Fateful Journey
Long before a serial sniper terrorized the Washington, D.C. area, John Allen Muhammad's second wife said he made her fear for her life.
"He has threatened to kill me. I may never see my children again," Mildred Muhammad said in a request for a restraining order.
Interviews with friends, relatives and acquaintances suggest there were two sides to Muhammad, 41, the man arrested with 17-year-old John Lee Malvo in the sniper shootings that left 10 dead and three more critically wounded.
The New York Times reported that the two men lived in virtual destitution while traveling together over the past year.
By early this year, the newspaper said, Malvo had dropped out of high school and was living with Muhammad at the Lighthouse Mission, a homeless shelter in Bellingham, Washington.
This summer and early fall, they traveled across the country to Louisiana, New Jersey and finally Washington, D.C.
In Trenton, N.J. in late summer, they paid $250 for the Chevrolet Caprice that police said was used in the sniper attacks. In September, Malvo allegedly participated in a deadly liquor store holdup in Montgomery, Ala.
Thereafter, the pair lived in the Washington D.C. suburbs. Police speculated that Muhammad was drawn to the area by the presence of his second wife, who lived in Clinton, Md., near the scene of a number of the shootings, the Times said.
Two pictures of Muhammad emerged from interviews with those who knew him at various points in his life: a Gulf War veteran and family man with a modest business and an angry loner who slipped into poverty in the years leading up to the D.C. shootings.
Muhammad was disciplined for hitting an officer in the Louisiana National Guard, but later earned Army honors for marksmanship and Gulf War service.
One neighbor trusted him to watch her 7-year-old son; another remembers him as reclusive and unfriendly.
His successful car repair business supported a middle-class life, but after his second marriage ended he slid into homelessness.
And when he returned to his home state of Louisiana in July for one of his sporadic visits, some saw a definite change.
"He just wasn't that same fresh, clean and ready-for-business," said Edward Holiday, a younger cousin who considered Muhammad a role model. "He didn't look like a guy who is doing as good as he said he did."
Said Denitra King, a neighbor: "He wasn't the same person."
Muhammad, 41, and Malvo were arrested Thursday while sleeping in a car at a Maryland rest stop. They are considered suspects in the sniper shootings, said Charles Moose, police chief in Montgomery County, Md., and leader of the sniper task force.
The Seattle Times quoted federal sources as saying Muhammad and Malvo had been known to speak sympathetically about the hijackers who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. There was no indication Muhammad or Malvo were linked to al Qaeda or any terrorist group, authorities said.
An FBI official described the pair as "closet extremists."
Holiday and King said Muhammad talked often about his Muslim beliefs. They said he didn't like the idea of the United States getting involved in Afghanistan, although he didn't get angry about it.
Malvo accompanied Muhammad on his Louisiana visit, and the older man introduced the teenager as his son.
Relatives in Louisiana were alarmed by Muhammad's control over the boy. Muhammad's former sister-in-law, Sheron Norman, said Malvo's diet was limited to crackers, honey and nutritional supplements.
"You could tell he was scared," she said. "You could tell he didn't like the way he was living."
Muhammad was born John Allen Williams in Baton Rouge, La. His mother died and his dad wasn't around, Holiday said, so his grandmother and an aunt raised him.
Carolyn Lawrence Matthews lived in Muhammad's neighborhood when he was growing up. Matthews, a school teacher, said she was a mentor to the boy, and taught him to be productive and responsible.
"I know this is a good family, a good neighborhood," she said. "We all shared everything. We all looked after each other."
Muhammad was a track and football star at Scotlandville High School, said James "Houseman" Johnson, owner of a local restaurant.
Muhammad married his high school sweetheart in 1982. He converted to Islam and changed his last name after he left Baton Rouge in 1985, said relatives of first wife Carol Williams.
In the Louisiana National Guard, where he served from 1978 to 1985, Muhammad faced disciplinary charges twice — once for striking a noncommissioned officer in the head while on duty. He was convicted and fined $100.
He enlisted in the Army in November 1985 and was posted at Fort Lewis in Washington state, then transferred to Germany in 1990, to Fort Ord, Calif., in 1992, and back to Fort Lewis in 1993.
Muhammad didn't receive sniper training from the Army, but he did receive a Marksmanship Badge with expert rating — the highest of three ratings — in use of the M-16 rifle, according to Army records.
He was trained mainly as a combat engineer, his specialty in the 1991 Gulf War, according to a defense official.
He was discharged at Fort Lewis in 1994, then served in the Oregon National Guard until 1995. His highest ranking on active duty was sergeant.
Norman, Carol Williams' sister, said the couple had a bitter custody dispute over their son, now 20. In 1994, the son visited Muhammad in Washington state for the summer, but failed to return until his mother got a court order, Norman said.
When he returned, Norman said, the boy had lost 20 pounds. She said he described being subjected to a military-like routine of exercise and a strict diet.
In 1997, Muhammad approached Felix Strozier at a karate competition and convinced him they should start a karate school in Tacoma. Muhammad wanted Strozier to teach Malvo, and promised to sign up many Muslim students.
"I was honored that he thought enough of me to back me with the school," Strozier said. But Strozier said they split unhappily when Muhammad failed to deliver on his promises.
"You know, it seems like I can remember him being bitter, just bitter about life," he said.
When Mildred Muhammad sought a restraining order after she and Muhammad separated in March 2000, she told the court her estranged husband was "irrational" and had threatened "to destroy my life."
In court records, she said their three children risked psychological damage from Muhammad's "abusive use of conflict."
John S. Mills, a lawyer who represented Muhammad as he tried to win custody of his three children with Mildred Muhammad, told the Washington Post his client was "angry at how he was treated over his kids."
Mildred Muhammad filed for divorce in 1999. The couple had joint custody of the children, but Muhammad eventually took the children out of the country, according to court records.
When Mildred Muhammad got the children back, she took them into hiding. Mills said Muhammad was devastated by the loss and frustrated that he could not find his children, but did not seem irrational.
Some neighbors described Muhammad as cold.
"He would just kind of look at me shrug me off and turn away," said Lee Ann Terlaje of Tacoma.
But Muhammad presented a different face to Deborah Waters, who lived across the street from him this summer.
"He seemed extremely nice, maybe a quiet, shy guy, but definitely not mean or evil," Waters said. He took her 7-year-old son on trips to the pool and the park.
In February, Tacoma police investigated Muhammad and another man for shoplifting about $27 worth of meat and frozen food, police spokesman Jim Mattheis said. Arrest warrants were issued for both after they failed to appear in court.
Malvo left Jamaica in his early teens and moved to another Caribbean island before migrating to the United States, his father and Jamaican officials said Thursday.
"He was a nice kid so I don't know how he got mixed up in this," said his father, Leslie Malvo, a building contractor in Kingston, Jamaica.
Malvo lived in Florida for a while with his mother, according to a source familiar with the investigation, and briefly attended high school in southwest Florida in the fall of 2001. By late October, Malvo and Muhammad surfaced together in Bellingham, a Washington town just south of Canada. They lived as father and son at a homeless shelter.
Police believe Muhammad dated Malvo's mother and for a while the three lived as a family, according to a senior law enforcement source, speaking on condition of anonymity.