The Beltway Snipers Left 10 Dead, With One 13-Year-old Victim Miraculously Survived

The Beltway Sniper attacks or the D.C. sniper attacks happened a year after the greatest tragedy that ever fell in the United States, the 911 attacks, so when this all started to happen, Americans were taken by fear, if it was related or the aftermath of the 911 attacks.

In three weeks, with ten people dead, the Beltway snipers have arrested their names - John Allen Muhammad and 16-year-old Lee Boyd Malvo.

Almost twenty years when this happened, one is still alive, the other has been executed for his crimes, Lee Boyd Malvo is still alive and serving consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole.

How did it all happen - The first murder.

It happened on February 16, 2002. After months of training, 16-year-old Malvo took their first victim, a woman who happened to be the niece of John Allen's wife's friend, and it happened in her house.

The 16-year old knocked and rang the doorbell of the "house on the hill," the woman who answered was Keenya Cook, they had a few minutes of conversation, and Malvo did the unthinkable for a 16-year-old boy;

He pulled the trigger, and shot her point blank.

A deadly rampage through two cities

The Beltway snipers started their horrific crimes with robberies and random shootings across different states.

As people from D.C. watched reports of the shooting, they never thought that it would soon be happening across their streets. No one was safe.

The Beltway snipers stormed the Nation's capital, and their crimes took weeks, and Americans were too afraid to go out or go to gasoline stations or parking lots where most of the shooting happened.

On October 2, 2002, they killed James Martin, a random victim, at a parking lot in Maryland. He was standing, and suddenly, shots were fired. By the end of that week, five were dead, one woman injured as she was getting inside her van just outside the mall.

Police feared the sniper was like a "ghost moving from one incident to the other".

Iran Brown, a 13-year-old, survives the attack.

Iran Brown is the youngest of their victims, he was going to his school, and his aunt took him in her car, and suddenly a shot was heard.

Iran was even looking where the shot came from. He was confused until he dropped to his knees and collapsed to the ground.

Bith he and his aunt then realized and were horrified that it was Iran who had been shot.

His aunt took control and brought him to the nearest hospital, and Iran's words to her -

"I love you," Iran whispered to his aunt.

By this time, Iran was the 8th person shot, still unknown snipers, who have been terrorizing America in three different states.

As surgeons frantically tried to repair Iran's liver, stomach, and spleen, police swarmed the school car park searching for clues.

Iran was the eighth person shot by an unknown sniper terrorizing America in 2002.

Iran miraculously survived the gunshot wound, a lot of it by luck, with the help of the medical doctors at the hospital where he had to be transferred by helicopter, the quick decision of his aunt, and God's hands were upon him on that day.

After he recovered, Iran was even invited by then-First Lady Laura Bush.

The Beltway snipers caught

In less than a month, they were caught. John Allen Muhammad, then 41, was the ringmaster, and Lee Malvo was his surrogate.

John was an ex-soldier who met then 16-year-old Malvo in Antigua. He is also a troubled teen from Jamaica.

Muhammad, by then, has lost his child custody battle from his ex-wife, with whom he has three kids.

Malvo turned to Muhammad as a father figure, as his mother abandoned him.

Muhammad took advantage of Malvo, and the two of them killed ten people and terrorized America.

Dewey Cornell, one of Malvo's psychologists, said the then-teenager understood that Muhammad was training him for a mission.

The goal, it seemed, was "to get [Muhammad's] children back".

Their last victim was bus driver Conrad Johnson in Aspen Hill, Maryland.

But the big break in the case came, ironically, from the snipers themselves.

In a now made public files from the FBI:

On October 17, a caller claiming to be the sniper phoned in to say, in a bit of an investigative tease, that he was responsible for the murder of two women (actually, only one was killed) during the robbery of a liquor store in Montgomery, Alabama, a month earlier.

That set in motion a chain of events that led to the capture of John Muhammad and Lee Malvo four days later, ending 23 days of random attacks in the Washington, D.C, area.

They left a tarot card at some of the shooting places where their crimes happened, along with handwritten notes. With the words;

"Call me God."

at the top. They were also demanding $10 million be deposited in a stolen credit card.

Here's how the investigation played out:

Investigators soon learned that a crime similar to the one described in the call had indeed taken place - and that fingerprint and ballistic evidence were available from the case.

An agent from our office in Mobile gathered that evidence and quickly flew to Washington, D.C., arriving Monday evening, October 21. While ATF handled the ballistic evidence, we took the fingerprint evidence to the FBI Laboratory (then located at our Headquarters).

The following morning, our fingerprint database produced a match - a magazine dropped at the crime scene bore the fingerprints of Lee Boyd Malvo from a previous arrest in Washington State. We now had a suspect…

The arrest record provided another important lead, mentioning a man named John Allen Muhammad. One of our agents from Tacoma recognized the name from a tip called into that office on the case. A second suspect…

Our work with ATF agents revealed that Muhammad had a Bushmaster .223 rifle in his possession, a federal violation since he'd been served with a restraining order to stay away from his ex-wife. That enabled us to charge him with federal weapons violations. And with Malvo clearly connected, the FBI and ATF jointly obtained a federal material witness warrant for him. The legal papers were now in our hands…

Meanwhile, on October 22, we searched our criminal records database and found that Muhammad had registered a blue Chevy Caprice with the license plate of NDA-21Z in New Jersey. That description was given to the news media and shared far and wide, leading to the arrest of the two snipers.

That was the end of the attacks, but not our role in the case. We spent many more hours gathering evidence and preparing it for court - work that ultimately paid off in the convictions of both Malvo and Muhammad.

Conclusion

After five days, the dark blue Chevy was spotted in Maryland on October 24, agents and officers caught the Beltway snipers, and the two men were sleeping together when the authorities got to them.

In 2002, two men who became known as the "Beltway snipers" - John Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo - went on a shooting spree.One of the things that confused authorities was that they were looking for white men and a white van. According to FBI records, this has something to do with their bias about serial killings, which has since been no longer to be accurate. Not all serial killers are white men.

Authorities could have caught these men early on as witnesses have already identified the dark blue Chevy.

The two men were sentenced with John Allen Muhammad sentenced to die by lethal injection in Virginia, which took place in 2009. As his last meal, he had chicken with red sauce and some cakes.

While Lee Boyd Malvo in 2020, while in prison, got married to a liberal activist and a wealthy member of the Knapp family of Iowa.

Malvo, 35, married Sable Noel Knapp, 30, in a low-key civil ceremony in Virginia's Red Onion State Prison on March 6, according to a marriage certificate filed in the Wise County Circuit Court.

Additional Resources:

1. ABC News

2. New York Times

3. FBI Archive