Monday, October 7. Once again I was up early and on my way to Montgomery County and the academy. On this day that ought to be just another school day, my daughter’s safety plagued my thoughts. I knew that, statistically, the odds of my Samantha being the kid on the wrong end of the rifle sights were very long, but still I couldn’t get the fear out of my head. I suspected that every parent who had turned on a TV or radio over the past several days must be thinking and fearing the same thing.
But as a parent who had spent a career in law enforcement, I knew I had to push these thoughts to the back of my mind. More than that, I had to use them as motivation, just like back in my high school baseball days when a kid from another team told me before our game that he was going to hit two home runs off me. It pissed me off, so on my first pitch to him I drilled him in the back with my best fastball. And I struck him out three times during the rest of the game. Channel the anger, I thought. Focus. Figure out who these bastards are and track their sorry asses down.
I was at the academy by 6 a.m. Detective Sergeant Cornwell and two of the computer geeks were bleary-eyed.
“You look like hell,” I said.
Cornwell looked at me and smiled. “You don’t look all that much better, and you haven’t worked through the night. But good news—Case Explorer is online. We’ve already started entering data into the system, and a good bit of the Rapid Start data is already in there.”
“Seriously?”
“In a few hours, it should all be integrated. No more double data entry. We’ll just do a data dump from Rapid Start to Case Explorer every couple of hours.”
“That’s fantastic,” I said. “I would kiss you, you ugly bastard, but I’m already married.”
I looked at the analysts. They had spent the night entering all the handwritten tip sheets into Case Explorer. We already had one hell of a team.
Now to use the data to create leads.
The first order of business was to make some rules so as to prioritize the value of the information we were getting. We decided on a simple color code system. Since we had nothing in the form of solid information beyond the white box truck or white van, we couldn’t afford to ignore anything. Any bit of information might be the missing puzzle piece that would break the case. So we assigned colors to each lead. A green lead would be a low-priority lead. It would be a tip or a bit of information that currently didn’t match any other information that was known, like tips from people who thought their ex-husbands or their neighbors or bosses were responsible. Usually, their rationale was that they thought the person was capable of committing such a crime. Still, those tips and leads would be placed in a green jacket and set aside for the time being.
The next category was a yellow lead. This lead possibly came from two or more sources, or there could be something else that might raise a few eyebrows. Examples: tips turned in from more than one source about the same person, or the tip that came in about the ex-husband wife’s boyfriend who has talked about killing people or was a member of a motorcycle gang. These would be placed in a yellow jacket and would be set aside and worked up when the time permitted.
Red leads were the highest-priority leads. These were leads that came in based on tips, information, and Case Explorer database matches. If the registered owner of a white van or white box truck was also a registered owner or was known to be in possession of a .223-caliber rifle, they would be considered a higher priority. The more data sets that matched, the higher the priority assigned to the lead. A registered owner of a white van with a felony record who was a known gang member, was identified as a suspect in VICAP, or was a match to any of the data would be a red lead.
For red leads, our group would do as complete a background check as we could from the available data. This would include driving record, criminal record, known vehicle, known registered weapons, last known address, place of last employment, and any other available information. All of it would be placed in a red folder. Red folders would be turned over to an investigative team. The field investigators would be assigned these leads and would take the information into the field with them. Depending on the lead itself, they would act in what they believed was in the best interest of furthering the lead: either eliminate the person or persons as suspects, or develop the lead further. Their follow-up could include interviews of neighbors, employers, even the person named. Or if the lead was deemed serious or promising enough, the person might be placed under surveillance.
By the time our full complement of analysts had arrived, we were beginning to crank out leads, with the higher priority leads getting the full work-up. With a group of eight to ten analysts and three or four plainclothes troopers, the Intelligence Division was a hub of activity. Everyone was fully engaged in the team effort. The room was awash in chatter. TVs were on, and the usual talking heads were on various news networks giving opinions on the snipers, the challenges to finding them, and what it all meant. Team members were bantering, sharing information, and singling out tips for follow up.
Since the weekend, I had been in contact with my friend and colleague Lieutenant Tom Chase, criminal investigation commander for Frederick City. Tom and I had worked on many of the same cases over the years and had become close friends. This particular morning, I was briefing him on the ongoing investigation. Briefing reports had been going out to all the allied agencies on a daily basis, but by the time it was received by the agencies, the information was usually at least twenty-four hours old. There was more updated news coming from the network and cable news channels.
I knew Tom would pass that information on not just to his own agency, but also to the Frederick County sheriff’s department and the two smaller police departments in the county. We talked about the theory that this was somehow connected to Michaels craft stores, and Tom said the Frederick City police and the sheriff’s department were trying to keep a close watch on those parking lots.
Then I brought up my thinking on where the snipers were laying their heads. Tom and I agreed: they would not sleep where they killed. Since all the killings had occurred in Montgomery County and were now moving south into Northern Virginia, I had a hunch they were located north, which would make Frederick a logical location. Or maybe they were somewhere northeast, perhaps Baltimore. Tom concurred.
My rationale for calling and briefing Tom was twofold. I wanted to give him this information on a professional basis, but I also hoped that sharing info with him might help protect my wife and kids. Jean worked in Frederick, and my daughter went to school there. It was where we lived. It might be just a matter of time before the snipers targeted a kid, and I didn’t want it to be mine.
Turns out it wasn’t. Sometime before 8:30 that morning, my cell phone rang. It was Captain McAndrew with the news we had feared: At 8:08 a.m., there was a shooting at Benjamin Tasker Middle School, located in Bowie, Prince George’s County. Iran Brown, a thirteen-year-old student, was shot as he got out of his mother’s car in front of the school.
I slammed my fist on the desk. I wanted to cry—we knew this would happen. I could feel the hot wave of anger overtaking me. “Goddamn it!” I shouted, to the room in general. “Those fuckers heard the stupid fucking comment the governor made and took him up on it! This bullshit has got to be stopped!”
No sooner had I hung up with the captain and told the group what had happened than it appeared on our TV screen, with live coverage from the scene. We watched in silence. All of us figured that the snipers had been listening to everything the media said, and were no doubt getting off on it. Meanwhile, we were doing our best, thinking they would attack where they had already struck. Instead, they moved one county east and south, away from where our troopers were waiting for them. They were playing us.
My emotions were jumbled—I was heartbroken that this had happened to that family, but I was thankful that it wasn’t my family. Such thoughts were new to me—in all my years of law enforcement, I had been able to put personal concerns aside. But this case was under my skin. I knew that many of us in that room were feeling the same thing, but I had to tamp down my feelings. None of the team needed to see that the person in charge was letting the chaos get to him. Looking around the room, I could see anger on every face. No doubt part of it was that we didn’t have the information and the data we needed. Our upset cemented our resolve, but resolve alone wasn’t going to solve this case.
We alerted the Prince George’s County school district and police department. But beyond keeping kids inside and increasing the frequency of regular patrols and the presence of school resource police officers, there was nothing more we could do. We simply couldn’t be everywhere. The small piece of good news: Iran was alive and would ultimately recover from his wounds.
As it turned out, law enforcement had learned about this shooting the same way the rest of the country had: via television. It was an ongoing problem during the course of the investigation. Part of the reason for this lack of information flow was the simple dynamics and massive size of this investigation. Every day, more police agencies were involved, along with more local police officers and federal agents that had been shipped in from all over the country. The investigation had quickly become unwieldy. It was impossible to get vital information in a timely manner to the people who needed it. As resources poured in, this problem would grow (it was never completely solved). There is a need to share, but there was also an element of need to know. It’s a decision that must be made on every case. For a localized case, it’s easy: those people were the lead investigator, the prosecutor, and investigative team leaders and supervisors. In a case like this it was much harder to manage.
So was disseminating information that wasn’t considered primary. Again, with this shooting, witnesses at the scene and in the area of the school all reported seeing a white van cruising the area and stopping near the school. This sighting was again repeated by the media.
If there was anything positive about this, it was fact that when it comes to any criminal investigation, even negatives can be a positive. The teams that were out there conducting surveillance on suspects could now deem some of them cleared of suspicion. If they were under surveillance when Iran was shot, clearly they couldn’t be responsible. So we could stop expending our resources following them around.
If there hadn’t been a media frenzy and public panic before Iran was shot, there sure were now. It’s bad enough when adults are shot; it’s another level of fear and helplessness when the victim is a child. The public outcry was suddenly into the stratosphere. That meant the pressure on all law enforcement was excruciating. Everyone involved with this investigation felt it.