On the Trail of a Killer
My sister and her husband in Blacksburg, Va., split up earlier this year, and he now lives in an apartment behind The Huckleberry Trail, just several blocks from the Virginia Tech campus. I wrote about my reminiscent run along that pathway last year.
Around 7:15 a.m., he heard two pop sounds and ran out back with his neighbors to find a body on the trail, just yards from where the photo in that earlier post was taken. An escaped inmate who’d already killed one security guard and injured another had just scored his second fatality, a sheriff's deputy. That meant that as everyone rushed to the dead officer, this guy was still among them.
I’ve been watching CNN all morning for updates and thinking how very creepy it must have felt to anyone running or cycling along that trail at that moment. Not to mention people like my brother-in-law and nephews who witnessed this. Let’s hope the guy’s in custody very soon.
UPDATE ON MONDAY AFTERNOON: My sister just called to say the police have the gunman in custody. And she's arranged for her sons and daughter to see a crisis counselor tomorrow to help them deal with being the first on the scene of a murder. Late this afternoon, my niece explained to me on the phone what she saw: a man who was shot on his bike (he wasn't on a bike but on a bike path) and they took him to the hospital to "make him undead."
Around 7:15 a.m., he heard two pop sounds and ran out back with his neighbors to find a body on the trail, just yards from where the photo in that earlier post was taken. An escaped inmate who’d already killed one security guard and injured another had just scored his second fatality, a sheriff's deputy. That meant that as everyone rushed to the dead officer, this guy was still among them.
I’ve been watching CNN all morning for updates and thinking how very creepy it must have felt to anyone running or cycling along that trail at that moment. Not to mention people like my brother-in-law and nephews who witnessed this. Let’s hope the guy’s in custody very soon.
UPDATE ON MONDAY AFTERNOON: My sister just called to say the police have the gunman in custody. And she's arranged for her sons and daughter to see a crisis counselor tomorrow to help them deal with being the first on the scene of a murder. Late this afternoon, my niece explained to me on the phone what she saw: a man who was shot on his bike (he wasn't on a bike but on a bike path) and they took him to the hospital to "make him undead."
