Employees of the Waffle House restaurant watch as Spotsylvania investigators and federal agents comb the shooting scene at the Exxon station for evidence that could lead to an end to the random killings. The Free Lance-Star View More Images from this story Visit the Photo Place

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Witnesses hear fatal 'boom'

Witnesses hear loud gunshot near the Four-Mile Fork Exxon where a man was killed yesterday.

By PAMELA GOULD
and BETTY HAYDEN SNIDER
The Free Lance-Star

Date published: 10/12/2002

Rainy day becomes surreal for workers, motel patrons

Bruce Bingham was standing in front of the Four-Mile Fork Mobil station talking to his boss when he heard what sounded like a gunshot from across the street.

As he looked in the direction of the sound, he saw a white van come through the intersection of U.S. 1 and Market Street and then head for the northbound Interstate 95 entrance ramp a few hundred yards away.

Bingham said he couldn't be sure the van--a Chevy Astro with no windows on the side and no writing on the exterior--was involved in the shooting at the Four-Mile Fork Exxon station across the street, but he found the timing with the traffic light uncanny.

"It was like it happened and the light changed," Bingham said yesterday afternoon as he tried to get back to work on a car in the station's bay.

Kenneth Bridges, 53, of Philadelphia was shot and killed around 9:35 a.m. at the Exxon at 5326 Jefferson Davis Highway in Spotsylvania County. Authorities would not say where they think the shot came from, but people staying at a Ramada Inn facing the station described a gunshot from the motel area.

"It was loud as [expletive]," said 39-year-old construction worker Tom Bowling, who was checking in at the time. "It sounded like a bomb going off."

Pedro Martinez, 48, of upstate New York and his wife, Fanni, said they were sleeping in their first-floor room directly across from the Exxon when the gunshot woke them.

"It was like a boom," Martinez said. "A few seconds later, I heard someone say, 'Oh, no.'"

Across the street in the Howard Johnson parking lot, truck driver Alvin Evans and a friend were getting ready to leave. "We heard a big, loud shot from a high-powered rifle," said Evans, an Army veteran from North Carolina. "We joked and said, 'That might have been the sniper.'"

Evans didn't see anything after he heard the single shot, but a motel maid on her way to work at the time told Evans she saw a woman driving erratically in a white van.

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Date published: 10/12/2002