RICHMOND | Some ache for revenge, others simply for justice. There is frustration, too, and defiance.
For those wounded by the D.C. snipers and for the relatives of those killed, the emotions leading up to the execution of the mastermind behind the 2002 attacks vary as widely as those who found themselves in the cross hairs.
John Allen Muhammad, 48, is set to die by injection in a Virginia prison on Tuesday, seven years after he and his teenage accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, terrorized the area in and around the nation’s capital for three weeks. Malvo, who was 17 at the time of the shootings, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for killing Linda Franklin, 47, an FBI analyst who was shot as she and her husband loaded supplies at a Home Depot in Falls Church.
Some family members can’t wait to see Muhammad take his final breath. Others plan to make the trip to Virginia but never step foot on prison grounds.
For Nelson M. Rivera, 38, and Marion Lewis, 57, watching Muhammad’s execution 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,” Mr. Rivera said. “I want to see his face and see how he likes that - confronting his death.”
Lori-Ann Lewis-Rivera, Mr. Rivera’s wife and Mr. Lewis’ daughter, was killed as she vacuumed her van at a Kensington gas station.
Mr. Rivera, a Honduran immigrant who recently became a U.S. citizen, has remarried and had two more children since Lewis-Rivera was killed, leaving behind a 2-year-old daughter, Jocelin. He now works as a public-schools groundskeeper in the suburbs of Sacramento, Calif.
Mr. Lewis a laid-off construction worker, said he would like to tell Muhammad how losing his 25-year-old daughter devastated his family. “For the hurt, the pain that he’s caused my family, I’d like to be his executioner, period,” Mr. Lewis said.
Robert Meyers, whose brother was killed, takes some solace in knowing that Muhammad’s execution is out of his hands. The 56-year-old from Perkiomenville, Pa., and his wife, Lori, plan to be in the witness booth; he considers it justice being served, a sentence being carried out.
Executions in Virginia, home of the nation’s second-busiest death chamber, 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 victims in this case - 10 killed and three injured in and around the nation’s capital alone - has the state scrambling to accommodate all the people entitled to watch. Corrections officials are tight-lipped about the arrangements, though relatives say each victim’s family was offered two spots in the approximately 10-by-10-foot witness booth.
Mr. Meyers said that he owed it to his brother to be there, and that he also wanted to be there for other victims’ families.
Dean Meyers, 53, a Vietnam veteran and civil engineer, was the youngest of four brothers. He was shot in the head while filling up at a Manassas gas station. Malvo later bragged to police, laughing that Dean Meyers “was hit good. Dead immediately.”
It was Mr. Meyers’ murder that sent Muhammad to death row.
Caroline Seawell has refused to live the last seven years as a victim.
Her ribs are deformed and there’s a piece of mesh covering a hole in her diaphragm. But she 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 craft store. Her youngest son, now 11, doesn’t even know about the shooting.
If anything, Mrs. 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. “I don’t want them to have any satisfaction out of the fact that they shot me.”
* David Dishneau contributed to this report.
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