3 Victims, Linked Only by the Randomness of Violence

WASHINGTON -- They had little in common except for the ordinariness of their errands in Maryland and Virginia. Now they are joined in history, victims of a suburban sniper who terrorized a region and frightened a nation.

Lori Ann Lewis-Rivera was vacuuming Cheerios out of the back of her van at a Shell station. Premkumar A. Walekar was pumping gas so he could begin his daily run as a cabby, while Dean Harold Meyers was buying gasoline before heading home after a long day as an engineer.

In a shooting spree that lasted three weeks and left 10 dead and three injured, Walekar was victim No. 3, Lewis-Rivera was No. 5 and Meyers was No. 9. In the aftermath, with two suspects in custody, families and friends of the three are seeking ways to cope with their losses. They are remembering their loved ones not for how they died, but for how they lived.

Lewis-Rivera was everyone’s favorite nanny, an Idaho girl who married a Honduran immigrant. Walekar emigrated from India to ensure that his two children would have the opportunities he wished for himself. Meyers was wounded in Vietnam, the recipient of a Purple Heart.

“There has been so much focus on how they died, but each one has a story,” said Jeff Carter, pastor at the Church of the Brethren in Manassas, Va., where Meyers worshiped. “They reflect different ribbons of humanity. They are of different ages, different professions, different socioeconomic backgrounds, a smattering of America.”

*

Dean Harold Meyers served with Company B, 5th Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Air Cavalry Division. On March 8, 1970, he volunteered for a reconnaissance mission in Phouc Vinh, north of Saigon.

He was hit in the left arm, above the elbow. Doctors removed tendons from his wrist to reconfigure his arm but told him he would be permanently disabled. Within a year he was playing basketball, riding his motorcycle and back home with his family in rural Pennsylvania, enrolling at Penn State University.

There was a girl back then, and they were sweet on each other, but Dean’s brother Greg recalled that she wanted to marry a minister. Dean was a Christian and a churchgoer, but he wanted to be an engineer. Something about the profession appealed -- the attention to detail, the problem-solving.

He adored children, and war buddies recalled that even in Vietnam, whenever they returned to base, local kids would greet him. They knew that he saved candies or trinkets for them.

He died at 53 a bachelor, a doting uncle to his nine nephews and two nieces. He took them to Boston’s Fenway Park for baseball games, offered rides in his classic Corvette, always sent birthday cards and brought Christmas presents. When they visited him in Washington, he often took them to the Smithsonian Institution, sharing his love of history. “All the kids were really special to him,” his brother Greg said.

An outdoorsy type, Meyers liked to jog, play tennis and canoe. He rarely spent money on himself. He bought his manual Canon AE-1 camera secondhand, and even his cars -- perhaps his only indulgence -- were hardly extravagant. The 1990 white Isuzu Trooper had logged 172,000 miles, the gray Mazda Protege, which he was fueling when he died, was nothing fancy.

But his family was surprised to learn after his death the extent of Dean Meyers’ charities. They were unaware that he had for years sponsored several children from the ages of 5 to 18 through World Vision, an international Christian humanitarian organization. They learned that he had turned down $1 million for serving as executor of a friend’s will, saying the fee was excessive.

Sometimes at the office he wore a cowboy hat, but colleagues knew him as anything but a cowboy. “His death really shook the office up,” said Gary Kirkbride, branch manager for the Dewberry & Davis firm in Manassas where Meyers worked. “It wasn’t just that it was shocking, period. It was shocking that it would happen to Dean. There isn’t a more likable, gentle soul in the office.”

He never talked about his war injury, which left ugly scars, or much about the war in Vietnam. But in 1972, amid the wrenching passions stoked by the antiwar movement, he wrote an essay that reads now like a coda for more recent traumas.

“The American dream has not soured over the years,” he wrote. “Perhaps we have a distorted view of our past history, believing that at one time our nation was virtuous and now is corrupt.... How can we forget we were once a nation under the siege of Civil War.... Once we condoned the buying and selling of a human life? Where was the American dream during those dark years? No, we have not fallen, but rather are rising.”

*

Hers was the most prosaic of moments frozen in terror, vacuuming the family van. She had just dropped her 3-year-old daughter off at school, and was running errands before picking up the 5-year-old boy whose family had hired her as a nanny.

Lori Ann Lewis was a child of Mountain Head, Idaho, who wanted to see a broader world. In the seventh grade she decided to become a nanny. As soon as she finished high school, she packed herself off to Northwest Nannies Institute in Lake Oswego, Ore.

When she stepped off the plane in Washington to move in with her first family, she carried a huge three-ring binder filled with projects she planned for the children.

“You’d come home for dinner and she had the kids making placemats and hats and food” from a new country, recalled her first employer, Ellen Weiss, a producer at National Public Radio.

She started attending Washington Temple, a Mormon church near the home she shared with Weiss, her husband and their two children. There she met Nelson Rivera, a landscaper from Honduras who spoke no English. And although she spoke no Spanish, somehow she sensed in him a kindred spirit.

“He didn’t speak a word of English. She didn’t speak a word of Spanish. But they understood each other. It was love at first sight,” Nelson Rivera’s brother Antonio said at her wake.

She was remembered as patient and loving, a big girl with a huge mane of blond hair who would envelop the children.

But Lewis-Rivera, 25, also was very focused.

“She was determined to create a life for herself,” Weiss said. “She was determined to make her marriage work, to buy a house. Even if it took saving $25 a week, she would have seen it through. She knew what mattered most to her.”

Now, Nelson Rivera is determined to raise their daughter the way his wife would have. “He knew exactly what Lori wanted,” said Lewis-Rivera’s last employer, who asked not to be identified. “They shared the same values.”

*

He was only 18 when he came to the U.S., thirsty for a college education that his father, a taxi driver, would be hard-pressed to afford back home in Pune, India.

Premkumar A. Walekar was a teddy bear of a man even then, 5-feet-10 and packed with energy. He came to Montgomery College 36 years ago because an uncle lived there. But he soon dropped out of college. He wanted to make money for his family, to give them the chances in life he didn’t have.

So he took up driving, as his father had, becoming a distributor for a publishing company, supplementing his income with a second job as a cabdriver. In the tradition of Indian culture, he took one look at a picture of Margaret Umapati and flew to India to marry her. She worked as an obstetric nurse, often on night shifts, so their time together was precious. On weekends they went to church -- they were Seventh-day Adventists -- and he drove her anywhere she wanted to go. She didn’t drive, and driving was what he knew best.

The children came one after the other: Andrea is 24, Andrew, 23. Prem gave them the advantages of a suburban childhood, but still he saved enough money to bring several family members to the United States. They called him Prem Dada, the big brother. He even sent enough money to India so his father could buy his own taxi, something so rare that it is recalled still through tears.

Prem Walekar’s hands were big and calloused, the mark of a physical man. He used them too in the kitchen, where Andrea recalled him cooking spicy omelets in the mornings before school while her mother slept after a night shift at the hospital. She thinks he had the soul of a chef.

He was also a favorite with the children. He was a notorious cheek-pincher, and one cousin claims to this day that one of her cheeks is lower than the other because of the force of Prem Walekar’s teasing affection.

The Walekars had bought a house in Pune, and were hoping to move there once their daughter married. They wanted to retire, to travel, to enjoy life.

When he was killed, Prem Walekar, 54, was filling up on gas after buying a lottery ticket. Andrea says the family hoped it would come back a winner, a final tribute to a man who made his own luck. Instead, it came back stained with his blood.