Posted on 10/27/2002 11:05:45 AM PST by freeforall
Land of the free - for good and bad
Christie Blatchford National Post
Friday, October 25, 2002
John Froschauer, The Associated Press Television cameras line up yesterday in front of the house federal agents investigated on Wednesday in Tacoma, Wash., where Malvo and Muhammad lived.
ROCKVILLE, Md. - In God's crucible, as the English author Israel Zangwill famously called America, comes fresh evidence that from time to time, there may be in the great melting pot something akin to a meltdown.
This one lasted 22 days; left 13 innocents mowed down, 10 fatally, while in the course of performing the mildest of daily activities; imposed upon the populous suburbs surrounding the U.S. capital a state of high anxiety and upon the country a sharp reminder of the open democracy's innate vulnerability to all manner of threats; saw a massive manhunt grow tentacles that reached as far south as Alabama and as far west and north as Bellingham, Wash., near the Canadian border, and ended, at last, early yesterday morning at a roadside rest stop about 100 kilometres northwest of here.
Bookending the piece, written along the jumble of freeways that are the chief vessels of the first nation of the motor car, was a plethora of white vehicles -- in the beginning, the mysterious white vans bystanders variously reported seeing leaving the early crime scenes, and at the close, the white truck driven by Ron Lantz, a genial prayer-service-attending Christian trucker who spotted the suspect car parked at that rest stop and called 911.
Even the police trailer into which the car was loaded and taken away was white.
It was at 3:19 a.m. yesterday that two men asleep in a big old Chevy Caprice were rousted and taken at gunpoint into police custody.
Later in the day, John Lee Malvo was arraigned in U.S. court in nearby Baltimore as a material witness in the beltway sniper case, John Allen Muhammad on unrelated federal firearms offences. Both are reported to have had previous legal problems, Mr. Malvo as the juvenile he is still, with Mr. Muhammad described as allegedly in breach of a restraining order, obtained in the spring of 2000 by one of his two former wives and which prohibited him from carrying weapons of any kind.
But these charges are merely mechanisms to enable authorities to hold the men while the investigation shifts gears into full prosecutorial mode.
The two were last night formally identified as the suspected beltway killers by the task force boss, Montgomery County Police Chief Charles A. Moose, who quietly told reporters, "We have the weapon. It is off the street." He appeared to be fighting to keep his emotions under control, at one point saying softly, of the victims' families, "We'll never know their pain, and we only wish we could have stopped this sooner to reduce the number of victims."
Chief Moose prefaced his brief remarks by asking for a moment of silence for a Maryland state trooper who was killed yesterday in a motorcycle crash, and he was followed, by Montgomery County Executive Doug Duncan, who said his citizens' collective grace over the past weeks -- as they went about their lives never knowing from whence the next shot might ring out -- had demonstrated that "Americans have shown we will not be deterred by acts of terror, whether from outside our borders or from within."
Mr. Duncan then slowly read aloud the names of the dead.
It was a suitably sober touch to a day that also concluded, in the modern American fashion, with the relatives of one of the alleged multiple murderers, Mr. Muhammad, slated to appear on the Larry King Live show on CNN last night.
In similar fashion, all the way through the three-week-long case, did other witnesses and eyewitnesses regularly appear on the cable shows -- beside the networks' 24-hour teams of forensic experts, profilers, psychologists, former police officers and security advisors -- hard on the heels of being interviewed by detectives, arguably jeopardizing the integrity of the fast-changing investigation.
If it was not the first time that television has played such a central role in a major criminal story in this country -- the O.J. Simpson case set the standard here -- the sniper saga provided a stunning reminder that American law enforcement is but a short step away from the day when witnesses may indeed phone Mr. King, Connie Chung or one or another of the faux TV "investigators," such as CNN's personable and plugged-in security expert J. Kelly McCann, before they call the real police.
Not even Chief Moose, who with his daily or thrice-daily press conferences became the recognizable public face of the probe, could begin to equal Mr. McCann's high profile, air time or apparent accessibility.
It was either Mr. Malvo's juvenile record or some contact he had with the federal Immigration and Naturalization Service -- and perhaps his youthful braggadocio, for there are unconfirmed suggestions that one of the suspects themselves phoned in a tip urging the sniper task force to take them seriously and check with Montgomery police -- which appears to have triggered the pair's undoing.
That tip led the task force, confusingly itself based in Maryland's Montgomery County, to contact their counterparts in Montgomery, Ala., on the chance they had unsolved shootings that might resemble their cases. The idea may have originated with one of the senior task force investigators from the federal bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms who was formerly based at the ATF office in Montgomery, Ala.
That in turn led the local police to find in their open files a Sept. 21 double shooting at a Montgomery liquor store and forward the task force the evidence from that crime scene -- reportedly including a fingerprint or partial fingerprint left behind that was found to match Mr. Malvo's.
One 52-year-old woman was shot in the back and died in the attack; another, 24, survived a bullet to the neck and is regarded by police in Montgomery as their own walking miracle.
Montgomery, Ala., Chief John Wilson early last night refused to divulge any details of his force's case, refused to confirm the reported fingerprint evidence, and told reporters that because of the tender age of their suspect, the file had been sealed.
With this circumspect regard for the sanctity of his case and the processes of the law that will unfold in the months to come -- similar care was shown by Chief Moose and Agent Bouchard -- did Chief Wilson neatly demonstrate the critical difference between the real officers of the law and their television impersonators. Whatever else, the real police are sworn to protect both the public and the public interest and however imperfectly they may succeed, the best of them are governed by these sacred principles.
The same cannot be said of the TV police and the TV prosecutors: It was CNN's admittedly fine reporters and experts, from their myriad locations across the country and with their huge variety of sources, who first released live on the air on Wednesday night the names of the two wanted men and described them as armed and dangerous, even as they admitted to knowing the real police were still wrestling with what information to give the media.
To serve and protect would seem a more comforting motto than to get news on the air first; stopping a killing spree more important than winning a ratings war, but such distinctions are not always clear here, and the future of criminal investigation may very well hang in the balance.
With Mr. Malvo thus identified, the task force reportedly traced him first to Tacoma, Wash., and the small house there where he and Mr. Muhammad briefly lived together and which on Wednesday was searched by agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the ATF, and ultimately to Mr. Muhammad's Chevy: The hunt was now on.
Seized from the backseat of that 1990 blue Caprice in the early morning raid yesterday was a semi-automatic military-style rifle called a Bushmaster XM-15, the very sort of weapon that chambers the .223-calibre bullets ballistics tests have definitively linked to all but three of the beltway shootings.
A sniper's-style scope and tripod were reportedly also seized, and there are also unconfirmed reports police found a makeshift gun port in the car's trunk, which would have enabled a gunman hidden there to fire undetected and his wheelman to make a quick escape.
Agent Bouchard last night confirmed that ballistics tests had definitively linked the Bushmaster to nine of the murders and two of the woundings. Other forensic evidence from crime scenes, he said, nonetheless links the other three cases to the spree.
The two suspects could not be more different: Mr. Muhammad is a 41-year-old former army mechanic who fought for his country more than a decade ago in the Persian Gulf but whose heart so turned to stone in the years afterward that he is now the suspected senior player in the deadly duo, while Mr. Malvo is a Jamaican national, only 17, who was in the United States illegally but naive enough that he tried to enrol at a high school in Bellingham, Wash. -- north of Tacoma -- without any supporting documents or school transcripts.
The relationship between the two remains unclear. Original reports that Mr. Muhammad was Mr. Malvo's stepson are apparently not true, but neither is it yet known how they met, let alone how they allegedly meshed into a finely tuned killing machine.
Mr. Muhammad, while an ordinary enlisted man during his almost 10 years of military service that saw him go overseas and be stationed both at Fort Lewis, Wash., near Tacoma, and at Fort Ord in California, may have been a marksman of some proficiency; there were reports, again unconfirmed, that he won, and requalified annually to keep, an expert badge for shooting.
Knowledgeable gun people have maintained, throughout the shooting spree, that whoever was doing the damage was no sniper, despite the moniker that quickly attached to him, but rather a competent rifleman whose most impressive quality was his chill composure: The almost irresistible human instinct, hunters and sport shooters say, is to fire a second shot to make sure the target goes down. But in none of the beltway shootings was more than a single shot ever fired.
Amusingly, the ordinary hunters and sport shooters who make up most of America's 222 million gun owners proved to be at least as accurate about the two suspects now in custody as did most of the criminal profilers who appeared almost hourly on television. The latter variously and confidently described the likely culprits as a white male or men between the ages of 25 and 40 who were probably working on their home turf, and who were almost certainly made-in-America products.
In the end, the two men offer a little of this, a little of that, home-grown and foreign elements both.
Mr. Muhammad, reportedly until sometime last year when, more than 15 years after he is said to have first converted to Islam, he adopted a Muslim last name -- a move that supposedly signals either a renewed commitment to the faith or a new start -- is a handsome black man who reportedly drew attention to himself when, in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, he allegedly mouthed sympathy for the terrorists.
Certainly, it is probably a safe bet that not many Americans who consider themselves loyal would have deliberately taken a Muslim name so many years after conversion in the aftermath of the enormous tragedy that gripped this country two Septembers ago.
His co-suspected in the spree, young Mr. Malvo with his brilliant smile, is an illegal immigrant who may have, in the way of so many other youngsters from the impoverished island of Jamaica, belatedly come as a teenager to join his mother here for a chance at a better life.
Certainly, the picture of him, showing up at that high school in Bellingham without so much as a single school record in hand, is unbearably poignant.
In the last of his cryptic messages to the killer or killers, issued late Wednesday night just hours before the arrests, Chief Moose at one point told the wanted men, of the task force, "Our word is our bond."
There were unconfirmed reports that this may have been in response to a line in one of the two or three messages left for the police by the shooter or shooters. CNN was early yesterday touting, as the probable source of the line, a song by a Jamaican rap group.
In fact, the most likely source of the reference may be in the vicious lyrics of the songs of an American rap group called Killarmy.
None of the task force leaders, their investigation not yet over and with months of complicated work to do, would hazard a guess as to the pair's alleged motive last night, even as the networks were doing precisely that.
In the end, in the crucible was another perfect American stew -- all the emotional hot buttons hit, issues of race, religion, politics, gun control, immigration raised to one extent or another -- and as always, it verged on boiling over, only to be brought back from the brink, just in time.
Christie Blatchford can be contacted at cblatchford@nationalpost.com
© Copyright 2002 National Post
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