(in an imaginary, hypothetical, make-believe kind of way)
“... as a black man could be shot just putting gas in his car...”
Sure, if he’s stealing it.
Gee, Michelle, what about the black guy shooting people in gas stations???
Montgomery County
The main shootings associated with the Beltway Sniper incident began on October 2, 2002, with one victim killed that evening in Aspen Hill, Maryland. Four more victims were killed the next morning, and a sixth killed in the evening on October 3, 2002. All shootings happened within a few miles of each other. Normally a safe area, the killing spree increased the murder rate by 25% within a span of 20 hours.[1]
At 5:20 pm, a shot was fired through a window of a Michaels Craft Store in Aspen Hill. As no one was injured, no serious alarms were raised.[2] About an hour later, at 6:30 pm, James Martin, a 55-year-old program analyst at NOAA, was shot and killed in the parking lot of a Shoppers Food Warehouse grocery store, located in Glenmont.[3]
On the morning of October 3, four people were shot within a span of approximately 2 hours in Aspen Hill, and other nearby areas in Montgomery County. Another was killed that evening in the District of Columbia, just over the border from Silver Spring.
At 7:41 am, James L. Buchanan, a 39-year-old landscaper known as “Sonny,” was shot dead in Montgomery County near Rockville, Maryland. Buchanan was shot while mowing the grass at the Fitzgerald Auto Mall.
At 8:12 am, 54-year-old part-time taxi driver Premkumar Walekar was killed in Aspen Hill in Montgomery County while pumping gasoline into his taxi at a Mobil station at Aspen Hill Road and Connecticut Avenue.
Sarah Ramos, a 34-year-old babysitter and housekeeper, was killed at 8:37 am at the Leisure World Shopping Center in Aspen Hill. She had gotten off a bus, and was seated on a bench, reading a book.[3]
At 9:58 am, in what was to be the last killing of the morning, 25-year-old Lori Ann Lewis-Rivera was killed while vacuuming her Dodge Caravan at a Shell station in Kensington, Maryland.
The snipers then waited until 9:15 pm before shooting Pascal Charlot, a 72-year-old retired carpenter, while he was walking on Georgia Avenue at Kalmia Road, in Washington, D.C. Charlot died less than an hour later.
In each shooting, the victims were killed by a single bullet, which were fired from some distance. The pattern was not detected until after the shootings occurred on October 3.[1]
Fear quickly spread throughout the community as news of the shootings spead. Many parents went to pick up their children at school early, not allowing them to take a school bus or walk home alone. Montgomery County Public Schools and private schools went into a lockdown, with no recess or outdoor gym classes. Other school districts in the area also took precautionary measures, keeping students indoors.[4]
[edit] Other areas
At this point Malvo and Muhammad started covering a wider area and taking more time between shootings. On October 4, 43-year-old Caroline Seawell was wounded at 2:30 pm in the parking lot of a Michael’s Craft Store at Spotsylvania Mall in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, just outside the city of Fredericksburg, while she was loading purchases into her minivan.
On October 7, at 8:09 am, Iran Brown, a 13-year-old boy, was wounded as he arrived to the Benjamin Tasker Middle School in Bowie, Maryland, in Prince George’s County. (Brown’s name was at first concealed from the public, but has since been revealed.) At this crime scene the authorities discovered a Tarot card (the death card), as well as a shell casing.
Two days later, on October 9 at 8:18 pm, 53-year-old Dean Harold Meyers was shot dead while pumping gasoline at a station in Prince William County, Virginia, near the city of Manassas.
Again, two days later, on the morning of October 11 at 9:30 am, 53-year-old Kenneth Bridges died while pumping fuel at an Exxon station off Interstate 95 in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, near Fredericksburg.
On October 14, at 9:15 pm, 47-year-old Linda Franklin, an FBI intelligence analyst who was a resident of Arlington County, Virginia, was shot dead after she finished shopping at a Home Depot in Fairfax County, Virginia, just outside Falls Church. The police received what seemed to be a very good lead after the October 14 shooting, but it was later determined that the witness was inside the Home Depot at the time and was lying. The witness was subsequently arrested for interfering with the investigation.
After a five day wait, 37-year-old Jeffrey Hopper was shot on October 19 at 8:00 pm in a parking lot near the Ponderosa steakhouse in Ashland, Virginia, about 90 miles south of Washington, near Interstate 95. Authorities discovered a 4-page letter from the shooter in the woods.
On October 21, Richmond-area police arrested two men, one with a white van, outside a gas station. The men turned out to be illegal immigrants with no connection to the shooter and they were remanded to the custody of what was then the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which subsequently deported them.
The next day, October 22, bus driver Conrad Johnson was shot dead at 5:56 am while standing on the steps of his bus in Aspen Hill, Maryland. Chief Moose released part of the content of one of the shooter’s communications, in which he declares, “Your children are not safe, anywhere, at any time.”
While no shootings occurred on October 23, the day is significant for two events. First, ballistics experts confirmed Johnson as the tenth fatality in the Beltway shootings. But in a yard in Tacoma, Washington, near a sniper school operated by the United States Army, police searched with metal detectors for bullets, shell casings, or other evidence which might provide a link to the shooters. A tree stump believed to have been used for target practice was seized
Just like the days when I had to hide behind by car pumping gas into my car in VA when a black man was shooting us.