| Submit your comments on this article |
| Home Front |
| Monkey County coppers looking for random killer... |
| 2002-10-04 |
| Two men, a driver and a shooter, are being sought for the deaths of five people gunned down in the Washington suburbs hours and miles apart from each other, police said Friday. Police were also still looking for a white cargo van, and had refined their description of the vehicle, but did not release the additional details, Montgomery County police chief Charles Moose said. The description of the van and two men first came from a single witness at the scene of one of the shootings, but Moose refused to say whether that was the only witness. "You've got a driver, you've got a shooter," Moose said. "In terms of whether that turns out to be a mistake, I want to say no lead is a mistake. We will search down all leads, if we track down the truck and it turns out not to be involved then that is the case." He doesn't sound too doubtful about the truck... Moose said investigators were tracking down more than 200 leads. A man arrested near the scene of one of the shootings turned out not to be involved, the police chief said. Probably won't be the only one stopped... Moose also said police were looking into a shooting Thursday night in Washington to see if it was related. In that shooting, Pascal Charlot, 72, of Washington, was shot once in the chest as he stood on a street corner in Northwest Washington. In the Our Nation's Capital, that's not an unheard-of occurrence. It could be related, or not... Joseph Riehl, a spokesman for the Baltimore office of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, would not comment on whether any slugs had been recovered. Investigators are "90 percent" certain the five were all killed with a .223-caliber weapon, police said. Riehl, however, said a person with reasonable shooting skills could accurately use a weapon loaded with .223 rounds from about 150 yards. Riehl said such weapons can be accurate up to 600 meters, or about 650 yards. Since this happened only ten miles or so to the west of where I work, I take it personally. WTOP also says the coppers are looking into a similar shooting in Spottsylvania, in Virginia. |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |
| #4 Charlot case: same gun, confirmed. They seem to think the case of the woman shot in Virginia may also be related. We'll see. |
| Posted by: Kathy K 2002-10-05 08:02:48 |
| #3 As a follow-up, http://www.koenighaus.net/indepundit/archives/001122.html#001122 has a very thorough running update on the case. I might note, also, replying to Allah the Dog Faced God, that maybe the police _don't_ yet know the description of the shooters. It was only in one case so far that witnesses managed to get a good look at the famous white box truck, after all, and they might well not have been able to see the occupants clearly enough to get a good ID. |
| Posted by: Joe 2002-10-04 20:18:29 |
| #2 I live in Manassas and work in Tyson's Corner, and I can tell you that I've been looking askance at white "box trucks" today. This is exhausting and enervating, because as the Post pointed out today, there are just so damn many of them - they're all over the place doing deliveries and whatnot every day. The police certainly were stopping a lot of them yesterday, but given the paucity of the evidence they had at that point, I don't really see what else they could have done. I'm suspicious about the Charlot shooting myself, because, looking at the map, the location (which, by the way, was only a block from the MD/Montgomery County state line on Georgia Avenue, next to Silver Spring) is pretty much in a rough line with the other locations of the murders. They did recover bullet fragments from the old fellow's body, so if they were able to find any bullets or bullet fragments from the other killings, we might be able to get some more data soon. For that matter, Chief Moose also released some very detailed data about that truck in the press conference which might be helpful - _if_ the truck hasn't been abandoned because the killer or killers have caught on that their vehicle is being searched for by every boy and girl in blue within 50 miles of the District. I think the Fredericksburg shooting (which, incidentially and most thankfully, the woman who was the victim appears to be surviving) is more of a copycat thing, because the vehicle involved was very different and the weapon appears not to have been the high-powered rifle involved in the MD killings. BTW, for what it's worth, at least one other blogger is speculating that the first victim, James Martin, was the intended target, and the others were shot to throw police off the track. Thing is, from what little I know - Mr. Martin worked for NOAA as some sort of analyst - I have no idea why _he_ would be the target of a killer, either. |
| Posted by: Joe 2002-10-04 20:14:35 |
| #1 "Two men" is hardly the type of identification that the public needs to provide its information role in this type of incident. Perhaps, there is some "profiling" sensitivity here, that is not advancing public safety. |
| Posted by: Allah the Dog Faced God 2002-10-04 19:31:26 |