By Paul Duggan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 30, 2006; A01
Oct. 3, 2002: so vivid still.
"I was in exercise class," Vickie Snider said. "They came in and announced it. They said there had been shootings in Aspen Hill." This was the morning fear took hold -- that Indian summer Thursday when, in just over two hours, four sniper victims fell in lower Montgomery County and terror spread through the Washington area.
Day One of the siege, the three-week communal nightmare.
"They told us to leave in groups," recalled Snider, 45, who was baby-sitting for a niece's 1-year-old daughter that morning. "So we finished up, we talked about it, and then I just left."
Fetching little Hailey from day care, she drove home to Rockville.
"I was trying to get her to nap," Snider said. "I was in the den. I think it was around 1-something. . . . I remember I had just gotten Hailey her lunch. I had her in my arms. And I could see out the window -- the policemen were coming up my sidewalk. And they came to my door. Two of them. And as soon as I opened my door, I saw they had his license."
Her brother's license.
"Oh, God! . . . Sonny!"
James L. "Sonny" Buchanan, 39, was the first to die that day, a landscaper shot while mowing a lawn. And tomorrow, when John Allen Muhammad -- already convicted and sentenced to death in a Virginia sniper case -- finally goes on trial in the community that suffered the worst of the regionwide rampage, Snider plans to be there, in a Montgomery County courtroom, even though she dreads it.
Montgomery is where the October madness began and where it ended.
"Emotionally, it's going to be very hard," Snider said, sitting on a bench in Rockville Civic Center Park, a tranquil spot where she takes refuge from time to time. In recent weeks, she has been busy arranging to put her life on hold for the trial, which could last into the summer and in which Muhammad will act as his own attorney. Montgomery prosecutors will not seek the death penalty, meaning he would face life in prison without parole if convicted.
"There are probably things about that day, that whole time, that I've suppressed, that I don't realize I've suppressed," Snider said. "And I know this might bring it back.
"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.
"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."
* * *
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."
