SILVER SPRING, Md. — It was at 10:30 Tuesday morning that Shirlita Baker’s down mood hit a new depth.
She started getting upset earlier in the week, watching the police chief try to send messages to the sniper, “making the cops look so desperate,” she said.
Then the two men arrested in Richmond, Va., initially thought to be suspects, turned out to be only suspected illegal immigrant laborers.
But at 10:30, Baker heard the news that a bus driver in her neighborhood had not just been seriously wounded by a gunshot to the stomach, he was now dead.
“That was the moment when I said to myself, ‘I can’t believe what’s happening here. They’re not going to get this guy,’” said Baker, 40, also a bus driver in Montgomery County. “I pulled my daughter out of school. I’m not going to work. This is ridiculous.”
It got worse.
Around 4:30 p.m., police officials announced that a note left by the sniper at the scene of a killing in Virginia carried the words “your children are not safe anywhere at any time.”
“We can’t live like this,” said Baker, who kept checking over her shoulder in the parking lot of a Giant grocery store. She shared a worried look with her 14-year-old daughter, Brittany. “We gone, honey, we gone,” and then they drove away.
As if the recent setbacks in the sniper investigation were not enough, those two huge chunks of news — the message about children and the killing of a bus driver just blocks from where the shooting spree began three weeks ago — left people here with a queasy feeling Tuesday that things were spinning totally out of control.
The developments were interpreted as some of the most dispiriting, most nerve-racking signs that the police are no closer to finding the sniper than they were the day the killings began.
Military spy planes. SWAT teams. Squad cars at every big traffic light. These do not make people feel much safer.
The most agonizing part, people say, is having their hope extinguished. So what about daily routines or morning commutes getting interrupted. It is the promising developments followed by a stack of disappointments that really whittle a strong person down.
“Things look good, and then all of a sudden they look bad again,” said Jacob Ellis, a recording engineer in Silver Spring. “Every time we get some good news, the sniper just takes it away.”