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Unpleasant memories.
She was living in Bowie, Md., at the time; she now lives in Spring Garden Township. The entire region lived in stark fear that the sniper, who shot 13 people leading to 10 deaths in the Washington, D.C. area, could and would strike at any time, any place.
She recalled the day when Bowie middle schooler Iran Brown was shot outside her school. That morning, on her way to work in Annapolis, passing a park she passed every day, Daly noticed an old, dark-colored Chevy Caprice. In hindsight, she said, the car stuck out to her, even though there were always cars at that park. It just stuck with her, she said.
Later that morning -- it would have been Oct 7, 2002 -- her husband called from Seattle, where he was traveling on business. He told her he had just heard about a student shot by the sniper at a school in Bowie. Their youngest daughter was in high school in Bowie at the time.
She asked her boss to turn on the news, and she soon learned that the shooting did not occur at her daughter's school.
To this day, she wonders whether she should have reported the Chevy she saw that morning. At the time, police believed the sniper drove a white van. When Muhammad and his accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, were arrested Oct. 24, 2002, they were driving an old blue Chevy Caprice. She believes it could
"I went through an awful lot of guilt, an awful lot of pain," Daly, 54, said. "They were asking people to call the FBI if they saw anything. Maybe I should have called. I really felt I could have helped somehow."
Still, she said, she has no way of knowing whether the Caprice she saw that morning was the snipers' vehicle, and she had no way of knowing at the time that the car was even connected to the shooters.
It was a strange time in suburban Washington, and the Maryland and Virginia suburbs, she said.
"People really don't understand how terrifying it was for so long," she said.
She recalled stopping to get gas after the suspects had been arrested and looking over at the man at the next pump. Four of Muhammad's victims were killed while pumping gas.
"We just started laughing," she said. "We didn't have to say anything at all. It was just nice to be able to fill your gas tank and not be terrified."
Muhammad's scheduled execution brought all of that back.
"Just reading about it, I felt tensed up," she said. "I don't take joy in anybody's death. But I won't feel bad for him."
ABOUT EXECUTIONS
If executed, John Allen Muhammad will be the 104th convicted murderer executed by the Commonwealth of Virginia since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. He is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection Tuesday for the October 2002 killing of Dean H. Meyers in Manassas.
The last execution in the state was in February of this year, when convicted cop killer Edward Nathaniel Bell was killed by lethal injection. Virginia leads all U.S. states in executions, historically. The first occurred before the United States even existed, in 1607, and since then, 1,371 prisoners have met their ends at the state's hands. It ranks second to Texas in executions since the Supreme Court lifted the ban on capital punishment.
Muhammad's accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.
-- Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, Washington Post.
ABOUT THE CRIMES
John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo were accused of a crime spree that terrorized the Washington, D.C., area for a month in the fall of 2002. All told, the two were responsible for killing 15 and wounding seven in a string of random shootings. They were apprehended Oct. 24, 2002.
-- Washington Post
