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Sniper trial shifts to suspects arrest { November 3 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56789-2003Nov3.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56789-2003Nov3.html
Sniper Trial Shifts to Suspects' Arrest
Discovery of Caprice, Subsequent Capture by FBI Agents Detailed
By Carol Morello
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 3, 2003; 2:50 PM
VIRGINIA BEACH, Nov. 3--The trial of sniper suspect John Allen Muhammad turned today to his arrest when police stormed his parked Caprice after a startled and fearful refrigerator repairman came upon the car at a Maryland rest stop.
While sharpshooters covered them from the wood line, FBI agents sprinted to the Caprice and smashed out its tinted windows. The noise of shattering glass roused Muhammad, who had been lying down in the back seat, and Lee Boyd Malvo, the Jamaican teenager alleged to be his accomplice, who was stretched out on the front seat.
"We wanted to take them by surprise, and not turn the advantage back over to them," said Charles B. Pierce, an FBI special agent who commanded the team that sneaked up on the car and arrested Muhammad and Malvo.
Muhammad told Neil Darnell, a special agent who pulled him from the car, that his name was John Williams and Malvo was his son, Darnell testified. Muhammad legally changed his name from Williams after he converted to Islam.
The Caprice had been reported to police by Whitney Donahue, a refrigerator repairman who was driving home to Pennsylvania early in the morning of Oct. 24, when he pulled into the I-70 rest stop outside Frederick and his headlights panned across the car. Only hours earlier, police had issued a lookout bulletin for a blue or burgundy Caprice with New Jersey license plates. Donahue had diligently jotted down the plate number because, as the driver of a white van, like the one initially sought by police in the sniper case, his vehicle had caused women to flee in fear whenever he appeared on a job. Suddenly, the car loomed in front of him at the dark and deserted rest stop.
"The 1990 blue Caprice that you-all are looking for is sitting at the rest area," he said in a call to 911, a tape of which was played for the jury today. When the operator pressed him for more details, Donahue added, "It looked like there were two people sitting in the car. . . . I didn't want to look too close, like I was looking at it."
Several times, Donahue said, he surreptitiously strolled near the Caprice to double check that the license tag was the same number he had copied down and to try to discern if the shadowy outlines he saw through the tinted windows were humans or headrests. His account evoked nervous titters from several jurors in acknowledgement of the potential danger he placed himself in.
At one point, he enlisted the help of an unidentified passing motorist who had stopped to use the restroom. Without explaining why, he asked him to drive slowly past the Caprice and to toot if the license tag matched the number Donahue had written down.
The arrest of the two sniper suspects happened less than 48 hours after Montgomery County bus driver Conrad E. Johnson became the last victim in the three-week long string of sniper shootings that horrified the Washington area last year. Prosecutors have methodically gone through details of 16 victims they attribute to Muhammad and Malvo, in 13 instances acting as a two-man sniper team, one firing from the trunk of the decrepit Caprice and the other acting a "spotter."
During the morning, prosecutors finished the last of their emotional murder cases when they turned their attention to Johnson, who was 35 when he was shot as he stood in the open door of his bus in a staging area at Aspen Hill.
Denise Johnson, his wife of eight years, said that when her husband left his house that morning, "We exchanged I love yous and goodbyes. And he always said a silent prayer before he pulled out."
Johnson said she returned to bed, only to wake up at 6:30 a.m. to turn on the television and see news of another sniper shooting with crime scene tape surrounding a Ride On bus like the one her husband drove.
Dressed in a black dress, Denise Johnson's composure on the witness stand faltered as she recalled her efforts to learn something about her husband's fate, all in vain. She called his mobile phone 10 or 15 times, she said, her fear mounting when he never answered. Then she called his supervisor, but was told no one had any concrete information to give her.
Eventually, she said, his mother called her and said, "Conrad was the one who got shot."
Jurors saw photographs of Johnson's blue shirt and white undershirt that were ripped from him by paramedics struggling to save Johnson's life. The bullet, which tore into his chest just below his right nipple, left only a small entrance wound , the size of a pencil eraser, said Lt. Tyrone Dement, a paramedic with Montgomery County Fire and Rescue. There was no exit wound. Johnson's shirt had only a few drops of blood around his right breast pocket.
But inside his body, the bullet caused "massive" injuries, said Mary G. Ripple, deputy medical examiner for Maryland, who supervised his autopsy. It tore his diaphragm, renal artery, pancreas and kidney, and did so much damage to his liver that there was little normal liver left, she said.
In the wood line near the bus stop where Johnson was shot, police found two duffle bags, one of which held a piece of black foam padding and a small tool like a Swiss Army knife. They also found a handwritten note stuffed into a plastic sandwich bag that was then impaled on the limb protruding from a log. The note, like others that had gone before it, contained the code words "For you Mr. Police. Call me God. Do not release to the press."
The note renewed the sniper's earlier request for $10 million in ransom money, and sounded angry that no arrangements had yet been made to deposit the money into a bank account the letter writer apparently believed could be accessed through an ATM card. The note was oddly belligerent and at turns, polite. "Do not play these childish games with us," the letter said. "You know our demands. Your choice. Thank you."
It also attempted to shift the blame for Johnson's killing to the police, who the letter writer accused of disregarding the instructions made in previous messages left at other crime scenes. "Your incompetence has cost you another life," it stated.
Also this morning, prosecutors showed still photographs made by a security camera at an Outback Steak House in Silver Spring. It showed a man near the entrance waiting to be seated. He appeared to be Muhammad.
In the afternoon, jurors saw photographs of a menacing looking semi-automatic weapon that was secreted behind the back rest of the Caprice's rear seat, which swung up on a hinge. The rifle was laid across the back frame, and held in place with a simple bungee cord, ATF agent Timothy Curtis testified.
The click of the Bushmaster rifle echoed through the courtroom, as Curtis demonstrated how to remove the ammunition from its magazine.
Ten people were killed and three others were wounded during the three-week siege in Maryland, the District and Virginia. Prosecutors also have introduced evidence in an attempt to link Muhammad to three other shootings in Louisiana and Alabama.
The 42-year-old Persian Gulf War veteran is on trial here for the slaying of Dean H. Meyers, a 53-year-old civil engineer who was gunned down at a gasoline station in Manassas. Muhammad has pleaded not guilty to two counts of capital murder, conspiracy and a weapons offense in the case. If convicted, he could face a sentence of death by lethal injection.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
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