Sniper Critically Injures Teenage Boy

The sniper taking deadly aim in Washington’s suburbs struck again Monday, critically wounding a 13-year-old boy as he stood outside the doors of his middle school--the eighth victim in a series of shootings that began last week.

Forensic evidence linked Monday’s attack to the earlier shootings, which left six people dead and one wounded, police said. The latest shooting prompted officials to intensify their investigation and bolster security for thousands of anxious students and families from Baltimore to Virginia.

The gathering horror set off last week mounted again Monday with new urgency over a long, strained day that indicated that even the region’s children were at risk.

In suburban Maryland, where most of the shootings have occurred, frightened parents rushed to their children’s schools, police teams stood vigil in schoolyards and public officials urged residents to patrol their own street corners.

“All of our victims have been defenseless, but now we’re stepping over the line. Our children don’t deserve this. I guess it’s getting to be really, really personal now,” said Montgomery County Police Chief Charles A. Moose, whose eyes moistened with tears as he spoke angrily.

On Monday evening, Moose announced that at his request the federal government had created a multiagency task force, which will work under his direction with authorities in the areas where the shootings occurred. It will include elements from the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the U.S. attorney’s office in Baltimore and other agencies.

Moose’s detectives in Montgomery County were confronted Wednesday and Thursday with five killings in less than 16 hours--victims shot as they performed the mundane tasks of everyday life such as shopping and pumping gas.

Three of those fatal shootings and a similar one late Thursday just inside the District of Columbia--as well as the wounding of a woman about 50 miles away in Virginia on Friday--were linked to the same variety of high-velocity .223-caliber bullet found Monday inside the chest and abdomen of the eighth-grade Bowie middle school student. The bullets in two of the killings were too badly mangled to provide any forensic evidence, officials said.

On Monday night, police officials in Prince George’s County, where the school shooting occurred, and federal firearm investigators said ballistics tests performed on a fragment removed from the wounded teenager confirmed the link with the other cases.

“Based on circumstances and our tests, the projectile is identical to those recovered at the other crime scenes,” said Joseph M. Riehl, assistant special agent with the Baltimore office of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

The eighth-grader was in critical but stable condition at Children’s Hospital in Washington, where he underwent nearly three hours of surgery. Dr. Martin Eichelberger, the trauma surgeon who performed the operation, said the bullet shattered inside the boy’s chest, piercing his stomach, pancreas, spleen, diaphragm and one lung.

Surgeons gave a bullet fragment to a Prince George’s detective, who then turned it over to ATF agents for ballistic tests. “We were able to find one that was simple to get to and extract it,” Eichelberger said.

Vowing to apprehend the rifle-wielding “bad guy,” Prince George’s County Police Chief Gerald Wilson confirmed that police were looking for a white “box truck,” the vehicle already being sought by Montgomery County police in connection with at least one of last week’s slayings.

William Aleshire, a Bowie city councilman and retired D.C. Metropolitan policeman, said the truck may have been carrying temporary Virginia registration tags--a report that police officials declined to verify. “They gave out a tag number for some sort of white truck,” Aleshire said.

Even if police are “able to narrow down what vehicle the suspect is driving,” Wilson cautioned, the sniper “may be traveling in a different vehicle now.”

Federal and local police officials moved Monday night to consolidate their detective work into the shootings.

Moose said he had requested the formal involvement of federal law enforcement officials “because of the magnitude of the investigation and the likelihood we are going to need additional resources.”

It was unclear whether the consolidated effort would lead to federal charges if a suspect is apprehended. But even before the latest shooting, federal authorities had dramatically escalated their involvement in the investigation over the weekend.

The FBI, meanwhile, was preparing a psychological profile of the shooter, to theorize about the person’s background, possible motivation and pattern of shooting. The FBI also deployed agents to a command post in Montgomery County, while ATF agents performed ballistic tests and Secret Service agents and U.S. marshals assisted in the investigation and school security.

The FBI’s high-tech “Rapid Start” computer program was being used to track and correlate thousands of leads. “They’re coming in from all over,” one official said. Moose added that more than 1,000 “credible leads” were being checked.

In Washington, President Bush also pledged federal aid and said the nation has “witnessed a series of cowardly and senseless acts of violence in the greater Washington area.” A $50,000 reward posted for help in cracking the case was boosted to $160,000 by dusk Monday.

As police learned the sketchy details of the shooting at Benjamin Tasker Middle School in the predominantly middle-class African American community of Bowie, school officials in the region moved swiftly to provide security to students and reassure parents.

Classes were locked down in Montgomery and Prince George’s counties, preventing any visitors from entering. Outdoor activities were canceled as far north as Baltimore and south into Virginia’s Spotsylvania County, where the shooting Friday occurred. And Montgomery and Prince George’s school officials beefed up security, bringing in police and, in some cases, even using Secret Service and Maryland State Police officers to patrol school grounds.

At nightfall, Montgomery County Executive Douglas Duncan urged parents to act as “safety patrols” outside schools and at bus stops to protect their own families. “This community is in a state of fear,” he said. “We need everyone to do their part to bring this killer to justice.”

Throughout the day Monday, Prince George’s school officials urged parents not to remove children from “locked-down” classrooms. “We don’t need to panic,” said Iris Metts, chief executive of the county’s public schools.

But in both affected Maryland counties, there were isolated reports of adults trying to pick up their sons and daughters. Metts said only parents at Tasker were being encouraged to get their children because the school had become a crime scene. Detectives continued interviewing some teachers late into the day.

Outside, other detectives aided by gunpowder-sensitive search dogs combed a wooded area several hundred yards away and across the street from the school--a considerable distance from where the single shot was apparently fired.

A military marksman in camouflage reenacted the shooting in a low crouch position from near the shooting scene. Investigators said some brush may have been moved by the gunman.

Dropped off by his aunt half an hour before the start of school, the critically wounded boy crumpled to the ground just yards from the school door, crying out after he was struck, police said. Officials said the boy’s aunt, a registered nurse, rushed to his side and helped him into her car, then drove him to a nearby hospital. But later, several Tasker instructors said that a seventh-grade teacher was the first to reach the victim.

The wounded boy “actually stood up” and “tried to get into the car himself,” said Prince George’s County Councilwoman Audrey Scott. “He was conscious the whole time.”

Inside, students were kept in their classrooms, uncertain what was going on outside. “They really didn’t know what happened,” said Damaris Ramos, 13, an eighth-grader. “Some people were crying because they thought [the sniper] was going to come into the school.”

“You think you send your kids off to school and it’s a safe place to be,” echoed her father, Johnny Ramos, grasping for words.

Seventh-grader Jill Heizer was nearly mute in horror. “I was like, ‘Oh my God,’ ” she said. “I was so scared.”

She and three friends were leaving with another girl, Erika Prichard, who was being guided firmly away from the building by her mother, Sandra.

“Come on, girls,” said the mother. “We’ve got to go.”

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Times staff writer Josh Meyer contributed to this report.