GUEST COMMENTARY: Austin bombings recall terror of D.C. snipers

AUSTIN, Texas -- At first, just as with the initial bombing in Austin, police, the press and the public in the Washington, D.C., area did not grasp what the sniper shooting of a 55-year-old man at a discount store portended.

A bullet cut through the window of a Michael's craft store in Aspen Hill, Maryland, a couple of miles north of the Beltway, just after 5 p.m. on Oct. 2, 2002, hitting no one. Then, an hour later in nearby Wheaton, James Martin, a federal worker, was shot and killed in the parking lot of a Shoppers Food Warehouse.

Interesting, newsworthy and undoubtedly a tragedy for Martin's family and friends, but not something that immediately gripped the public's attention in that time before social media.

Then the next morning, sniper fire killed four people in suburban Montgomery County, Maryland, men and women going about their morning in normal ways: pumping gas, sitting on a bus bench reading, mowing grass at a mall, vacuuming a van at a service station. A fifth person died from sniper fire that evening, this time in the District of Columbia, a man simply walking along the street.

The greater Washington area was instantly gripped by the shootings. And the seemingly random nature of the killings, as may be the case in Austin with this month's explosions, made the fear real and personal.

I was living in Bethesda, Maryland, at the time with my family, including my then-7-year-old daughter, and our home was less than 10 miles from each of those initial shootings. I worked at Education Week in downtown Bethesda, even closer. And this was just a year after the 9/11 attacks. There was a genuine, official concern that there would be followup violence.

That's when we all first learned about "dirty bombs." Lying in bed at night, you sometimes heard military aircraft patrolling the metro area's skies.

But, somehow, the threat posed by the sniper -- it later turned out to be two, working as a team and using a blue 1990 Chevy Caprice -- seemed more tangible, present, worse.

Because the press had reported that someone had seen a white van or box truck speeding away from one of those initial shootings, I found myself scanning the immediate landscape as I would exit a building or while driving, noting every white van. And until then, I had no idea how many such vehicles there were on the streets.

I had the feeling at those moments that anything could happen. I found myself pondering the reality of soldiers in combat, of what it meant to know that at any time some unseen person could point a gun at you and pull the trigger. Yes, the odds of anything happening, in a metro area of several million people, were tiny. But, at least until the police made the arrests, something more than negligible.

The shootings kept coming over the next weeks, spreading out to Northern Virginia and Prince George's County, Maryland. People pumping gas (again), or loading a car at a Home Depot. A bus driver on the steps of his vehicle. And, worst of all, a 13-year-old boy getting out of a car in the morning at a middle school. He survived after his aunt, a nurse, rushed him to a nearby hospital.

Schools went on lockdown, with recreation periods held inside. Games were canceled for fall sports, including for my daughter's second-grade soccer team I was coaching. Some gas stations put up tarps near the pumps to shield people from view as they filled up their cars. As a family, we found ourselves going out less to eat or shop, and if we did, hurrying from the car into buildings, eyes peeled.

At work and other gatherings, the shootings (and white vans) dominated conversation. Parents grieved that their children had to grow up in a climate of fear.

The shooters' arrests came on Oct. 24, just over three weeks after that first man had died in Wheaton. John Allen Muhammed, 41, and Lee Boyd Malvo, 17, were found sleeping in that Caprice at an Interstate 70 rest stop about 40 miles northwest of Washington. They had a Bushmaster AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle with them and a rifle bipod. They had transformed the car's trunk into a gun emplacement, firing through a small hole drilled near the license plate.

In total, 10 people died and three were seriously wounded in 14 incidents. Muhammed, executed in 2009 in Virginia for the killings, and Malvo, serving life sentences levied in Maryland and Virginia, were also implicated in seven other killings earlier that year across the United States.

With the two men jailed, school playgrounds reopened and the games resumed. People relaxed at gas stations and parking lots. Conversation turned to the coming midterm elections, to Saddam Hussein, the Sopranos and the colder weather coming. And, eventually, I no longer noticed white vans.

Commentary on 03/21/2018

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