At Last, Sister of Sniper Victim Gets Her Day in Court

Vickie Snider, whose brother James L. Buchanan was killed, says she has a responsibility to attend the trial. "I have to represent my brother." (By Nikki Kahn -- The Washington Post)

"But I have to be there. I have to represent my brother."

As with loved ones of all the Montgomery dead (six of the 13 October sniper victims were killed in the county), her family's day in court has been a long time coming.

After Muhammad and his young companion, Lee Boyd Malvo, were arrested Oct. 24, 2002, State's Attorney Douglas F. Gansler (D) quickly charged them with murder, arguing that they should be put on trial in Montgomery first because his county had borne the brunt of the attacks. But the Bush administration decreed that Virginia, where the death penalty is far easier to obtain than in Maryland, would get first crack. Five shootings had occurred in four jurisdictions there.

Muhammad, now 45, was found guilty and sentenced to lethal injection in the killing of Dean H. Meyers, a civil engineer shot Oct. 9 while pumping gas in Prince William County.

Malvo, now 21, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole in the Oct. 14 fatal shooting of FBI analyst Linda Franklin in a Home Depot parking lot in Seven Corners. He was given a second life term after pleading guilty in the slaying of businessman Kenneth H. Bridges, who was shot Oct. 11 while pumping gas in Spotsylvania County.

Not knowing whether they ever would see Muhammad or Malvo in a Montgomery courtroom, Snider and relatives of other victims in the county drove for hours to attend those back-to-back, six-week trials in Virginia in late 2003. Because of intense local publicity surrounding the October attacks, in which 10 people were killed and three wounded, the pair had been granted changes of venue.

"I had to be away from my family," said Snider, a mother of three who owns an auto-repair shop with her husband and is a school crossing guard. Muhammad's trial was in Virginia Beach, Malvo's in Chesapeake, Va. More than 200 miles from Rockville, Snider lived in motels. "I would leave on Sunday, and I'd drive there," she said, "and then I'd leave on Friday and drive all the way home." And then she'd do it again.

Other victims' loved ones did the same. "It's like you belong to a club that you don't want to belong to," Snider said. "But you love and support each other throughout."

Unlike the Virginia cases, each of which focused on a single slaying, Muhammad's Montgomery trial (and Malvo's in the fall, barring a plea bargain) will deal with a half-dozen attacks, from the Oct. 2 slaying of James D. Martin, a diversity coordinator for the federal government who was shot outside a Wheaton supermarket, to the Oct. 22 fatal shooting of driver Conrad E. Johnson on a county Ride On bus in Aspen Hill.

And the trial will revisit, in all its grim aspects, the day when the Washington area suddenly realized it was in the cross hairs: that bloody, chaotic morning of Oct. 3, when first Buchanan went down in White Flint, shot in the back, and three others soon followed nearby: Premkumar A. Walekar, a cabdriver pumping gas; Maria Sarah Ramos, a house cleaner sitting on a bench; and Lori-Ann Lewis-Rivera, a nanny vacuuming a minivan at a gas station.

Gansler, a likely candidate for state attorney general this year, has declined to discuss the case publicly as the trial date nears, including his decision to spend hundreds of thousands of tax dollars prosecuting a man already under a death sentence. He has described the trial as "insurance," noting that Muhammad has not run out of appeals in the Virginia case, and he has dismissed suggestions that the publicity could help him in the November election.

Also, Gansler has said, the county is entitled to exact justice for the violence and terror it experienced.