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

"I don't know if everyone is of the same opinion, but I don't think anyone really wants a trial," Snider said of herself and others who lost family members in Montgomery. "I don't think any of us wants to go through it again. But we know there needs to be one."

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Every victim had a story. Buchanan's is just one.

"He was a man who worked hard. He was a generous man, a giving man," Snider said of her brother, who grew up in Montgomery, was engaged to be married and was living with their mother and another sister in Virginia. "And probably, if there is a therapy for the grief I feel, it's all the people who have come to me and told me about the nice things he did for them, just over and beyond what a normal person would do."

The son of a retired county police officer, Buchanan had a degree in business law from the University of Maryland and was a board member of the Montgomery Boys and Girls Clubs. He was active in Habitat for Humanity and a graffiti abatement effort in the county. He helped the police force with its Crime Solvers program. And he wrote poetry.

In "Dreams," he wrote:

They give us strength and energy to push forward in times of peril

They comfort our heart with hope and soothe our soul with beauty and vivid imagery.

The verses are inscribed on a granite marker in a memorial garden near the spot where he was killed, on a stretch of grass behind Fitzgerald Auto Mall off Rockville Pike.

His family also formed Sonny's Kids Foundation, which raises money and awards grants and scholarships to educational institutions and students.

"He mentored kids for many years," Snider said. "He taught them how to work with their hands. . . . Sonny loved kids. Loved them. And he loved life."

In his business, True Colors, he did more than cut grass. He was a landscape architect, his sister said, skilled at constructing "beautiful" pathways and patios, retaining walls and lily ponds. Six months before his death, he had moved from Rockville to Abingdon, Va., more than 300 miles away. But he came back Oct. 3. The Fitzgeralds were old friends and clients, and the lawn at their auto dealership needed a final autumn mowing.

The randomness haunts Snider. "That's the hardest thing for me to get over," she said. "Of all the people in this county, it was him they shot. He came up here for one day."

That morning, before going to her exercise class, she left a message on his cellphone. Buchanan planned to pick up some furniture at her house to take back to Abingdon, and she wanted him to know her door would be open. She reckons now that he was on the ground by then, dead or dying. The day's first sniper bullet, fired from a high-powered, .223-caliber Bushmaster XM15 rifle, struck Buchanan just before 7:45 a.m.

So vivid, those hours. But for Snider, much of the rest of October passed in soft focus.

"The days were surreal," she said. "I just went through the motions. . . . And the saddest thing for me, at every step I took, whether it was planning the memorial or going to see the body, there was devastation. The day I went to see his body, when it was released, that was the day Iran Brown [a 13-year-old boy in Prince George's County] was shot. And at the funeral home, while we were there, there were helicopters with guns hanging out.

"The day we went to Sonny's memorial service," she said, "that was the day Mr. Bridges was shot, with five kids. . . . That was one of the hardest things for me, not only losing my brother but watching as everyone else lost a family member, and knowing they were going to feel what I was feeling, going through what my family was going through."

Now, as painful as she knows it will be, she is ready to relive it in a courtroom.

"I have to be there for him," she said of her brother. "I don't want him to be remembered as just a victim. He wasn't just that. He was a person, a wonderful man."