TACOMA, Washington — The FBI agents may have completed their search of the humble backyard where John Allen Muhammad used to take late-night potshots at a tree trunk, but outside the run-down single-story house, his former friends and neighbors are carrying out a different kind of search.
They want to discover what turned the self-confident, imposing disciplinarian who became a devout Muslim into someone who went on a wild killing spree.
“I thought the world of him,” said Felix Strozier, his partner in the karate school they ran in Tacoma from 1997 to 1998. “He was a quiet person, he was quite aggressive but it was easy to talk to him and calm him down. I was hoping it wasn’t true — it’s not the John Muhammad I knew. It’s totally out of character.”
But Strozier could also recall a man who did not like to be crossed, who claimed falsely to have been in the US special forces and whose fuse was short. The two fell out over the running of the now defunct school. “I can remember him being bitter about life,” Strozier said.
Among Muhammad’s neighbors there was incredulity at the news. “In this city, no more than 150 years ago, they lived by the gun — so we’re back there again,” said Christopher Miller.
“I’m glad he was caught,” said Chris Waters, an army private who lives in the house opposite, which is for sale for $130,000. “There’s a price to pay and he must pay it.”
“I think he’s a bitter coward,” said Kelvin Farley, who works in the lumber industry and lives nearby. “This is a close-knit community, I can’t believe it.”
The picture that is emerging is of inter-generational nomadic killing spree by a Gulf War veteran sharpshooter who had already terrorized one ex-wife, and a teenage illegal immigrant who called him “father”.
Muhammad is seen as a controlling, dominant presence who told his children to refer to people as “sir” or “mister”, and who appeared to have finally found in John Lee Malvo someone who would obey his instructions on everything from what he ate to whose life he terminated.
His motives remain confused: An angry killer who demanded money and a man who eventually seemed to want to control even the way he was caught.
The journey that may now take him and John Lee to death row has already spanned Louisiana, Alabama, New Jersey, Oregon, Washington state, Jamaica and Antigua, as well as the states in which they chose their human targets.
Muhammad, 41, was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where his days at Scotlandville high school as John Williams appear to have been happy. His mother died young, his father was not around and he was brought up by aunts before he married his childhood sweetheart, Carol, and had a son, Travis. But the marriage did not last and Friday his former in-laws, Sheron and Ronald Norman, recalled a man who did as he pleased. “He became arrogant at times,” said Mrs. Norman, a paramedic “If he wanted something, he would just take it.” The marriage ended in 1987.
In the meantime, he had joined the army and would serve for nine years, including in the Gulf War, before an honorable discharge. His interest in the military had been fostered by time in the national guard in Louisiana as a young man, where he was once sentenced to seven days detention for punching a sergeant. Outside the service he moved from job to job and state to state, living at various times in Oregon, New Jersey and Washington. He also spent time in Antigua, which he left because it was “pretty backward — no Internet or technological advances”. It is there he may have met John Lee. He ran a car repair business in Tacoma and then the karate school where the teenager was a student. He did odd jobs in Bellingham, north of Seattle.
When his second marriage, to Mildred Williams, ended, he wanted their three children. He took them in 2000 from their Tacoma home for 18 months, against her will. His wife did not know where he had taken them, but remained in her home in the hope that they would be able to find her. When he was tracked down she sought a protection order.
“He is behaving very irrational,” she said in her legal statement in 2000. “Whenever he does talk with me, he always says that he is going to destroy my life, and I hang up the phone. His demeanour is such that he is a threat to me.”
On one occasion she called the 911 emergency number after he pushed his way into her home.
When she regained custody of her children she disappeared so he could not snatch them again. He seems to have decided to replace them with someone else’s. Last year, John Lee’s mother, Uma James, contacted the police to complain about the way Muhammad appeared to have taken over control of her teenage son. She and the boy had been detained by immigration officials as illegal immigrants after they moved from Florida to Tacoma, but had been released. Now her son was living with Muhammad in a Christian shelter in Bellingham.
Staff at the center recalled Muhammad as a disciplined man, more neatly dressed than their usual residents, and who on one occasion took off a brand new parka and gave it to someone who had admired it. They were puzzled that someone living in a shelter appeared to have enough money to travel to Jamaica with the young man he called his son. Friday their relationship was described as “drill sergeant recruit”.
On Martin Luther King Avenue, in the nearby Hilltop district, are two Muslim centers. At the Mas Allah Muslim center, a Muslim newspaper with the headline “Condolences for the lives lost in the terrorist attack on Sept. 11” is displayed in the window. Local Muslims are puzzled that a man who had embraced their faith could have been involved in such violence. Muhammad converted to Islam in 1985 and joined the Nation of Islam, for whom he said he had carried out security.
Back in his neighborhood, residents continue to speculate on how Muhammad, a man remembered locally for his firm handshake and his attention to fitness, had turned into a serial killer.
Ron Jett, a young bearded machinist who lives nearby, heard shots in the night. “It would be pretty loud and we would wake up; we had no idea what was going on. It wasn’t every week, but it was bang, bang, bang,” he said.
Christopher Miller added: “This is a town of drive-by shootings. Up there in Hilltop the druggies and drug lords run the area.” But Miller believed that good would come out of the sniper scare.
“Our fictitious security blanket has seeped away,” he said. “I see gun control coming. Eventually they will try and stifle the guns and have cameras on every corner. Everything in this country has been done on the basis of fear and now the president is in a fear-based mode.”
(The Guardian)
