of a white supremacist group. “This asshole,” I said to nobody in particular, “is a real shithead and needs to be at the top of the list for no other reason than who he is.” I looked around to find someone to give the information to, but every cop in the room was taking calls and getting info very much like what I had just gotten. Reluctantly, I placed my notes in a box and moved on to the next call.
Several hours later, I had to take a break. As I walked down the hall looking for a restroom and a soda machine, a man approached me. “Chief Moose,” he said. We shook hands, and he thanked me for helping and said he wanted to make sure I had taken the time to eat. Chief Moose looked like a man who was used to an orderly world. Now that it was turned upside down, I suspect he was trying to process what had happened and what needed to be done. As I shook his hand, it was as though I could hear what he was thinking—maybe because we were all thinking it.
Things were out of control, and everybody was looking to him to provide leadership and come up with a plan. The burden of command can be extremely heavy, and there was no training in the world that he—or any of us, for that matter—could have obtained during a career that would have prepared him for a situation like this. I immediately liked him. If he took the time to make sure a borrowed trooper had eaten, he cared about his cops.
As the afternoon shadows grew long, we were beginning to realize that this investigation wasn’t going to end quickly. In one day, we had saturated the area with law enforcement, but now we had to be prepared to keep that up. Maryland State Police first sergeants around the state were ordered to look at their staffing, cut their commands down to bare minimums, and send troopers to Montgomery County to work round the clock. Leave and vacations were canceled. Troopers were placed on twelve-hour shifts in an effort to keep as many on the road as possible. Because of the multiple killings, troopers were on edge and being very deliberate during their traffic stops. Some motorists had been stopped several times—in the morning as they traveled to work and then again in late afternoon or early evening on their way home from work. For the most part, the general public was very cooperative. Everyone understood that the police were looking for heavily armed killers. As a result, the public seemed to accept the curt, direct orders they were given by the officers and troopers who had stopped them.
By the end of that day, the ATF identified the bullets as likely coming from the same rifle, suspected to be a Bushmaster .223-caliber assault weapon. It was known to be very accurate and, in the hands of a skilled shooter, extremely deadly. That gave us another clue: the shooter did possess a skill set. It’s easy to take a rifle like that to a range and hit a nonmoving paper target from a great distance. But it’s much harder to look down the barrel of the rifle and get a person in your sights, and then be steady enough to squeeze the trigger.
But that’s all we knew. We still didn’t know if we were dealing with a local psychopath on a onetime rampage or an organized terrorist cell that was bent on terrorizing the area. Considering what had happened over the past year, we were thinking it was the latter.
It wasn’t until later that night that I heard what the public was hearing. Around 7 p.m., I checked in with my wife. It was all over the news, she said. News channels were breaking into regular programming about every fifteen minutes with some piece of information. I told her what I knew and what I had been doing. “They may send us home around eight to get some rest,” I said. “But I’ll have to be back at it early tomorrow.”
When 8 p.m. came, I headed north on I-270 into Frederick County and home. Despite being exhausted, I couldn’t stop going over things. Even though I wasn’t yet deeply involved in the investigation, and the state police’s role thus far was nothing more than to flood the area with law enforcement, my mind was turning over each scenario, looking for connections, for some way to make sense out of all this. Was this going to continue? Were there going to be more killings? Was there some sort of rational explanation for these irrational acts? As I pulled into my driveway, I hadn’t come up with a thing.
I was tired. It has always been difficult for me to turn it off when I got home. Still, I did my best not to bring the job home. Jean gets that, doesn’t bring up the job unless I opened up to her first. That night, things happened in blurry snippets. My daughter was telling me about what had happened at cheerleading practice, and I tried to concentrate, to hear what she was telling me. Then Jean told me about her day, her voice light and soothing. It was her way of bringing me home mentally. The TV was on and we were all half watching whatever show was on.
Then suddenly the show was interrupted by breaking news from Washington, D.C. There had been another murder. Pascal Charlot was walking down the street on Georgia Avenue near Kalmia Road about 9:30 p.m., just beyond the Maryland state line in D.C., when he was struck by a high-speed bullet. Charlot was killed instantly. He had no connection to any of the other victims.
According to the news report, Metropolitan Police responded to the scene, arriving within minutes. Witnesses claimed the shot came from across the street, where there was a chest-high cinder-block wall hidden by pine trees and bushes. Another witness reported seeing a blue four-door Chevy Caprice driving casually away from the scene with its lights off.