Victims’ Hopes, Dreams Snuffed Out by Sniper’s Fire

Kenneth H. Bridges saw his job as a calling, and it kept him on the road a lot -- sometimes more than his family wanted.

Bridges, 53, was the entrepreneur who co-founded Matah Network, a distribution network designed to strengthen African Americans by getting them to buy products from black manufacturers. Friends called him charismatic, and neighbors said he was one of the kindest people they knew.

A former Amway distributor, Bridges attended the Wharton School of Business in Philadelphia. Five years ago, he founded the Matah Network.

He was an advocate of government reparations to black Americans. He believed that by buying products built by other African Americans, blacks were giving themselves “internal reparations.”

He lived with his wife and six children in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Germantown. Bridges was in Virginia on Friday for a meeting with officials of Dudley Products, which makes cosmetics and personal care products.

At 9:30 a.m. Bridges was shot and killed by the sniper as he pumped gas in Fredericksburg, only moments after he had talked to his wife by phone.

On Saturday, Matah’s Web site was flooded with messages of sadness and sympathy.

“I am still in shock. He was truly an African warrior,” wrote Doris Oluremi Person.

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James L. “Sonny” Buchanan Jr. was the son of a police officer and he inherited some of a policeman’s sense of community service. The 39-year-old Buchanan had long been active in the area’s Boys and Girls Club, had mentored young people, and had worked with a Crime Solvers hotline.

Friends knew the landscaper for his many personal kindnesses. He was forever dropping off gifts, they said, teaching young people how to grow plants and offering encouragement. George Jones III, 21, whom Buchanan worked with in the Boys and Girls Club, recalled at Buchanan’s funeral how Buchanan had “never tried to be a father figure. He was always just a friend.”

Buchanan had roots in Washington’s Maryland suburbs, where he had gone to high school and the University of Maryland before opening a successful landscaping business. This year, he sold that business to help his father build a dream house in rural Virginia.

He believed in keeping commitments, and he had come back to Maryland to cut the grass of a former customer when he was killed. His father, James Buchanan Sr., had taught his son that those less well-off always deserved help. “He literally took that to heart,” Buchanan said.

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Premkumar A. Walekar left India for the United States at age 18, looking for a better life. He never accepted all the ways of his adopted land, and he planned to move back soon to a house he had purchased in India.

A soft-spoken man, Walekar, 54, attended Montgomery College, a large community college that has been a first step for tens of thousands of immigrants moving to the Washington area. Walekar got a job working for a magazine distributor and held a second job as a steakhouse cook.

He allowed his mother to arrange a marriage for him to an Indian woman named Margaret. He fell in love with her when he saw her picture, he told friends; they were married two days after they met.

Premkumar and Margaret moved to the outer suburb of Olney, Md., where they had two children, Andrew, 23, and Andrea, 24. They were his joy. After he retired from the magazine business, Walekar began driving a cab. He had recently begun trying to arrange his daughter’s marriage, and as soon as he finished that task, he planned to move with his wife back to India.

Instead, he was shot and killed as he pumped gas into his cab in Rockville, Md., last week. “Those cruel hands ended his life like a snap,” his brother-in-law, Lazarus Borge, said at his funeral.

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Sarah Ramos, 34, had finished one year of law school in El Salvador when she emigrated to the United States with her husband, Carlos. The move meant that her husband, a professor who speaks little English, would be at least temporarily unemployed, and that her earnings as a nanny and housecleaner would support the family.

Ramos and her husband hoped for a better life in the Maryland suburbs. And they hoped for a good education for their son, Carlos Jr., 7, who attends elementary school in Silver Spring, Md.

A deeply religious woman, Ramos prayed that God would take care of her young family. But it wasn’t always easy. They didn’t have enough money to buy a car.

Ramos was resting on a bench near Georgia Avenue in Silver Spring, reading a book and waiting for a ride to work, when she was shot and killed.

Her parents came from El Salvador for her funeral. Respecting her wishes, they did not bring her home to El Salvador, but buried her in the land where she hoped to find happiness.

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The Washington suburbs were a new world for Lori Ann Lewis-Rivera when she moved from her childhood home in Mountain Home, Idaho, six years ago. But she was determined to make a go of her life and her new role as a nanny, a job she had wanted even as a teenager.

Organized and determined, Lewis-Rivera, 25, got a job caring for the two young children of a Washington family. She entered a Spanish-speaking Mormon church she learned of through a nanny who was her friend. She soon converted.

And it was there she met Nelson Rivera, an immigrant from Honduras who was working as a landscaper.

Though they could hardly understand each other’s language, they soon married. Three years ago, they had a daughter. They moved into a ground-floor apartment in Langley Park, northeast of Washington.

With some financial help from her employer, she bought a handsome burgundy minivan. She had stopped to vacuum the van at a Shell gas station in Kensington on the morning when she was killed by the sniper’s bullet.

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A friendly man who loved to chat and stroll, 72-year-old Pascal Charlot was a familiar sight in his Northwest Washington neighborhood.

He was an immigrant who had moved from Haiti many years ago. Since then, he had worked as a handyman. He also did odd jobs for neighbors, fixing a cracked door here and mending a piece of broken furniture there. He tended to his invalid wife, who lived with him and his stepson in a brick row house in Washington near Silver Spring.

One of his pleasures was tending to his tiny backyard, where he grew tomatoes and bell peppers. On steamy summer nights, Charlot was known to sit on a chair and admire the garden.

And he loved to walk even more. On the night he was killed by the sniper, Charlot was standing on the corner of Georgia Avenue and Kalmia Road, about 30 blocks from his home.

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James D. Martin, 55, was devoted to his church, his wife and the 11-year-old son, Ben, whom he had had late in life.

He was buying sodas and snacks for his son’s church youth group at a Wheaton, Md., grocery when he became the sniper’s first known victim.

Martin grew up in a family of modest means in rural Missouri in the 1950s and moved to the Washington area after college.

He had been working as a diversity coordinator at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, because, according to his boss, retired Adm. Conrad C. Lautenbacher Jr., “he was devoted to the principle.”

Martin had also thrown himself into mentoring children at Shepherd Elementary School in Washington.

At his funeral, friends remembered him as a soft-spoken, gentle man who loved helping children.

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Dean Harold Meyers’ friends knew him as a man of hard work and steady habits.

For 20 years, Meyers, 53, had worked at a Manassas, Va., office of the architectural engineering firm of Dewberry & Davis LLC, taking part in the company’s biggest development projects.

Neighbors in Gaithersburg, Md., where he lived alone in a townhouse for 25 years, knew him as a man who went to work early and came home late.

He remained close to his three brothers, whose children called him Uncle Dean. He gave them rides in his classic Corvette.

And he took care of his ailing 83-year-old mother.

Meyers grew up in a suburb of Philadelphia and was drafted to serve in Vietnam. He injured his arm in the war. In 1975, after his service, he graduated from Penn State University.

Meyers’ older brother Greg was worried about him when he heard that the sniper was loose in Washington. “I was thinking about calling to talk to him about the situation down there, and how cautious he was being,” Greg said.

Greg Meyers hadn’t reached his brother before the sniper shot and killed Dean as he stood beside his gray Mazda at a gas station in Manassas.

It was 8:15, and Dean Meyers had been working late.