Fearful parents taking kids to school
BOWIE, Md. (AP) – Anxious parents accompanied their children to school or kept them at home Tuesday, a day after a sniper linked to the murder of six adults critically wounded a middle-school pupil. The governor pleaded with the gunman to surrender and “stop this insane killing.” “I can’t stop going to work, the children can’t stop going to school,” said Henry Ollie, 48, leading his 12-year-old son, Charles, to the front door of Benjamin Tasker Middle School in Bowie, where the latest shooting happened. Ordinarily, Charles takes the bus.
Some parents served as volunteer guards, watching over intersections. But it appeared many decided to keep their children home as Monday’s shooting fueled heightened anxiety for families in already nervous suburbs. Some buses arriving at schools carried fewer students than usual.
Tasker student Jessica McFadden, 13, said she knew of at least three friends whose parents were keeping them home. She came to school clutching a pot of pink flowers and a teddy bear, a thank-you present for her teacher for her help Monday.
Her mother, Diane McFadden, said she decided to let her daughter come to school because “they can’t live in fear. That’s why we’re back. You can’t stop what you’re doing because of some sick person.”
Said another 13-year-old, Amanda Wiedmaier: “Usually, I’m embarrassed to walk around and hold my mom’s hand, but I don’t care today.”
Gov. Parris Glendening appealed for an end to the attacks.
“This is a person who is shooting elderly men, shooting women, and now shooting little children,” Glendening said. “And I really think if there is any message, it is for this individual to turn himself in, to stop this insane killing.”
“No one is looking up to him. No one is thinking this is a great act he is doing,” Glendening said. “This is an act of an absolute coward.”
Prince George’s County, the scene of the latest shooting, sent two helicopters to patrol the county as schools opened and had police officers at every school. Police in neighboring Montgomery County, where five people were killed last week, also guarded schools.
“As a community we clearly remain anxious,” Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose said Tuesday morning. “We have a very visible patrol in and around our schools, a very visible patrol around our freeways.”
There was no immediate comment from Prince George’s officials on precise attendance figures, but Jerry Weast, the Montgomery school superintendent, said attendance there was “at the lower end of the normal range.”
Police in Prince George’s County served a search warrant during the night, but the police chief said no arrests were made. No further details about the warrant were offered.
“All of us will have to fight,” Prince George’s County police chief Gerald Wilson said Tuesday morning. “We cannot allow one individual to shut that spirit down in us.”
The 13-year-old student at Benjamin Tasker was shot as his aunt dropped him off Monday morning.
The teen, wounded in the torso, was in critical but stable condition Tuesday at Children’s Hospital in Washington. Doctors said they were optimistic he would survive.
A task force including local and state police, the FBI and the Secret Service mobilized to pursue the sniper, but police acknowledged having few clues or eyewitness accounts to solve one of the most frightening serial killings in memory. Moose said Tuesday that police had received 1,250 credible leads from 6,025 calls.
The sniper has shot eight people since Wednesday, killing six; police have discerned no pattern among the victims. One died on a Washington street, the others within five miles of each other in Maryland’s Montgomery County.
An earlier attack – a non-fatal shooting Sept. 14 in Hillandale in Montgomery County – was being investigated to see if it was related, ATF agent Michael Bouchard said Tuesday. Details of that shooting were not immediately released.
The latest attack Monday morning was 20 miles farther east, in neighboring Prince George’s County north of Washington.
Ballistics tests found the bullet that struck the teen was identical to those that killed some of the others and wounded a woman in Virginia, said Joe Riehl, an agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
All victims were hit by a single bullet fired from a distance. Police have spoken of a single sniper, but have not ruled out the possibility that more than one person is involved.
President Bush denounced the attacks as “cowardly and senseless acts of violence” and ordered FBI profiling experts and ballistics analysts from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to assist local police.
Police and federal agents searched the grounds around Benjamin Tasker, sorted through thousands of tips, pored over maps and put together a psychological profile to hunt down the sniper.
They also began to use a geographic profile submitted by investigators that uses crime locations to determine where the killer feels comfortable traveling and may live. A $150,000 reward has been posted for help in solving the attacks.
All the victims were shot in public places: the boy outside school, two at gas stations, two in parking lots, another outside a post office, another as he mowed the grass and the eighth on a street corner.
Dr. Martin Eichelberger, director of emergency trauma service at Children’s Hospital, said doctors working on the boy made a special effort to find a portion of the bullet to give to police.
Ballistics evidence also linked the Maryland slayings with the wounding of a 43-year-old woman Friday. She was shot in the back in a parking lot at a craft store in Fredericksburg, Va., 50 miles south of here, and was in fair condition Tuesday.
The high-velocity rounds used in the shootings are common military ammunition and are also a favorite of recreational shooters. They can be used in many types of guns.