Courtesy Photo John Allen Muhammad

"It was my wife," Lewis said in a recent interview from Mountain Home, Idaho.

She quietly broke the news that their daughter, Lori Lewis Rivera, 25, a young mother, had been killed earlier that morning -- Oct. 3, 2002 -- while vacuuming her car at the Shell gas station at Connecticut and Knowles avenues near her home in Kensington, Md.

"After I calmed down, she told me what she knew," said Lewis, 57. "After I got off the phone, my boss called and said he was sending a guy to take me home."

Lewis and his son-in-law, Nelson Rivera, who has remarried and now lives in Sacramento, Calif., with their daughter, plan to attend the execution of John Allen Muhammad, 48, on Tuesday at the Greensville Correctional Center in Virginia.

"They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and seeing him actually die, I think, is going to be better than reading a thousand (words) about it," Lewis said. "I want to have that picture in my mind."

'Coming our way next'

Former Frederick County Sheriff Jim Hagy thinks there is nothing that Virginia, Maryland, Alabama, Louisiana or any other state where Muhammad was convicted or suspected of murder could do to him that would bring full justice.

"I don't know that this will even bring closure for the family and friends of those 10 innocent people that were killed for no reason whatsoever," said Hagy of the man who was known as the D.C. Sniper over three terrifying weeks seven years ago this fall. "Whatever they do to him, he deserves a lot more."

Hagy received a phone call at home about 1 a.m. Oct. 24, 2002; law enforcement officers had a tip that Muhammad and his accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, were at a rest area near Myersville . He quickly headed to the county's new law enforcement center on Airport Drive East. The center, completed that summer, housed both the patrol division of the county sheriff's office and the Frederick barrack of the Maryland State Police.

During the search for Muhammad and Malvo, Hagy said, the first benefit of the new building was seen. Malvo is serving a life sentence in prison.

"We were able to get together and draw maps with circles to make sure we were not duplicating efforts," Hagy said. "We figured that they'd gone around Montgomery County, P.G., Virginia and D.C., and it seemed logical that they would progress up 270."

From the morning Lori Lewis Rivera was shot, the third of five victims that day, until the early hours of Oct. 24, when Muhammad and Malvo were captured while sleeping in their car at a rest area off I-70, much of the Washington metro area, including Frederick , held its breath in fear.

Frederick County Public Schools had gone on precautionary lockdown during school hours and moved outdoor activities inside. A Special Olympics event at Mount St. Mary's in Emmitsburg was canceled. Military surveillance planes were brought into the region. Maryland Gov. Parris Glendening banned hunting in four counties, and plans were being made to bring in the National Guard to protect voters during the upcoming Nov. 5 elections.

Everyone was on high alert for a white box truck, which later proved to be the wrong vehicle.

Nationally, 20th Century Fox delayed the release of the movie "Phone Booth," about an unseen gunman.

"I think that police officers experience much the same feelings as everyone else," Hagy said. "Of course, we were working around the clock at the same time. There was no doubt in my mind that he was coming our way next. If you look back at the overtime we spent during that period that will bear that out."

Escape attempt

Lt. Ron Hibbard of the Frederick County Sheriff's Office, then assigned to the K-9 unit, was at the end of his shift when he heard a message that the suspect's car -- a Chevrolet Caprice with New Jersey license plates -- had been spotted. He was one of the first on the scene, shortly after midnight.

"We had also adjusted our schedule during that period of time," Hibbard said. "I know I'd never experienced a time like that previously where a such a large portion of the community was on edge, just living, at the same time.

"To a certain extent, experiencing anything on a personal level took a back seat to getting those thugs in custody, but as a family we experienced it just like everyone else."

After Muhammad and Malvo were nabbed while sleeping in their car, Hibbard was asked to accompany them to detention in Montgomery County. In a bizarre moment that was later re-created in a made-for-television movie, Hibbard discovered Malvo had slipped his handcuffs while alone in an interview room. He tackled Malvo when the teen tried to escape through an interview room ceiling.

What he recalls most significantly, he said, was meeting the relatives and friends of Muhammad and Malvo's victims.

"I had the opportunity to sit and talk with some family members who lost loved ones," Hibbard said. "I think hearing their accounts -- the direct effect this had on them -- it's hard to understand how deeply these guys actions affected all these people.

"And those family members were amazingly supportive of each other and of the other families. That was humbling to be a part of -- to hear their stores and how they were trying to put things into perspective."

Not another stolen day

Glass and gunfire exploded around Paul LaRuffa the moment he closed his car door after locking up his restaurant, Margellina's in Clinton, on the night of Sept. 5, 2002. Shot five times -- in the neck, chest, stomach, diaphragm and top of his spine -- LaRuffa, who survived, was eventually identified as the first victim of Muhammad and Malvo.

Malvo grabbed a laptop computer -- later found in the Caprice when he and Muhammad were arrested -- from the back seat of LaRuffa's car, along with the restaurant's bank drop.

That $3,500 was used to fund their killing spree.

"I was on life support for three, four days. Both my lungs collapsed, but I healed really fast," LaRuffa said by phone recently from Hollywood, Md. "The last thing to recover was my hand. The first bullet hit my arm and damaged a nerve that controls my left hand. That took about a year to recover."

"A million thoughts" went through his head in the seconds when he did not know whether he would live or die, LaRuffa said.

"I thought about my wife, my son, my two grandchildren. I thought about the fact that I didn't have a chance to say anything to anybody. To say goodbye. I thought, 'This is it.' You go to that -- from thinking that everything was fine.

"It's so sudden."

After the explosion in his left ear, "it got amazingly quiet and I noticed that, too." LaRuffa said. To this day he dislikes loud noises and does not go to Fourth of July fireworks with his family.

LaRuffa, like Lewis and Rivera, and all the shooting victims' families and friends, was invited to witness the execution Tuesday evening.

He declined.

"I did not want them to steal another day of my life," LaRuffa said. "I will spend that day with my family."