Seven Years, One Month*

Tonight around 9PM, John Muhammed will be put to death by lethal injection at Greensville Penitentiary in Jarrot, VA. Muhammed, and his accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, are better known singularly as the Washington sniper. I can’t believe it’s been a little more than seven years since that terrible October. I was living in Herndon, at the time. It was so frightful living in the DC area during that month. I remember how people were saying that the sniper may be going around in a white van or truck. From then on, everybody would have one eye trained on every white vehicle they saw, wondering if that’s who had killed 10 people and was out looking for more blood. Once when we were at Office Depot in Fairfax, my mom and brother, I think, went inside to look at printers. I stayed in the car, but it got too unbearable just sitting there. So, I kept an eye out for any white cars, and when I didn’t see any, I made a mad dash for the store. Then my mom asked me to go back out and get something, then bring it back in again. I really didn’t want to do it. God knows why I eventually did. But I was scared out of my mind for the 20 seconds it took to run out to the car, get whatever it was, and haul ass back into the store. Metro DC is a huge area, so it’s hard to fathom that kind of fear coursing through more than six million people for a whole month, all because of a man and his then-17-year-old friend.

One of the shootings happened less than half a mile from my grandma’s house in Falls Church, at the Home Depot at Seven Corners. That really got my attention. It was immediately reported on the news, and I asked my dad if grandma was okay, and that maybe he should call her to see. I don’t even remember if he did or not, I was just really frightened by how close he had been to someone from my family. I’m not really someone who openly shows compassion towards family members, also, so that just shows you how worried I was.

I don’t necessarily approve of capital punishment, but when you think of how much that guy affected the area I lived in, it’s hard to think of any other punishment as justice.