page_title: D.C. sniper attacks
section_title: Montgomery County, Maryland
hierarchical_section_title: D.C. sniper attacks / Attacks in the Baltimore-Washington Area / Montgomery County, Maryland
caption_attribution_description: English: The trunk of the 1990 Chevrolet Caprice driven by the D.C. snipers in October 2002. The license plate number is NDA-21Z.
context_page_description: The D.C. sniper attacks were a series of coordinated shootings that occurred during three weeks in October 2002 in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia. Ten people were killed and three others were critically wounded in the Baltimore-Washington Metropolitan Area and along Interstate 95 in Virginia.
  The snipers were John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, who traveled in a blue 1990 Chevrolet Caprice sedan. Their crime spree, begun in February 2002, included murders and robberies in the states of Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, and Washington, which resulted in seven deaths and seven wounded people; in ten months, the snipers killed 17 people and wounded 10 others.
  In September 2003, Muhammad was sentenced to death, and in October, the juvenile, Malvo, was sentenced to six consecutive life sentences without parole. In November 2009, Muhammad was put to death by lethal injection.
  In 2017, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit vacated Malvo's three life sentences without parole in Virginia on appeal, with re-sentencing ordered pursuant to the Supreme Court's ruling in the case of Miller v. Alabama, 567 U.S.
context_section_description: At 5:20 p.m. on Wednesday, October 2, 2002, a shot was fired through a window of a Michaels craft store in Aspen Hill. The bullet narrowly missed Ann Chapman, a cashier at the store. Since no one was injured, the shot was assumed to be random and no serious alarms were raised. However, approximately one hour later, at 6:30 p.m., James Martin, a 55-year-old program analyst at NOAA, was shot and killed at 2201 Randolph Road in the parking lot of a Shoppers Food Warehouse grocery store, located in Wheaton.
  On the morning of October 3, four people were shot dead within a span of approximately two hours in Aspen Hill and other nearby areas in Montgomery County. Another was killed that evening in the Takoma neighborhood of the District of Columbia.
  At 7:41 a.m., James L. Buchanan, a 39-year-old landscaper known as "Sonny", was shot dead at 11411 Rockville Pike near Rockville, Maryland. Buchanan was shot while mowing the grass at the Fitzgerald Auto Malls.
  At 8:12 a.m., 54-year-old part-time taxi cab driver, Prem Kumar 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.
  At 8:37 a.m., Sarah Ramos, a 34-year-old babysitter and housekeeper, was killed at 3701 Rossmoor Boulevard at the Leisure World Shopping Center in Norbeck. She had gotten off a bus and was seated on a bench reading a book.
  At 9:58 a.m., 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 the Shell station at the intersection of Connecticut and Knowles Avenues in Kensington, Maryland.
  The snipers then waited until 9:20 p.m. 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 fired from some distance and in each case, the killers struck and then vanished. This pattern was not detected until after the shootings occurred on October 3.
  Fear quickly spread throughout the region as news of the shootings spread. At a press conference meeting, Chief of Police for Montgomery County, MD, Charles Moose, informed parents that schools were on a code blue alert; keeping children indoors and that for the time being the schools were safe. Many parents went to pick up their children at school early, not allowing them to take a school bus or walk home. Montgomery County Public Schools, District of Columbia Public Schools, and private schools went into a lockdown, with no recess or outdoor physical education classes. Other school districts in the area also took precautionary measures, keeping students indoors. During the course of the shootings, law enforcement agencies from neighboring states became embedded in the investigation through telephone tips. In fact, even the small South Bethany Police Department in Delaware received a tip of a possible suspect vehicle located nearby. That tip was investigated and cleared as unrelated. Many other police departments, both large and small, played a role during the active investigation.
  Police had only a few pieces of evidence to work with; including one initial report that during the Silver Spring attack someone had reportedly seen a white box truck. After the murder in Washington, D.C., witnesses then began telling police that they had seen a blue Chevrolet Caprice instead of the white box truck. They also had initially believed that all the murders were carried out with the use of a .223 caliber rifle.
caption: A hole was cut at the rear of the blue 1990 Chevrolet Caprice driven by Muhammad and Malvo, as a firing port to be used during their attacks.[19] This allowed them to remain hidden and escape the scene following their attacks.
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