Rampage Victims Selected At Random

Allison Lamont Norman is led from the Wicomico County Sheriff's Office in Salisbury. He is charged in the rampage in which two died. (Chris Gardner -- AP)

She said their mother, Alice Marie Stanford, worked at a variety of jobs, including housekeeping and in nursing homes. Palmer always thought of Norman as a respectful but happy-go-lucky person. "It's not like he was a menace or anything," she said.

A neighborhood friend of Norman's, Toriann Thompson, 25, described him yesterday as "playful, like a normal kid."

"He's quiet, for real," Thompson said. "For him to go off like this, somebody must have really done something to him."

Norman is accused of fatally shooting Jamell Weston, 24, in the face with a 9mm Glock handgun and wounding Weston's cousin, Marcus Cannon, at an apartment complex in Laurel on Thursday morning. Charging documents say Norman lived at the Carvel Gardens apartments in Laurel, where the first shootings took place.

Norman went on a 45-minute shooting spree while driving a stolen car south on U.S. 13 toward Maryland, police said. They said he wounded Anthony White, 45, in a shopping center in Laurel, fired on a sanitation worker in Delmar, Md., shot at cars in Salisbury and climbed into Peters's SUV before killing him.

Also shot were two women driving vehicles in Salisbury. Carla D. Green was in a white van when she was hit in the upper torso. She lost control of the van, which came to rest in the front yard of a home. Green was listed in critical condition last night.

The other woman was Marsha Hankerson, 44, an office assistant at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. She said in an interview yesterday that she was driving to work at 8:40 a.m. in her green Chevrolet Malibu when she heard a popping noise and noticed a hole in her car's windshield. She saw that another woman had a hole in her car window and that people were beginning to scatter.

"Then I felt a burning in my shoulder," Hankerson said, which is when she realized she'd been shot. Her pink-and-blue-striped shirt began to fill with blood. She was treated at a hospital and released.

Sylvania Jackson, Peters's mother, sat at his home yesterday as wails of agony came from another room. "He was just at the wrong place at the wrong time," Jackson said.

To the north in Seaford, Johnnie Mae White, 45, stayed in touch with her hospital-bound husband, Anthony, by telephone. He was shot once in the left thigh and once in the stomach at the Discount Land shopping center in Laurel.

He had just dropped off his black, 1977 GMC pickup truck at Bob's Speed Shop on U.S. 13 to have some exhaust work done when a gunman approached in a Ford Focus and asked whether White needed a ride. Seconds later, the man fired his gun. Wounded, White fell into a ditch.

"I asked him how he got out of the ditch," White's wife said. "He said he rolled himself all the way out, then rolled across the parking lot before Mr. Bob saw him."

Robert Groton, who owns the garage, said he thought at first that White had had a seizure.

"We got a pillow and blanket, and when we got to him we found out he had been shot," Groton said. "If we hadn't got over to him, he might have bled to death."

Johnnie Mae White said her husband got up early that morning and almost didn't take the truck in. "I said, 'No, take it today,' " she said.

She said her husband did not know Norman but had seen him around town. She said she does not know why her husband was shot, adding that there is no way to predict random violence.

"It could have happened anytime, anywhere," she said. "It could have happened in the grocery store."

Staff writer Amit R. Paley and staff researcher Bobbye Pratt contributed to this report.