By Peter Nicholas, Sumana Chatterjee and Tim Johnson, Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service
ASHLAND, Va. -- Police on Sunday said a 37-year-old man shot in the stomach Saturday night outside a steakhouse about 90 miles south of Washington was probably the latest victim of a sniper who has killed nine people and is still at large.
“We are acting as if it is (the sniper) and we will continue on that mode until we know that it is not,” said Col. Stuart Cook of the sheriff’s department in Hanover County, north of Richmond, the state capital.
The victim, who was not identified, was shot as he and his wife walked out of a Ponderosa restaurant in Ashland, along Interstate 95, a major north-south artery on the East Coast. His wife was not injured. The couple was traveling through the area and had stopped for food and gasoline.
The shooting, if the work of the sniper, marks the first time that the assailant has hit on a weekend and the farthest the attacks have occurred from the nation’s capital. Saturday’s attack broke a lull of five days since a fatal shooting in Falls Church, Va., a Washington suburb, and intensified the fear that has plagued Washington, Maryland and northern Virginia since Oct. 2.
The attack also brought new urgency to a hunt for a furtive killer who has struck victims of a variety of ages, genders and ethnic groups. The sniper has kept area schools in lock-down mode with children unable to play outside, and it has forced many residents indoors, afraid even to pump gas.
Many details of the shooting fit the sniper’s pattern. Police said the gunman appeared to have fired from a distance, concealing his position in a wooded area behind the Ponderosa restaurant’s rear parking lot. The distance from the woods to the spot where the victim fell was about 57 yards.
The attacker also fired a single bullet, and had his choice of highway escape routes, as has been the pattern. The restaurant sits within a half mile of Interstate 95 and is only a few blocks from Route 1, another major north-south artery. Police said roadblocks went up within 10 minutes of the emergency call notifying them of the shooting.
Rep. Eric Cantor, a Virginia Republican who represents the region, said the latest attack suggests the sniper is moving farther from the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, making him even more elusive.
“It has broadened the crime scene to a very large extent,” Cantor said. “You are extending over 100 miles when you’re talking about Rockville, Md., to Ashland, Va. So it does present a greater challenge to law enforcement.” One of the first people killed was a taxi driver who was pumping gas at a station in Rockville on Oct. 3.
The latest attack unfolded with a grim familiarity. As in earlier shootings, police helicopters hovered over the crime scene, training spotlights below. Bloodhounds sniffed for clues. Up to 100 officers swept in and canvassed the parking lot behind the restaurant, walking shoulder-to-shoulder in a late-night search for shell casings and hints of the sniper’s presence. The search began again after dawn Sunday.
Sheriff Cook said he would not discuss what evidence, if any, was found at the scene.
The victim was in critical condition at the Medical College of Virginia Hospital in Richmond, 15 miles to the south. Surgeons operated on him for three hours late Saturday, and prepared to operate again as soon as his condition stabilized.
“The prognosis is still guarded. But since he is a very healthy man and he is very young, the chances are fair to good,” said Dr. Rao Ivatury, director of trauma and critical care.
Surgeons mended the man’s stomach and repaired damage to his kidney and pancreas.
They also removed the man’s spleen, Ivatury said, but did not remove the bullet or bullet fragments.
Unless surgeons obtain the bullet, authorities will not be able to determine whether it was fired from the same .223-caliber rifle used in the 11 other shootings, nine of which have been fatal.
Several high school students who were in a parking lot near the restaurant, said they heard the gun shot but did not see the sniper.
“I heard the shot, boom, and thought it was a car backfiring and then thought it was firecrackers,” said 17-year-old Matthew Wicks, a senior at Ashland’s Patrick Henry High School. “But then I saw the head laying down” on the cement, he said.
“People in the town had it in the back of their minds this could happen here because of the proximity to I-95,” said Mayor Angela LaCombe of Ashland, a quiet town of 6,500 people. She described residents as “shocked, saddened, grieving and afraid.”
Town officials said there has been just one other shooting this year, an unsolved homicide at a private home in February.
The latest killing reverberated to the top levels of government. Two senior officials in the Bush administration downplayed any fear that the killings may be the work of foreign extremists.
“There’s no evidence to this point that this is the work of an international terrorist organization,” National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
Rice, speaking later on CNN’s “Late Edition,” said investigators were sent to the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to interrogate detainees with suspected links to al-Qaida about the sniper shootings.
Secretary of State Colin Powell concurred on “Fox News Sunday” that federal officials have been probing for “every possible connection” to international terrorism, and had come up with nothing.
Rice said President Bush has ordered “a very large role” for federal agencies in assisting the growing hunt for the killer or killers.
“The president is very much on top of it, and looks at it every single morning,” she said on “Face the Nation.”