 Yonathan Melaku admitted today that during the second shooting at the National Museum of the Marine Corps, he set up a video camera within the interior of his vehicle to record the shooting incident. The video shows Melaku repeatedly firing a handgun out the passenger-side window, and he narrates the incident on the video and states, among other things: “That’s my target. That’s the military building. It’s going to be attacked,” and at the conclusion of multiple shots exclaiming, “Allahu Akbar,” repeatedly.
Melaku, a 2006 graduate of Edison High School in Franconia, is a naturalized citizen who moved to the United States from EthiÂoÂpia in 2005, according to U.S. authorities. Marine Corps officials have said he joined the reserves in September 2007 and that he was never deployed overseas and was not scheduled to deploy.
Before his arrest in the shootings, Melaku had been linked to a spate of vehicle break-ins in Loudoun County. He was found guilty of two counts of grand larceny in Loudoun in November and was also convicted of trying to escape from his jail cell by digging through a cinderblock wall. A plea agreement in that case ended with Melaku having to serve six months in jail.
| Someone, somewhere, will make the argument that the poor dear did not adjust well to the change of cultures. Someone will be correct, which is why the poor dear will spend the next quarter century in prison, embedded in yet a third culture. |
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