Rush to Assist Youngest Shooting Victim Recalled

The mother of the youngest victim of the Washington area snipers sobbed loudly in court yesterday during the Montgomery County trial of John Allen Muhammad as the boy's aunt testified about the frightful morning when Iran Brown was shot outside his Prince George's County middle school.

Jurors listened to a recording of a frantic Tanya Brown talking to a 911 dispatcher on a cellphone as she rushed her seriously wounded nephew to a clinic and honked her horn furiously on the morning of Oct. 7, 2002.

"Oh my God, we gotta hurry up," she told the dispatcher. "Are you okay, Iran?"

The dispatcher asked whether the boy, then 13, was breathing.

"Yes, he's still breathing," Brown answered. "But he looks pale."

The call was played during the fourth day of testimony in the first-degree murder trial of Muhammad, 45, accused of six slayings in Montgomery. The attempt to kill Iran Brown, is not among the crimes Muhammad is charged with, but prosecutors are showing jurors evidence from all 10 homicides and three woundings by the snipers in 2002.

The teenager's mother, who was a spectator, stepped out of the courtroom, crying loudly. Tanya Brown grew teary on the stand but answered questions calmly and was not cross-examined by Muhammad, who is representing himself.

Wrapping up testimony relevant to the Brown shooting, prosecutors moved on to the next two, at gas stations in suburban Virginia.

Muhammad had a tense exchange with Prince William County police officer Steven Bailey, who took the stand to describe the scene after Dean H. Meyers, 53, was killed at 8:10 p.m. Oct. 9 at a Sunoco gas station in Manassas. Bailey said Muhammad was at the station as Bailey, then a rookie, secured the scene. The officer said he saw Muhammad's Caprice, talked to Muhammad and allowed him to leave. In court, Muhammad asked Bailey about his work that night, and the officer at times looked exasperated.

"He was trying to get me riled up," Bailey said later. "At points, some of the questions got me hot under the collar."

Muhammad, who briefly represented himself in Virginia, also cross-examined Bailey sternly at that trial. His defense in both cases seems to focus on demonstrating that none of the witnesses has first-hand knowledge of who used the rifle in the attacks or where the shots came from.

Muhammad was convicted of murder in Virginia in 2003 for killing Meyers and is on death row there.

"I want to see him pay the consequences just like anybody else," Bailey said. "I want justice done."

The ubiquitous Chevrolet Caprice -- which one witness described as "funky blue, a type of color that needed a paint job'' -- was spotted again two days later in Spotsylvania County, where Kenneth Bridges, 53, was fatally shot at an Exxon station.

Christine Goodwin, a software engineer who lived near the gas station, described how she anxiously pumped gas there that morning while warily eyeing the Caprice.

"I was really unnerved," she testified, saying she thought the gas station would be attractive to the snipers because it was near Interstate 95.

When she got to work, booted up her computer and logged on to a news site, she saw an image of the gas station. "I left work immediately," not bothering to shut off the computer, she said.