Where sniper killed woman, bench becomes focus of fear
A little boy spun around inside the Crisp & Juicy restaurant Tuesday, then made his way to the window. His outstretched hand approached the scars in the glass.
"Alex!" called a woman waiting for her order. The boy came, leaving the ugly flower behind.
Outside, no one sits on The Bench. To do so would be "sacrilegious," someone says. It is a holy site now. It was covered with flowers until someone — it's not clear who — removed them.
A tiny metal cross was draped along its planks on this day. People in cars rolled past and pointed. The elderly shuffled past and paused. Beside the bullet hole, above the sign listing the restaurant's combo meals, was a poster that read: "Thou shalt not kill! — God."
That bench is where Sarah Ramos, 34, housekeeper, baby-sitter, wife and mother of a 7-year-old boy, was waiting when she was killed by a single bullet through the head at 8:37 a.m. on Oct. 3. She was the fourth of eight to die in sniper attacks since Oct. 2.
The crime was so awful, the victim so apparently random, the circumstances so ordinary, that people in this Washington suburb seem compelled to talk about it. They swap theories with strangers and offer warnings to people standing in the open.
To wait and rest is to court death. It's a horrifying reminder that everything alive is vulnerable to the stamp of the heel, the tug of the hook, the boom of the gun. Absolute safety is an illusion, always, everywhere.
This bench, where Ramos was killed, gives a focus for people's fears. Folks wander over to study it, take pictures and talk. It is a place where they go to understand, pay respects, maybe pray. Until The Bench mysteriously disappears, it serves this purpose well.
The tragedy of Sarah Ramos is the tragedy of many others — a taxicab driver, a retired landscaper, another young mother. Almost every day brings another death, and everyone is waiting for the next shot. Will it happen around the corner from your house? Will it happen to someone you know? Will it be you?
If you must wait — as Ramos did that deadly morning, when she bided her time before an employer was to pick her up — you want at least to do something. You play amateur detective, you offer your theories to the person standing by you, also looking at The Bench. You try to talk some sense into the situation.
"I'm wondering if he's not retracing things in his life. Like maybe he went to that school. He may have worked at Michaels," said a 60-year-old woman in a yellow sweat shirt who offered only her middle name, Josephine. Like many of the mostly older folks who gather here, she was skittish about giving her full name.
"That's just my latest theory," Josephine said; before this, she thought the sniper shootings were the work of terrorists. "I think my theory is so good I almost want to tell the police."
Everybody sees clues. Some insist the sniper must have shot from the parking lot. No — from the street. No — from the trees across the street. People talk about sightlines and hill grades. They figure he may have worked in some of the places where he's killing. From that, and from the truck he may have been driving, they guess he was in plumbing or electricity or some sort of skilled trade.
Or they see a pattern in the sniper's shooting sites. "Somebody said it made a star," Josephine said, "but it didn't make a star." Then: "I'm just expanding on my own speculation here." She pauses and looks around. "Well, it's real. She's really dead."
Theorizing about the sniper isn't just an idle pastime, like discussing soap-opera intrigues. Understanding the sniper's motives is a matter of life and death. Few folks who gather around The Bench seem to think the sniper's attacks are entirely random. No, there is some order, some distorted logic. If they can understand where and why he shoots, they believe, they can perhaps prevent it from happening to them.
Ramos was killed in the morning, and now, Wednesday morning, six days after, right around the same time she was killed, you could see what the shopping center might have been like while she sat. The stores around The Bench weren't open yet. The parking lot had few cars. All was calm, quiet. You think about sitting on The Bench, but you can't bring yourself to do it. It's a matter of respect. And a desire not to tempt the fates.
And yet ... one evening, a man was sitting on The Bench. Scott Holden, 52, was bantering with Becki Price, 46. She's his financial adviser, and they meet in this area every month or so to exchange checks and information.
"We met here before, and we met here again," Holden said in a frank, friendly way, as if to say, it's no big deal.
Over the next few minutes, though, as he and Price discussed where the killer might have aimed from, Holden grew increasingly uncomfortable. Was it from the street? Wouldn't someone have seen the rifle sticking out the window?
"I'm a little spooked," Holden said.
Would it have been easier to shoot from the parking lot?
"Yuck," Holden said, "it's weirding me out." He was standing now, and his arm was around Price. "I'm beginning to get freaked a little bit."
"I'll protect you," Price said brightly.
How can this ever be just a regular bench? A 78-year-old woman walked past it. She wouldn't give her name. She said she saw Ramos' body after she was shot. "My older daughter says you've got to stop thinking about that," but the image keeps coming back.
"She was like this," the woman said, slumping to one side. "I just thought she was sleeping. And then I saw the blood."
Even for those who didn't see that aftermath, The Bench has a terribleness. Never mind what some say — that the sniper wouldn't strike the same place twice. It's too easy to look at it and imagine someone resting there like "a sitting duck," as one man put it. It's too easy to see it not as a place to relax but as a trap for someone unsuspecting, a backdrop to the perfect target for a gun and a steady hand.
After 3 p.m. Wednesday, two men showed up, one wearing the insignia of Divaris Real Estate, which manages properties. Without ceremony, they placed The Bench on a dolly and rolled it two stores down, in front of the GNC. By Friday afternoon, the Crisp & Juicy window had been replaced and the transplanted bench — where was The Bench? It was gone from the GNC.
Where is The Bench? There are so many blue benches here, it could be one of these. Someone might easily sit on it, not realizing the horrible end that Sarah Ramos met on it. An employee along the strip, Jason Thurston, 22, said he thought The Bench was placed in front of Starbucks, but a Starbucks employee says she has noticed no new benches. The Bench simply could be gone. A place of mourning erased. Officials at Divaris couldn't be reached for comment.
Is this life moving on? One area employee says maybe it's for the best: The Bench represented so much sadness.