All my years of experience, including investigating homicides, was about to be sorely tested by this apparent sniper case. For one thing, it’s a rule of thumb in homicides that the most critical time to obtain evidence is the first twenty-four hours after a murder is discovered. Yet the sniper shootings were occurring so rapidly that the well-established rules of thumb had to be thrown out the window. Investigators had to make plans on the fly.
But no matter how well a police department trains and plans in advance, initial confusion at the crime scene is part of the job, and that confusion has to be managed. The best way to manage it is for every one of us to stay in our own lane, so to speak, to concentrate on doing our job regardless of what’s happening around us. We have to have faith that the uniformed police who are usually the first responders have been trained to secure the crime scene. They will quickly assess the situation and determine the total scene scope. Then, if possible, they will double or triple the size of the scene and secure it with crime scene tape, or whatever means are available. Access to the scene must be strictly limited so that it’s not contaminated by citizens, or even other police officers, who just want a look for themselves. The first responding units will start a crime scene log to indicate who entered the scene, the date and time in and out, and the role or reason for everyone entering. The log should also include any other appropriate factors, such as weather conditions, and must be maintained by the first responding officer until he or she is relieved by proper authority.
There are numerous factors that can complicate a crime scene, such as where it’s located. Is it in a public area? Is it outside or inside? If it’s outside, the weather can have an enormous influence on the crime scene investigation and what evidence is collected and how quickly.
From the moment the murder is discovered and reported, the initial lead investigator and the investigative team must come up to speed as quickly as possible. Potential witnesses need to be quickly identified and kept separated until they are interviewed. Investigators also need to quickly debrief the uniformed officers and the medical first responders to get a handle on who they are, what they saw when they arrived, what witnesses or victims may have told them, as well as any other critical information, including facts that no one may recognize as important until later. Formal statements must be taken to confirm what the witnesses saw, heard, or claimed they saw. It’s important to get these statements as quickly and as accurately as possible, while the events are fresh in the witnesses’ minds.
Moreover, different witnesses may require a different investigative skill set during the interview, based on how traumatized they may be and any language barrier that might exist. Investigators must quickly determine who the victim is, what he or she was doing in the location where the crime occurred, how the victim was killed, and if there are any obvious reasons, such as a robbery that may have gone bad, that could point to a motive. All these steps must be taken before the real in-depth investigation can start.
This requires a dedicated team all working together—from the uniformed patrol officer who caught the initial call, to the crime scene or lab people who collect the evidence, to the investigators charged with investigating the crime and tracking down the killer. As the complexity of the case increases, so does the number of investigators and other stakeholders who become involved. This takes time, coordination, and resources.
So when the rapid succession of shootings and killings began in October 2002, the Montgomery County police quickly became overwhelmed. They simply didn’t have enough resources to cover all the crime scenes, let alone to overcome the initial confusion or to make sense out of what was happening to their community. The Montgomery County Police Department is a very experienced, very professional, and highly motivated department, but no one agency alone could have gotten on top of so many shootings occurring so quickly. Other police departments around the country may have claimed they could have handled it, but having lived and seen firsthand how complex this case was, I know better.
The October 2 shooting murder of James Martin in the parking lot of a Shoppers Food Warehouse in Wheaton was still in its initial phase of investigation when the murders and chaos of October 3 began. At 7:41 a.m. James Buchanan was cutting grass along the street around a large car dealership in Rockville. When the parking lot attendant found him, he was lying on the car lot with the mower tilted over a few feet away. He had died for no apparent reason. As police and emergency medical responders arrived and transported Buchanan to the hospital, passersby debated whether he had slipped and fallen under the running mower, or whether the motor had exploded. The confusion continued as medical personnel at Suburban Hospital initially diagnosed his death as an industrial accident.
Then, at 8:12 a.m., at a Mobil Gas Station in Aspen Hill, Montgomery County, a few minutes from where Buchanan had fallen, Premkumar Walekar was pumping gas into his taxi cab when he was shot. Once again, the death had no apparent motive. There was no robbery or attempted robbery, no reasonable explanation as to why he was shot. He just seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
A bystander flagged down a Montgomery County patrol officer, so police responded to Walekar’s homicide first, having not yet been dispatched to the auto dealership where Buchanan was killed. Three murders had been committed in Montgomery County in a little more than a seventeen-hour time frame. But nothing connected any of these instances. Not yet. And there was about to be a fourth.
At 8:37 a.m. Sarah Ramos was sitting on a park bench in front of a Crisp and Juicy Chicken restaurant in Silver Spring, waiting for a bus, when she was struck in the head by a bullet. This was in a busy strip mall in a densely populated area during the busiest time of day.
It was just a few blocks from where Walekar had been killed just twenty-five minutes earlier.
A passing motorist called the Montgomery County Police Department to report a suicide. Once uniformed officers arrived on the scene, however, suicide was quickly ruled out. At that moment the officers realized that their county was under attack, yet they had no idea who was causing the carnage or how to stop it. The quick determination of facts showed no connection among any of the victims. This left the possibility of some sort of gang-related motivation, since there were several violent gangs known to be operating in and around Montgomery County.
However, since these shootings were just a year after September 11, and some six months after the anthrax case, terrorism immediately went to the top of the list. This is when the Montgomery County Police Department began reaching out to allied agencies, including the Maryland State Police.