Victims' Families Reflect Before DC Sniper Execution: 'I Could Pull the Switch'

WASHINGTON -- As Bob Meyers made the long drive to the Virginia prison where John Allen Muhammad was to be put to death, he recalled the day seven years ago when he urged his brother to leave the Washington area. It was too dangerous to stay there, he argued, while the mysterious D.C. sniper remained on the loose.

"His comment was, 'There are millions of people down here. It's pretty unlikely I would be involved,'" Meyers said. But he finally relented, agreeing to return to the family home in rural Perkiomenville, Pa., for the weekend. He was set to leave early Friday morning.

"Unfortunately," Meyers said, "he didn't make it past Tuesday evening."

Dean Meyers, 53, was pumping gas in Manassas, Va., on Oct. 9, 2002, when he became the seventh of 10 people killed by Muhammad or his teenage accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, in the Washington region.

In all, the sniping team would shoot 22 people, murdering 15 of them, in a deadly coast-to-coast spree that stretched from the Northwest to the deep South. But it was their three-week finale in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C., that jangled the capital region and the nation as it nervously marked the one-year anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. And it was Meyers' murder that led to Muhammad's conviction and his trip to Virginia's death chamber.

Muhammad was scheduled to die by lethal injection tonight at the Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt, Va. Meyers and his wife, Lori, are among victims' family members who plan to be there to watch him die.

"I'm not going because I want to celebrate or think there are any winners here, because there aren't," said Meyers, 56, who works in a building material supply company. "I feel a responsibility to go out of loyalty to my brother, that our family be represented."

Denise Johnson, whose husband, Conrad, was the snipers' last victim, told a local television station that she would be there to see Muhammad face his death sentence. To this day, she asks herself, "If only they had caught him sooner?"

Also watching will be Isa Nichols and her daughter Tamara. Eight months before the snipers struck fear into the nation's capital, the pair killed Keenya Cook at Nichols' home in Tacoma, Wash.

The murder remained a cold case until Nichols saw Muhammad's photo on TV as a suspect in the D.C. sniper shooting spree. That's when she realized Muhammad, who had repaired her car and whose children her daughter had baby-sat, had sent Malvo to target her for helping Mohammad's wife, Mildred, escape their abusive marriage. Cook, 21, answered the door instead on Feb. 16, 2002, and was shot point-blank. The teen, then 16, "later confessed it was his initiation shooting" under Muhammad's tutelage, Nichols said.

"For me, it's a process of justice being carried out," said Nichols, who has written a book, "Genesis: The Bullet Was Meant For Me: D.C. Sniper Story Untold." She said she is at peace with Malvo's sentence of life without parole because "he had the mind of a child who happened to be with a man who became diabolical."

Nichols flew across the country to witness Muhammad's execution because of Tamara, who discovered her cousin's body and is now 21. "She said, 'Mommy, I want to be there," Nichols said as she drove south on Interstate 95 toward the prison. "She said, 'I need closure.'"

For Princess Harper and Timothy Lee, the 12-hour drive from their home in Prattville, Ala., was worth making to see justice served. Their sister, Claudine Parker, was killed Sept. 21, 2002, as she stood outside a liquor store that she managed there. "We're doing this for Claudine," Lee told The Montgomery Advertiser. "Somebody needs to be there."

Marion Lewis planned to travel from Mountain Home, Idaho, to watch Muhammad pay the ultimate price for killing his daughter Lori Lewis Rivera, a 25-year-old nanny who was gunned down at a gas station in Kensington, Md. He told The Washington Post, "I don't have any doubt that I could pull the switch or push the plunger myself."

But others harmed by Muhammad had no intention of witnessing his execution.

Paul LaRuffa survived after being shot outside his restaurant in Clinton, Md. Although he said his life was changed forever, he and his wife, Linda, have no interest in traveling from their Hollywood, Md., home to southern Virginia to watch Muhammad die. Even as they marked the days to Muhammad's death, Linda LaRuffa told USA TODAY, "When I think of him now, I say to myself, 'What a waste of a life.'"

Isa Nichols had a different take hours before the execution. "When I was testifying during the sentencing phase and looked at his face and he looked at me, he wasn't the same man" she knew back in Tacoma before something snapped and he became a calculating murderer. "John died on the inside way before today."