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Five shot dead in 16-hour span
By MARY JACOBY, Times Staff Writer ASPEN HILL, Md. -- The cab driver was a regular customer at the Mobil station. Thursday morning, as he often did, he parked at a pump, went into the gas station store and bought a lottery ticket. Maybe he was hoping it was his lucky day. Instead, a shot rang out. The man, who had returned to his cab, clutched his left side, slumping against a woman's van parked next to him, mechanic Alex Millhouse said. The woman screamed hysterically. It was the third of what would become five fatal shootings in Montgomery County, Md., in the span of 16 hours Wednesday and Thursday, savage and random crimes that have thrown residents of this suburban Washington, D.C., area into an uproar. Montgomery is the wealthiest county in Maryland and normally fairly tranquil. Last year, the county logged 19 homicides. Until Wednesday, it had recorded 20 for 2002. "Our homicide rate just increased by 25 percent," Montgomery County police Chief Charles Moose said at a news conference. On Thursday, public schools in Montgomery County and the neighboring District of Columbia were on "lock down" status, with the doors barred and the children kept inside for lunch and recess. The FBI and the Secret Service joined local police in looking for the killer or killers, and a $50,000 reward was offered. But the search was complicated by the absence of strong leads. The best authorities had to go on was the account of a woman who had been sitting near the fourth victim, a woman shot in the head outside a post office in Silver Spring, Md., at 8:37 a.m. Thursday. The witness turned and caught a fleeting glance of a white delivery-type truck speeding away. She and other witnesses described a white truck, perhaps with black lettering on the side and damage to its rear. Citizens jammed local 911 lines with tips, while police pulled over many vehicles that fit the description, to no avail. Police are also not sure if they are looking for one or two people, and authorities are awaiting forensic results to confirm that the five victims had been killed by the same type of weapon, believed to be a high-powered rifle. However, Moose said, "We strongly feel that all of these are connected." The violence began about 5:20 p.m. Wednesday when someone fired a shot into the window of a crafts store in a shopping mall in the Aspen Hill area, a middle-class suburb about 15 miles north of downtown Washington. No one was hurt. But at 6:04 p.m., a 55-year-old man identified as James D. Martin of Silver Spring was shot in the parking lot of a grocery store in nearby Wheaton, Md. He had a wife and 11-year-old son. At 7:41 a.m. Thursday, another man was shot while mowing grass outside a business in Rockville, Md. Police identified him as James L. Buchanan, 39, of Arlington, Va. He was a landscaper known for taking care of people. Then at 8:12 a.m., the cabbie was shot while pumping gas at the Mobil station on a busy intersection in Aspen Hill. He was identified as Prenkumar Walekar, 54, of Olney, Md. He was married with a 24-year-old daughter. A few minutes later, at 8:37 a.m., 34-year-old Sarah Ramos of Silver Spring was shot in the head at the post office, which is next to the Leisure World retirement community. That slaying was followed at nearly 10 a.m. with the fatal shooting of 25-year-old Lori Ann Lewis-Rivera in Kensington, Md. Lewis-Rivera of Silver Spring was vacuuming out her van at a Shell station. She was married with a toddler daughter. The killings did not seem to be connected to terrorism. "There's nothing to indicate there's some political motive," Montgomery County police spokesman Nancy Demme said. But that just made the incidents even more incomprehensible to residents. The victims were of different ages, genders and races. They apparently didn't know one another. Their only common characteristic was that they died in public places doing ordinary things on an ordinary day. "I'm almost afraid to walk down the street," said Millhouse, 26, the mechanic at the Mobil station who aided Walekar as the cab driver lay dying. "This is happening in public for no reason." The dead included two white males, a white female, a Hispanic female and the cab driver, who was of Indian descent. The last slaying occurred near an area of Kensington known as "antique row" for its quaint antique shops. Lewis-Rivera had almost finished cleaning out her van when one of the Shell station's technicians, Jimmy Acka, heard a loud noise. He looked up from the car he was working on, thinking there had been a traffic accident. Instead, he saw a woman clutching herself, as if she'd had a heart attack. Lewis-Rivera collapsed and slipped under her van, and gas station workers rushed over to help. Another gas station patron tried to administer CPR but found Lewis-Rivera's nose and mouth filled with blood. That's when they realized, Acka said, that they were witnessing something other than a heart attack. The fact that the victims were all were felled with one shot indicates police are looking for a "skilled shooter," Moose said. "We do have someone that so far has been very accurate in what they are attempting to do." Thursday afternoon, after the van had been towed from the Shell station and the yellow crime-scene tape removed, physician Wayne Meyer pulled into the station to fill up his car. With him was his daughter, a high school student who usually takes a special class in the afternoons at an area school. But safety-conscious administrators would not let her travel to it. Like almost everyone in the area, Meyer had heard of the shootings. But he was shocked when told that one of the victims had died a few feet from where he was pumping his gas. "Right there? In broad daylight?" he asked. The mood was a bit like after the Sept. 11 attacks, he said, when hundreds died at the Pentagon doing ordinary things like going to work or taking an airplane flight.
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