Witnesses Offer Vivid Details of Sniper Shootings

A daughter’s mounting desperation, a frightened doctor’s futile stab at saving a dying man, a patrol officer’s race through a crowded intersection -- the moments when the Washington, D.C., region first came under the shadow of a sniper unreeled again Monday in a courtroom here.

After days spent trying to link John Allen Muhammad to a series of distant killings and robberies in the South, prosecutors turned to the rampage of rifle fire that killed five people in 14 hours and stirred placid suburban Maryland to the sudden fear of long-range killing.

Andrea Walekar, the daughter of slain Montgomery County cab driver Premkumar A. Walekar, took the witness stand Monday afternoon, recounting her father’s death on the morning of Oct. 3, 2002. She told how she grew frantic as she heard news accounts of a gunman roaming the streets and began dialing her father’s cellphone to warn him.

“I kept calling and calling him,” she said. “But he wasn’t picking up.”

Finally, she got her answer by turning on the television. She saw a news report from a crime scene, which showed her father’s idle, empty taxi next to a gas pump in the county’s Aspen Hill section.

Pediatrician Caroline Namrow, who had driven into the Mobil lot with her 22-month-old daughter, had tried to save the dying cab driver. Namrow said she was watching Walekar pump gas when she heard a gunshot. She said she looked up as Walekar staggered toward her mouthing the words: “Call an ambulance.” Shot once in the chest, he toppled over.

Namrow testified Monday that she found only a faint pulse when she reached for the dying man’s wrist. As she bent down to attempt to revive him, Walekar’s eyes rolled up in their sockets, the physician recalled.

At that moment in Namrow’s account, a woman in the courtroom began sobbing. It was Walekar’s widow, Margaret, who had kept her composure through her daughter’s testimony but could no longer muzzle her grief. Her moans grew so loud that deputies escorted her out.

A shaken Namrow continued. “You’re going to be all right,” she told Walekar as he lay dying -- a statement that she sadly admitted Monday had been a lie.

“From the amount of blood I saw, I realized it was a gunshot wound,” she said. “His pulse was so ... fast, I realized this was a potentially fatal wound.”

A Montgomery County police officer who had weaved through traffic in his patrol car to reach the scene testified that when he pulled into the gas station lot, Walekar was beyond help.

“There was no pulse,” said Police Cpl. Paul Kukucka. Sniper victim James L. “Sonny” Buchanan had already fallen dead that morning from a long-range rifle shot. Four more would follow before the day ended.

Mary G. Ripple, a deputy Maryland state medical examiner who performed an autopsy on Walekar’s body, said Monday that the .223-caliber bullet that killed him could only have come from one Bushmaster XM-15 rifle. That bullet, Ripple testified, came from the gun recovered from the trunk of Muhammad’s Chevrolet Caprice during his arrest on Oct. 24 last year.

Authorities had linked Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, 18, to 10 sniper slayings in Maryland, Washington, D.C., and Virginia and to at least three killings in Atlanta, Baton Rouge, La., and Montgomery, Ala.

Authorities in Prince William County, a northern Virginia suburb, charged Muhammad with killing Dean H. Meyers, a Maryland civil engineer slain at a Manassas, Va., gas station who became the seventh D.C.-area sniper slaying victim. Malvo is charged with a killing that occurred in Fairfax County, Va. He will be tried next month.

Prince William County Commonwealth Atty. Paul B. Ebert is seeking the death penalty against Muhammad under a Virginia law that allows capital punishment if the state proves that a defendant killed more than one person over a three-year period. To show that Muhammad deserves death by chemical injection, prosecutors are trying to tie Muhammad to 13 slayings and at least three other shootings.

Earlier Monday, several witnesses from Louisiana bolstered prosecution allegations that Muhammad was involved in the fatal shooting of Hong Im Ballenger, a beauty shop worker, on Sept. 23, 2002.

Among those appearing for the prosecution was Muhammad’s cousin, Charlene Anderson, who said that earlier that summer the sniper suspect and Malvo stayed at her Baton Rouge home for several days. During the stay, she said, Muhammad unzipped an Army duffel bag and showed her a high-powered rifle that she recognized as a military weapon.

Under prodding from defense lawyers, however, Anderson was not able to conclusively describe it as the Bushmaster later found in Muhammad’s car. Anderson said Muhammad told her that he and Malvo were in Louisiana as part of a team of Navy agents tracking down marijuana dealers suspected of stealing 500 pounds of C-4 plastic explosives.

Another Louisiana witness testified Monday that he saw the sniper suspect barely an hour after Ballenger was slain. Church deacon Henry Leon Goins said Muhammad and Malvo appeared at his Baton Rouge church that night. Goins also said he saw a car parked in the church parking lot that looked like the Chevrolet Caprice allegedly used in the sniper killings.

Goins said Malvo appeared to be a “very obedient son to his father” -- a relationship prosecutors are focusing on to show that Muhammad was deeply involved in the killings. The two suspects are not related. Authorities have found no direct evidence that Muhammad fired any of the “kill shots,” but Ebert has insisted Muhammad was “captain” of the “killing team.”

Defense lawyers Peter D. Greenspun and Jonathan Shapiro questioned the Louisiana accounts and tried to persuade Circuit Court Judge LeRoy F. Millette Jr. to throw out Anderson’s testimony, calling it “wholly irrelevant.” Millette refused, saying “there’s nothing wrong with her testimony. It’s significant in showing the relationship between Mr. Muhammad and Mr. Malvo.”

The judge also denied a defense motion to reconsider an earlier decision barring Muhammad from presenting evidence related to his mental health.