Victims, relatives to witness sniper execution

RICHMOND — Emotions run deep and vary widely for those wounded by the D.C. snipers and for the relatives of those killed, days before the mastermind of the 2002 attacks is scheduled to be executed.

John Allen Muhammad, 48, is set to die by injection Tuesday in a Virginia prison, seven years after he and young accomplice Lee Boyd Malvo terrorized the Washington area for three weeks.

Muhammad was convicted of killing Dean Harold Meyers at a Manassas, Va., gas station during the spree in which 10 people were fatally shot in October 2002. The killings happened in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia.

Some family members cannot wait to see Muhammad take his final breath. Others plan to make the trip to Virginia but never step foot on prison grounds. And there are those who plan to spend the night at home with their families, satisfied that Muhammad is paying for what he’s done but indifferent as to how it will happen.

Meyers’ brother, Robert Meyers, and wife Lori plan to be in the witness booth.

“The reason why this life is going to be taken has everything to do with choices [Muhammad] made and the process that those choices took him through,” said Meyers, 56, of Perkiomenville, Pa

Meyers also said he owed it to his brother to be there and that he also wanted to be there for other victims’ families.

Meyers, 53, was a Vietnam veteran, civil engineer, and the youngest of four brothers. He was shot in the head while filling up at the Northern Virginia gas station. Malvo, then 17, later bragged to police that Meyers “was hit good. Dead immediately.”

“We’re expecting justice being done, but not from a vengeful standpoint,” Robert Meyers said. “It is more about the payment of his debt to society, because that was decided by others.”

On Wednesday, Muhammad’s attorneys released a May 2008 letter in which their client proclaims his innocence.

The rambling, handwritten letter was made available because of requests for a statement from Muhammad, his attorneys said. The letter was filed in federal court in connection with Muhammad’s unsuccessful attempt to block his execution, the attorneys also said.

In the letter dated May 8, 2008, and rife with misspellings, Muhammad writes of discussions with a new team of attorneys and of assurances that “exculpatory evidence” that he claims was withheld from his trial “will prove my innocent and what really happen … .”

The letter adds: “So all you police and prosecutors can stand-down-’rushing’ to murder this innocent black man for something he nor his son (Lee) had nothing to do with … .”

Malvo, now 24, is serving a life sentence. Muhammad fostered a father-son relationship with Malvo but the two were not related.

Jonathan Sheldon, one of Muhammad’s attorneys, said the letter has been filed in U.S. District Court since May 2008.

The letter, written under the heading “Attorney Client Privilege,” was apparently filed during an attempt by lawyers to spare Muhammad from the death penalty.

In their filing, the lawyers said Muhammad was regularly whipped with hose pipes and electrical cords and beaten with hammers and sticks by family members during a brutal childhood.

On Tuesday, Muhammad’s attorneys asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stop his execution. They also have asked Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine for clemency, saying Muhammad is mentally ill and should not be executed.

Executions in Virginia — outnumbering every U.S. state except Texas — usually are intimate affairs observed by a handful of lawyers, prison officials, the mandated six citizen witnesses, a few reporters and family members.

But the sheer number of D.C. sniper victims — 10 killed and three injured in the Washington area alone — has the state scrambling to accommodate all the people entitled to watch. Corrections officials are tightlipped about the arrangements, though relatives say each victim’s family was offered two spots in the roughly 10-by-10 witness booth.

Watching Muhammad’s execution, say Nelson M. Rivera and Marion Lewis, will be the closest they will ever come to revenge.

“I feel like it’s going to be the last chapter of this book and I want to see what his expression on his face is. And I want to see if he says anything,” the 38-year-old Rivera said. “I want to see his face and see how he likes that — confronting his death.”

Lori Ann Lewis-Rivera, who was Rivera’s wife and Lewis’ daughter, was killed as she vacuumed her van at a Kensington, Md., gas station.

Rivera, a Honduran immigrant who recently became a U.S. citizen, has remarried and had two more children since Lori was killed, leaving behind a 2-year-old daughter, Jocelin. He now works as a public-schools groundskeeper in the suburbs of Sacramento, Calif.

Still, “there is not one day I don’t remember what happened and I don’t remember my wife,” he said. “This is going to be with me the rest of my life.”

Lewis, 57, a laid-off construction worker, said he would like to tell Muhammad how losing his 25-year-old daughter devastated their family.

“For the hurt, the pain that he’s caused my family, I’d like to be his executioner, period,” Lewis said.

Charles Moore believes Muhammad deserves to die, and he’s frustrated that Malvo will not be on a gurney beside him.

“The only thing that would give me closure would be if I knew that Lee Boyd Malvo was being punished properly,” said Moore, 80, of Gainesville, Fla.

Malvo was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for killing Linda Franklin, a 47-year-old FBI analyst who was shot as she and her husband loaded supplies at a Home Depot in Falls Church, Va.

“I don’t see how someone can plan and plot and commit murder, one right after the other, and get off with just life in prison, I don’t care what their age is,” Moore said.

Moore, a retired bioengineer at the University of Florida, said his daughter used to call him every morning “to tell me to get out of bed and start chasing my wife around the house or something.”

He struggles with Parkinson’s disease now, and says he can’t afford the trip to Virginia to watch the execution. He’s not really sure he would make the trip if he could, though.

“When my daughter was first killed, if I would have had a gun I would have been willing to kill him but right now I don’t know how I feel,” Moore said. “I don’t want him turned loose on society, that’s for sure.”

Caroline Seawell has refused to live the last seven years as a victim.

Sure, her ribs are deformed and there’s a piece of mesh covering a hole in her diaphragm. But Seawell has been blessed with no major medical problems since a sniper’s bullet raced into her back and through a handful of organs as she loaded a scarecrow and other Halloween decorations into her minivan.

She and her family moved to South Carolina not long after the shooting outside a Fredericksburg, Va., Michael’s craft store. Her youngest son, now 11, doesn’t even know about the shooting.

“I’ve been really good about being able to kind of just put it behind me,” Seawell said. “I’ve been able to just continue on with my life.”

In that defiant spirit, Seawell said she will not travel to Virginia to watch Muhammad take his last breath. He deserves to die for what he’s done, she said, but after watching both parents die from cancer, she has no desire to witness another death.

“There was enough killing already with all of us,” she said.

If anything, Seawell says, the shooting has made her a much stronger person. If given the chance, she’d like to tell Muhammad and Malvo just that.

“They didn’t do what they set out to do because they haven’t devastated my life,” she said. “I’ve been able to move on and continue and raise my children, which is exactly what I wanted to do. I don’t want them to have any satisfaction out of the fact that they shot me.”