'God' is dead

November 10, 2009 12:35 am

FOR THREE WEEKS in October of 2002, a swath of interstate- hugging communities from Metropolitan Washington to the outskirts of Richmond was pagan territory. It was terrified by an arbitrary little god who meted death to men and women for merely shopping or pumping gas or going to buy stamps. From its unlikely chariot, a 1990 Caprice, this unseen deity struck down 10 human beings, gravely hurt three others, and filled all with dread. Then came Oct. 24--and for John Allen Muhammad, a damning mortality.

On that date police arrested Muhammad and his teenage accomplice, Lee Malvo, at an interstate rest stop in Maryland. Soon a Prince William County jury handed Muhammad a death sentence for murdering Dean Meyers, a civil engineer from Pennsylvania killed by a rifle round at a Manassas-area gas station. Tonight at 9, Muhammad, The Beltway Sniper, is scheduled to die in the Greensville Correctional Center.

Technically, Muhammad will not pay for the nine other murders in his spree, including that of Kenneth Bridges, a businessman killed while gassing up in Massaponax; nor does his sentence officially consider the wounding of Caroline Seawell near the Spotsylvania Mall. But to all his victims, webbed by the special evil of that dark October, will soon accrue a measure of justice.

At two crime scenes, the haughty killer left notes inscribed, "Call me God." And for a while, wielding life-and-death power over the unlucky souls who fell into his cross hairs, and forcing thousands to practice the devotionals of evasion, a god of sorts he was. But the law has a place for malignant flea-gods like John Allen Muhammad--he'll see it firsthand tonight--as does He whom the wicked impersonate.