A Polite Boy, an Angry Mentor

TACOMA, Wash. -- They were unlikely companions.

From one corner of America to another, John Allen Muhammad has lived his 41 years by his own rules.

In the Army in Louisiana, where he was a B-student sharpshooter and went by his given name John Williams, he was twice court-martialed in the 1980s for disobeying orders and punching out a fellow sergeant.

As John Allen Muhammad, a converted black Muslim, he violated a court order in Washington state in the 1990s, terrorizing his wife, kidnapping his three young children and holing up on the floor of a Christian chapel in a homeless mission.

And in recent weeks, police now suspect, he lived out of his car with a 17-year-old Jamaican he variously called his son or stepson, picking off victims at random with a Bushmaster high-velocity rifle.

The teenager -- there is no record of any family relationship to Muhammad -- had lived most of his 17 years by the rules of others.

He was born Lee Boyd Malvo to a teenage mother and a 39-year-old mason in the heart of a virtual war zone -- the Jubilee Hospital in downtown Kingston, Jamaica.

He grew up amid the brutal drug wars, record murder rates and wrenching poverty that endures on the Caribbean Island nation, but not without deep Jamaican family values -- an abiding and polite respect with which he greeted any elder “yes, ma’am” or “yes, sir.” He had no police record.

Three years ago, Malvo and his mother, Una James, left it all behind for a better future. Illegally, they landed on the Florida shores, smuggled in on a cargo ship.

They migrated to Washington state.

In search of a future, they found John Allen Muhammad.

In time, Muhammad would take the boy with him to that homeless mission in Bellingham, Wash., a town near the Canadian border that one resident describes as “a mecca for people who want to be as far away as possible from wherever they are from.”

Malvo would enroll in the local high school, where he proved to be an insatiable learner who knew more about U.S. history than his teacher, classmates recalled. But it wouldn’t last; immigration authorities caught up with him, yanked him from school and detained him for three months until last February.

It was after his release, and after a cross-country odyssey that apparently included stays in Baton Rouge, La., and Montgomery, Ala., that Malvo and Muhammad found themselves Thursday in a beat-up Chevy Caprice, surrounded by police officers in the early morning darkness near Frederick, Md., suspected of being random snipers who have terrorized Washington, D.C., and environs since Oct. 2.

That is the picture that emerges from hundreds of pages of court records and interviews with dozens of state, U.S. and Jamaican government officials, and friends and relatives of both men.

Muhammad was born in Louisiana and raised in Baton Rouge, where he grew up with a cousin, Edward Holiday. Holiday, 38, said Thursday that Muhammad’s mother died when he was young and he was raised by two aunts, both schoolteachers, and his grandfather.

He has two brothers and two sisters.

“He was real happy-go-lucky,” Holiday recalled. “We built go-carts, and we rode them in the park. We’d fix up bikes and ride them in the neighborhood. We were like brothers.

“He was the protector of the neighborhood,” he added. “He would stand up for anybody. All the kids looked up to him. He was our hero.”

In high school Muhammad played football, tennis and ran track.

Once when Holiday wanted to take a girl on a date, but had no good shoes or car, Muhammad lent him a pair of shoes and his black ’78 Olds Cutlass Supreme.

As a soldier, Sgt. Williams never ranked high among America’s fighting men. He enlisted in the Louisiana National Guard in August 1978, launching a checkered, 16-year military career that would earn routine ribbons from a stint as an engineer in the Persian Gulf War, two courts-martial and marksmanship skills that ranked below expert.

Rafael Miranda, his commanding officer in the National Guard, recalled him as distinctly “middle-of-the-road.”

“He was a very nice guy, liked by all the men,” Miranda said. “He was like tall, athletic, with a million-dollar smile. He was, I would say, a natural born leader.... But he did have his flashes of anger.”

Those occasional rages, which Miranda attributed to marital problems that have plagued Muhammad throughout his adult life, led to two convictions for minor infractions of the military code.

In 1982 he was found guilty of failing to report for duty and disobeying his commanders’ orders. He went AWOL for three drills, and ultimately was fined $100 and busted one rank. A year later, he slugged a sergeant above the eye.

But he learned welding, combat engineering and metal working, giving him the skills he would later use to set up shop as an auto and truck mechanic.

His final ranking as a marksman was sharpshooter, one notch below expert.

Military records released Thursday by the Pentagon did not specify the reasons for his discharge in April 1994. But, after a military tour that included postings at five military bases from Fort Ord, Calif., to Germany, his last posting at Fort Lewis planted his roots in Washington state.

Muhammad married for a second time there in 1988, after his first marriage collapsed a few years earlier. But it wasn’t long after his military discharge that his second marriage, to Mildred Denice Williams, would end even more bitterly. During the marriage, which produced three children, there were charges and counter-charges that cast Muhammad as a man prone to serious violence.

As one of the couple’s neighbors and longtime friends in Tacoma, Anthony G. Muhammad, put it in an affidavit on file in their divorce case: “From 1992 until 1999, John and Mildred and the children had a model family picture.” But as Mildred’s workload and family pressure mounted, Anthony Muhammad wrote, the couple began to break apart.

At the time, John Allen Muhammad owned and ran Express Car/Truck Mechanic Inc., which advertised, “The Future is Here Now,” and his wife had been working there.

Eventually it got ugly. In court filings seeking a restraining order against him in 2000, Mildred alleged that Muhammad had terrorized her, threatened her with murder and took their three children for long periods of time without permission.

She also asserted that her husband’s long Army career had made him a weapons and demolitions expert, which made her fear him. At one point, she alleged, his threats drove her to hospitalization in May 2000.

Mildred did win several restraining orders against him, first in Tacoma and later in Maryland and Washington, D.C., after she fled with the children to a relative’s home in suburban Clinton, Md.

In the divorce documents, she called Muhammad a “very irrational” man who regularly threatened to “destroy” her. She said Muhammad stalked her at home and at work, and tapped her phone. In other court records, Mildred Denice Williams said her ex-husband engaged in a pattern of “physical, sexual or ... emotional abuse of a child,” and that his “abusive use of conflict ... creates the danger of serious damage to the child’s psychological development.”

In the end, the Tacoma court agreed to bar Muhammad from contacting her and the couple’s three children, now ages 12, 10 and 9.

The court ordered Muhammad to pay $850 a month in child support a month. His wife kept their 1987 Nissan 300ZX sports car, a 1985 Jaguar XJ6 and one of their businesses, known as Reality Enterprises.

But none of these court mandates stopped Muhammad from abducting his three children again in 2000.

By the time Williams landed in Bellingham in late October 2001, he was legally John Allen Muhammad; he’d officially changed his name six months earlier, according to documents on file in Tacoma.

And by then, Muhammad had become well acquainted with the Light House Mission in a seedy section of town, across from a printing plant and a car-repair shop. Muhammad had stayed there the previous August with his three children after spiriting them away from Tacoma.

That stay ended when the local sheriff’s office, acting on a writ from Tacoma, took the children out of school and returned them to their mother.

Run by the Union Gospel Missions out of Kansas City, the 79-year-old nondenominational Christian homeless shelter occupies a three-story stucco building that houses 100 or so people a night. The mission housed Muhammad and his children on the floor of the family area, a 30-by-50-foot chapel in a building that sports wall fliers for free donated winter coats, pictures of Jesus and videotapes of “The Story of Jesus.”

When Muhammad returned in October with the 17-year-old boy he called his stepson, he stayed in a large dorm room with 52 beds for men only.

“On several other occasions, beginning on Oct. 20, 2001 ... John Muhammad was accompanied by a teenaged male who John claimed to be his stepson,” the mission confirmed in a statement Thursday. “The individual was using the name Lee Malvo.”

By then, Malvo’s life had been fuller than his 17 years.

At age 14, he had joined his mother in a smuggling vessel from Haiti, one of the scores of rickety ships that set out every year from the impoverished Caribbean island packed with illegal immigrants. They landed in Florida in June 1999, Malvo would later tell investigators for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. And they entered America undetected.

It wasn’t until almost Christmas of last year, though, that the INS would catch up with them. And by then, Malvo had endeared himself to many at Bellingham High School, where he enrolled as a junior in early November. Malvo’s name even appears in last year’s yearbook, although he didn’t show up for his photo session.

Officially, the school district’s communications director, Lavelle Freudenberg, would say only that he attended the school for “a brief period.”

But his classmates and others remember Malvo for his abiding manners and mind.

“He knew more than the teacher did. He knew way more. He was always correcting the teacher,” said Tami Rearwin, 16, a senior who had Malvo in her U.S. history class. “He always had something to say about something.”

Crissy Greenawalt, 17, another senior, had college writing class with Malvo, who told his classmates he’d moved from Florida. “He had a lot of opinions. They were really thought out,” she recalled.

Malvo showed up for class each day in the same jeans and green pullover, wearing shirts of flannel or wool. He performed well in class, but each night he retired to the homeless shelter, and some at school said his homework suffered.

Here’s how one source at the school, who asked not to be named, remembered the young Malvo: “He was exceptionally friendly, and polite. He called everybody sir and ma’am. He represented that he lived in Florida, but that may not have been true.

“He was very intelligent, but he had some problems in turning in his homework. He used the computers in school. He was doing a report on global warming; he was fascinated by it.”

Through those autumn and winter months, while young Malvo was in class, there’s no evidence Muhammad ever landed a steady job. Down at the Waterfront Bar, Wally Oyen, the morning bartender, said, “Muhammad often came in to have one or two two-dollar beers, usually around 10 a.m., which means he missed the happy hour that ends at 8 a.m.”

Many who met the two men assumed they were only temporarily at the shelter, and that they intended to settle in town.

But one day, Malvo disappeared. His last day at school was Dec. 18. On the 19th, INS agents hauled him away.

Details are sketchy, but Jamaican and U.S. government officials say police in Bellingham, responding to a domestic dispute that included Malvo and his mother, grew suspicious about their immigration status. They called in the INS, who arrested mother and son and took them to a Seattle detention center.

There, authorities got what ultimately would turn out to be a crucial piece of evidence in the Washington, D.C., sniper probe.

Beyond telling agents the tale of their journey from Jamaica to Haiti to Florida to Washington state, Malvo and his mother were fingerprinted in their routing processing. Malvo’s print would match one found at the scene of a September shooting in Montgomery, Ala., and at the scene of one of the Washington-area sniper shootings, government sources said.

Malvo apparently left behind other clues in Bellingham: The FBI also showed up at the school this week, reportedly seeking his handwriting samples to compare with notes left at the sniper crime scenes.

But at the time they were detained last December, Malvo and his mother were merely undocumented migrants. They were held for about three months, then released on bond after a Feb. 20 hearing.

The ensuing months saw Muhammand and Malvo undertake their journey that would eventually lead to the Washington, D.C., area. They visited friends and relatives in Baton Rouge in August, recalled Holiday, the cousin.

Holiday said he suspected something was wrong because Muhammad was dirty and sweaty and “his demeanor was so different. I knew something was going on, but didn’t know what.”

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Fineman reported from Washington, Hong from Bellingham and Verhovek from Tacoma. Times staff writers John Hendren, Esther Schrader and Josh Meyer in Washington, Patrick McDonnell in North Carolina, Lianne Hart in Baton Rouge and Lynn Marshall in Seattle also contributed.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

A Look at 2 Lives

John Allen Muhammad: A veteran of the Persian Gulf War, his Army shooting skill was rated one notch below expert. He was court-martialed twice in the 1980s, for disobeying orders and punching a fellow soldier. In 2001, he changed his name from John Williams, years after converting to Islam. He has married and divorced twice.

Lee Boyd Malvo: Born in Jamaica, he came to the U.S. with his mother illegally three years ago. He attended high school last year in Bellingham, Wash. At one point, he lived with Muhammad at a homeless shelter.