Virginia Sniper

By Lily Kim

We pressed our noses up against the glass of the car window, little hands curled on the soft ridge at the top of the pane. My little sister Lizzie and I sat in the back of our families white 1993 Land Rover, trying to make the most of our 5 minutes of adult-like freedom while our mom filled up the car. It was the beginning of October, yet the humid soup of Virginia summer still clung to our backs. We wore matching t-shirts our Dad had bought us both from some obscure business trip in a gift shop made for guilty fathers. “Someone who loves me very much went to Belgium and bought me this shirt”.

“Help me push it down” I whined at Lizzie helplessly. I couldn’t breathe, the homemade salve my Dad had put on the cracked leather seats revealed a stench that could only be spoiled butter.

“It’s stuck,” Lizzie said mater-of-factly. We pushed our noses to the top of the window, breathing in the sweet smell of gas, resigned to our child-like helplessness.

It was October 6th 2002, our state had been on lockdown for a week or so. Just 2 days ago a 43-year-old homemaker named Caroline Seawell had been shot in the chest while loading her purchases from Michaels Arts & Crafts Store into her Toyota mini van. Now we sat in our family car, encased in blue bulletproof tarp at the Texaco gas station down the road. We watched as worried faces inched out of car doors, we were young and mistook panic for excitement, the midday sunlight sizzle adding to the electricity in the air.

The D.C. sniper attacks, also known as the Beltway sniper attacks, were a series of coordinated shootings that occurred during three weeks in October 2002 in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia. The Snipers were John Muhammad (aged 41 at the time of the shootings) and Lee Boyd Malvo (aged 17).

The whole neighbourhood was on the look out for a white van, due to a tip off in the early days before lockdown. Lizzie and I would play I Spy to entertain ourselves, looking for the white van that harboured the gunmen. It was common to see police interrogating a distressed plumber or scaffolding firm on the side of the road. White vans would put signs in their window that read “I’m not the Sniper, GOD BLESS, VIRGINIA IS FOR LOVERS” with crudely drawn hearts staining the white paper like blood marks. When the police finally found the shooters on a crisp fall day, they were sleeping in the backseat of a blue 1990 Chevrolet Caprice Sedan, having terrified and fooled a nation.

We arrived home from our gas station outing. My Dad, who was an ATF Agent at the time, was pacing on the back porch, gesticulating into his Bluetooth earpiece. I was acutely aware of the large gun safe in our basement, next to where we hung our clean laundry. It was like a sleeping dragon in a suburban cave. We rifled through the brown paper shopping bags, half putting things away, half trying to find something to stash in our pockets. I settled on a cheese string, perfect plastic in a tri-color ribbon of processed glory.

President Bush was on the T.V. addressing the nation. Lizzie and I flopped down in the air-conditioned cool of the living room, legs sticking to the leather couch. We watched our President squinting into the camera, his American Flag pin glinting in the midday sun.

“It makes me sick to my stomach that there is a cold blooded killer at home,” Lizzie and I mouthed the Presidents words to each other in his Southern accent, We looked around, pointing at each other, laughing like two children who had never had to think about death. It didn’t hit my 12 year-old world until we weren’t allowed to go to school the next day.

The attacks continued, and when a 13 year-old student named Iran Brown was shot in the chest in Bowi, Maryland on his way to school, all schools, leisure centres, and places of mass congregation were ordered to shut. It was reported by CNN that a tarot card was found near the scene, a source saying it was “the Death Card”, with “Call Me God” written on the back as a message to local Police. The media went into a frenzy, neighbours had theories, mostly relating to acts of terrorism, as we had endured 9/11 just the year before. The tip hotlines were inundated with American’s taking credit for the shootings, human-alien hybrid theories, of scorned ex-lovers convinced it could only be their ex-husband.

I was in my last year at Mantua Elementary School in Fairfax, Virginia. We were collecting money for a field trip to a nearby pumpkin patch, I could out run any boy in my grade and I had lost my rigorous class president election campaign by 3 votes. I was still collecting tootsie pop wrappers at the time, and had a lucrative business buying and selling pogs. Life was simple, life was good. These were the days before active shooter drills would become as frequent and necessary as fire drills. Before we would be made to line up by grade and practice running in a zig-zag fashion across the open concrete of the our school campus, as to confuse the bullets.

“We are now resetting the clocks,” the grave sound of our principal’s voice would sound out over the tannoy. It was our school’s active shooter drill code to alert us all that there was an armed person on campus. Every classroom would swing into action, piling tables and chairs up onto the windows and doors, a barricade school children should never have to construct. We would then squat down to the ground, hugging our knees to our chests, hearts racing, confused between the excitement of the exercise and the fear of a threat we really didn’t understand.

In these early days, we watched the news with a grotesque fascination. Parents worried that they would never be able to let their children run free without fearing for their safety. We worried we would never be able to see our friends, or walk to the nearby lake, lathered in mosquito repellent, sticky and free.

Linda Franklin, 47, of Arlington, Virginia is killed by a single gunshot in a Home Depot parking lot in Falls Church, Virginia. We sweep the leaves off of the deck outside and are ushered in for curfew.

The leaves fell from the surrounding trees and rotted in the gutters while I played SIMs for 8 hours straight. Lizzie and I chased each other in the dogwood bloom scattered on the slippery deck. Days were spent sweeping rotting leaves out of the woods, our giant schnauzer Jeeves following us into the sun dappled woodland like the fiercest woolfin body guard. There was a clearing at the end of the wood where 4 fallen trees convened. It was our pirate ship. The make believe waters were choppy and our mission laborious. We only abandoned ship upon being called back to the house with a special mission to chuck corn, which we gladly accepted as an excellent opportunity to play Pocahontas. We sat on the porch stripping the ears back, making sure to pick every hairy fibre from the sweet gold underneath. As a preteen I spent most of my mornings sleeping in. My littlest sister Bella had just been born in the hot and sticky August months before the shooter came into our lives. I would sneak into her nursery and sing her made up nursery rhymes, she smelled of clean cotton and something sweet and new. We spent those summers in Washington D.C, walking sluggishly around the Smithsonian

Museums, laughing every time we passed a place called "Foggy Bottom" on the metro.

Lizzie missed out on the obligatory Chuckie Cheeses birthday party, as the lockdown and the fear carried on into late October. We collected information from the radio, AIM chats from friends, and the snippets of late night worried murmurs from our parents. Soon time went on, the biggest manhunt in our lifetime was over, lives continued as normal. Our beautiful schnauzer protector Jeeves passed away the next winter, when the snow was 6ft high and the cracks in our family unit were starting to show again. Life moved quickly, I went to Middle School, Bella started to crawl, making the long journey up the stairs to my room every morning, to bring me treasures in small and sticky palms.

In November 2009, John Allen Mohammed is executed for the murders of 10 people after spending 6 years on death row. I saw his face flash on the TV screen, a face from a time that felt like another life. I had graduated high school, and was now living on the other side of the country in Northern California. My Mom and Bella had already been living in England for 3 years, Lizzie was learning to drive. I was smoking menthols then, normally just so I could whack the new pack on the palm of my hand, and peel off the cellophane, feeling like a tragic movie vixen. I would take a drag, stub it out on the side of the car, and put it back in the pack. Even then I knew it didn’t suit me. Now I watched his expressionless face as he walked from the courtroom on to his death row march, remembering that October in Virginia, when we weren’t allowed out for recess.

My boyfriend at the time looked over at me, lazy eyed from a recent bong hit.

“That’s heavy.”

“Yeah I was there,” I said, eyes transfixed on the mugshot of the man that had terrorized our little community.

“It could have been any of you,” his eyes were wide, he didn’t know what to do with his face.

“Yeah, I guess we’re lucky.”

We got in his green pick up and drove to Panther beach to drink Natural Light and bury our bodies in the cool sand. When we drove through the mountain pass, I stuck my arm out the window, moving my palm up and down into the wind, feeling the cool air through my fingers. Donovan was playing on the radio. I turned it up, took a drag of my menthol and I didn’t think about it again.