OWIE, Md., Oct. 7 — A 13-year-old student was shot and critically wounded this morning at the entrance of his school here in the eighth attack linked to a roving sniper who has killed six adults in the Washington suburban area.Posted on 10/07/2002 8:52:47 PM PDT by JohnHuang2
OWIE, Md., Oct. 7 — A 13-year-old student was shot and critically wounded this morning at the entrance of his school here in the eighth attack linked to a roving sniper who has killed six adults in the Washington suburban area.
In the face of regionwide alarm, all available uniformed police were sent to guard schools in a show of force that included even uniformed members of the Secret Service who normally guard the president and foreign embassies in downtown Washington.
"All of our victims have been innocent, have been defenseless, but now they're stepping over the line, because our children don't deserve this," declared Chief Charles Moose of the Montgomery County police, teary-eyed and angry after five days of fruitless searching for the sniper who has chosen victims seemingly at random and executed them from afar with single-shot accuracy.
Today's shooting, outside the Benjamin Tasker Middle School here in Prince George's County, prompted school officials to restrict outdoor student activities from Washington through the Maryland and Virginia suburbs and even in Baltimore, 40 miles north. Teachers at some schools masked ground-floor windows with paper.
Chief Moose and other police in the area intensified their manhunt as the public called in with information about a white vehicle that may have fled the area after the shooting.
The school is an easy highway drive from neighboring Montgomery County, where the sniper killed five of his six victims last week, displaying what the police say was single-shot deadliness in covertly firing a high-powered military or hunting rifle from afar.
"There are a number of different types of vehicles, all of them white, that the suspect may be traveling in," said the Prince George's police chief, Gerald Wilson, before hurrying over to Montgomery County this evening to coordinate the search with Chief Moose and an armada of federal, state and local police.
"We intend hopefully to have him very soon," Chief Wilson said without offering further details on an investigation in which siren-blaring police cars have been crisscrossing the Washington commuter belt.
Detectives here focused on a woodland bordering the school in searching for evidence left by the sniper who, until today, had frustrated forensic specialists. But a dog trained to sniff gunpowder traces zeroed in on a patch of matted brush at the edge of the woods about 100 yards opposite the school entrance where the boy was shot, detectives said.
Police and crime-laboratory specialists painstakingly searched the suspect spot on hands and knees, wielding an assortment of high-tech equipment and rakes in taking samples.
Confirmation that the bullet that struck down the student matched the bullets used in earlier slayings further traumatized the Washington region. Parents had dreaded the possibility that the sniper, who until now shot a random ethnic mix of adults as they heedlessly pursued daily errands, would take aim at a child.
With this latest shot, the sniper's tally rose to six dead and two critically wounded since Wednesday in single-shot attacks. Most were in suburban Montgomery County, with single shootings in Washington, Prince George's County and Fredericksburg, Va., 50 miles to the south.
The sniper's .223-caliber, high-intensity ammunition is designed for soldiers and hunters to inflict deep and widening wounds by fragmenting after tearing into victims. The single shot wounded the boy in the abdomen, spleen, stomach, kidney, pancreas and lung and left him on a ventilator after surgery, in critical but stable condition.
"The projectile is identical to those recovered at the other scenes," Joseph Riehl, a special agent of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms tersely announced here at police headquarters.
Instantly, the region's horror was compounded and verged on a fury articulated by the Montgomery County executive, Doug Duncan.
"We are angry and we are outraged," Mr. Duncan boomed at a news conference in describing "a new low" in the sniper's depradations.
The White House issued a statement by President Bush expressing sympathy to the victims and promising all federal resources needed to solve the "series of cowardly and senseless acts of violence." The Justice Department was expected to invoke Title 28 of the federal law's "serial killing provisions."
Schools in the area were to be open on Tuesday on the theory they are safer than any alternative.
"Our young people must go to school," Chief Moose said. "There's no way we can surrender to this kind of terror."
Like the other victims who did not know they were being stalked, the student, whose identity was withheld, was going about his daily routine. An aunt dropped him off a half-hour before the 8:30 opening of classes and then heard the gunshot moments later as she drove away.
Rushing back, the aunt, who is a former Army nurse trained in critical battlefield care, picked the boy up and raced to a medical clinic, where he received first aid.
He was then transferred by helicopter to the Children's National Medical Center in Washington, where Dr. Martin Eichelberger, a pediatric surgeon, waited to operate, with firearms agents waiting nearby for the bullet fragments. The aunt is nursing chief of the surgical care unit where her nephew will be recovering.
Police officers flooded the area, with detectives soon unloading a camera at a nearby intersection intended to photograph traffic infractions, hoping the sniper ran the light in fleeing. Inside the school, teachers locked classroom doors and pushed desks away from the windows.
"All I knew was I was freaked out," said Ashley Cottrell, 12.
Her mother, Shannon, raced from her job in downtown Washington to retrieve Ashley and embrace her. The hug was "the best hug I've received in a long time," the mother said.
As word of the shooting spread, frantic parents sought advice from the police and schools about what to do. Chief Moose emphasized the need for parents to stay closer than ever to their children. "They got to engage them, they got to talk to them, they got to explain this mess to them," he said, emphasizing that a sense of love and security was the priority.
County officials urged parents to escort their children to school on Tuesday and to serve as voluntary monitors at major intersections.
Theories about the killer abound, but Chief Moose turned away all speculation and declined to share information with reporters from a new psychological profile of the sniper prepared by the F.B.I. "That is a tool for us to catch the bad guy," he said.
The chief, who is in charge of the coordinated investigation, declined to discuss any aspects of detectives' strategies and stakeouts as the manhunt continued.
By nightfall, the public's only new piece of information about the elusive sniper was that he had struck again in a new direction.
"The fear has ratcheted up quite a bit," said Mr. Duncan, the county executive, who heard of the school shooting as he left the funeral of one of last week's victims in his county.
"There's a real struggle to come to grips with what's happening here," Mr. Duncan said. Some earlier news accounts had emphasized that no youngsters had yet been victimized. Chief Moose was asked whether he thought the sniper was watching the police news conferences each day and might be adjusting his attacks.
The chief paused, offering a hard-eyed look and the comment, "I decline the opportunity to speculate."
Moose refused to call it a hate crime. Considering the fact it was a black on white crime, his decision was not a popular choice with the majority living inside the Tri County area. The perps were never arrested.
Will he let the Feds have it? My guess is that if it looks as though it is terrorist related - attacks at malls and schools have been mentioned in past missives from Al Qaeda - then he would let it go.
But if the perp is a white guy, no.
Seconded. The bastards doing this should fry.
Be that as it may, the 5.56 usually does fragment, at the place where the bullet is crimped into the case. It does so after yawing at least 90 degrees, it often sheds its jacket too. The 5.45x39 (Russian) behaves similarly, although it's yaw cycle is shorter and thus it might yaw 360 degrees and more. See this site for more information on the terminal ballistics properties of various catridge/bullet combinations. The M193 and M855 FMJ 5.56X45 are the old and new military FMJ ammunition in question. One reason not to use for hunting, and use a SP type of bullet instead is that it ruins too much meat, depending on shot placement of course. The .222 Remington SP is an example of the latter type of hunting ammunition.
Yes! And it definitely fits the terrorist theory.
The wakeup call of 9-11 seems to have made little impact on our American psyche. No one wants to think that we are being targeted by a culture that is the mortal enemy of the West, of what was once called Christendom. Our attention span is that of gnats. We don't want to be bothered with the possibility that a dedicated enemy has established forward fire bases right in our midst, right in plain sight. No, our nation of Pollyanas is in full denial. Serious troubles are the stuff of movies, not real life. If we pretend no one would pick us off, one by one, as we go through our daily life then the problem will just go away all by itself.
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