TheAgitator.com
Sniper News
Tuesday, October 15th, 2002The sniper hit pretty close to home last night, about three miles, really. The Home Depot in question is where I go to fill the propane tank for the barbecue.
Seven Corners (the shopping center where the attack took place) gets its name from the fact that several main Northern Virginia arteries intersect in and around the shopping center. After the attack, the sniper had a number of otions. The Beltway (495) exits are just a couple of miles down the road. He also could have hopped on Route 7, I-66, or Route 50. Basically, the guy was a short hop from several roads that would have gotten him out of the area in just a few minutes. I suspect that by the time the cops dropped the dragnet, he was already watching the coveage on television.
Witnesses say he fled eastbound on Route 50. That would have taken him toward the District (and about a hundred feet from my house). About 7 miles later, he’d have hit the Roosevelt Bridge, which would then dump off in D.C. next to the Kennedy Center, just blocks from the White House. My guess is that if the witnesses are correct, he took 50 to I-395, or to the GW Parkway, which would get him south of the Beltway in minutes.
A few items of interest from last night’s attack:
The Home Depot has a Michael’s crafts store just a few dozen feet to its south. That would make the third time, I believe, that he’s hit someone near a Michael’s.
Police scanners last night reportedly told area cops to look for a “cream colored van driven by an olive-skinned man with an automatic shotgun.” Funny, but the “olive-skinned” part of that description was somehow filtered out by the time the message got to the media. A reporter broached the description during the Q&A with the Fairfax County police chief. He declined to comment. I really hope our law enforcement leaders aren’t censoring important identifying information to either a) protect ethnic sensitivities, or, b) avoid arousing terrorism panics. If this guy’s going to be caught, the public needs to be involved, and we need all the information necessary to help us find him.
But that’s not happening. Read Howard Kurtz on the regrettable performances of Montgomery County Police Chief Moose and his minions on the Sunday morning talk shows.
My wacko theory is that the sniper is a crazed enviromentalist. He has been targeting people at gas stations (he thinks oil exploration hurts the environment), and now a Home Depot (they allegedly sell rainforest grown wood).
I don’t really have an explanation for his hatred of craft stores. Maybe he’s sick of the little wooden “Home Sweet Home” decorations. I hate those damn things.
Let’s take the previous comment a little wider — there are a few people (like some of the anarchists who “graced” DC with their presence recently) who have a misplaced and illogical hatred for those of us who choose to live in the suburbs.
Not only do they consider us suburbanites greedy, arrogant, and uncaring, they see the relative safety of suburban life and its examples of convenience (commuter-oriented gas stations, home-improvement stores, easy shopping, even time and space for craftmaking) as a blanket that insulates suburbanites from the “misery” of the rest of the world.
Could it be that our sniper is a malignant outgrowth of the anarchist movement, who wants to bring the “injustice” he sees in the rest of the world (and probably blames on American prosperity) directly and graphically to those who he considers uncaring?
If this is the case, it is the sniper — not suburbia — who needs a little lead-based “education”.
Keep your head down, Radley …
Maybe the previous poster is correct; it’s entirely possible that killing suburbanites is the snipers’ modus operandi, and we’ll just have to leave it at that. As someone who knows way too many people who won’t go north or east of an invisible and arbitrary class/race boundary here in Kansas City (because they “don’t feel safe” in those “bad areas”, day or night), I can see where he’s going with the whole wake-up call theory for those who think they are safe in their gated communities… However, my fear is that all of what has happened so far has just been ‘target practice’ for the sniper(s), and the real targets are inside the Beltway, whose day of reckoning might be coming up soon. It’s just too convenient that the sniping is going on in the surrounding DC area, instead of, say, Winston-Salem, Richmond or Philadelphia’s metro region.