SILVER SPRING, Md. (U-WIRE) — For seven strange days, each more jittery than the last, a macabre lottery has been playing in Washington and its well-groomed suburbs.
It affords everyone who dares leave the house a chance — an infinitesimal chance, but a chance — of being murdered by an excellent marksman.
“You don’t even have to play to lose,” said Byrne Peake, 42, a building contractor here in Silver Spring, where last week a nanny was shot in the head while sitting on a park bench. “All you have to do is have a pulse.”
And yet — with six dead, two seriously wounded, including a 13-year-old boy shot on Monday on his way to school, and the sniper still out there somewhere — the quotidian pulse of suburban life thumps on.
The Beltway, which slices through neighborhoods where seven of the shootings occurred, remains jammed and manic. School attendance has not swooned, although children sit in classrooms behind drawn shades, recess has been put on indefinite hold and police officers with rifles patrol schoolyard perimeters.
People here are carefully carrying on with the tasks that keep them alive — and make them targets.
“If you let this sniper run your life, you may as well hide in the back hall closet,” said Peake, who was out this crisp autumn afternoon at Sligo Creek Golf Course. The course lies 10 minutes from the Kensington Shell Station, where last Thursday a woman was killed while vacuuming her minivan.
While Peake was willing to play golf on a thickly wooded course where he conceded he was fair game for a sniper, he has reined in his family. His 3-year-old daughter is not allowed out of doors.
This combination of annoyed bravura and calibrated retreat has begun to define the daily lives of residents of Montgomery County. Before five people were shot to death here in the past week, this sprawling suburb of Washington was known primarily for the extraordinarily high percentage of its residents who are well-off, well-educated and live in big houses.
Now it is a place where going to school requires tactical planning.
Nicholas Shann, 11, is a sixth-grader at Julius West Middle School in Rockville, Md., about five miles from where a man was shot to death last Thursday while mowing a lawn.
Nicholas lives three blocks from the school and normally walks home by himself. But his mother, Allegra Shann, an interior decorator, has canceled those walks for the foreseeable future.
As has been the case since late last week, the shades at his school were drawn shut Tuesday, the doors were locked, all physical education class were confined to the gym and no one was allowed to go outside until buses and parents showed up to take children home. All after-school activities were canceled.
Teachers and students agreed that was it hard to concentrate in class on Tuesday. An unusually high percentage of the students who did show up Tuesday, Green said, ask to see the school nurse. They complained of stomachaches and several demanded that they be taken home, she said.
“I had a dream last night that the shooter guy was in my school,” said Monica Kellem, 12, a seventh-grader from Rockville, before jumping on a bus home Tuesday afternoon. “Now, I am going home and I am staying home.”
In nearby Kensington, Margaret Upton, 36, was asked by a reporter outside a children’s library if she would talk about the shooting.
“Not out here,” she said, as she pulled her baby from the back seat and grabbed her older son by the hand. “But after we get inside, I’d be happy to.”
Sniper has affluent Maryland County on edge
Daily Emerald
October 8, 2002
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