Grumbling over police work as sniper hunt stalls
By BOB DART and REBECCA CARR
Atlanta Journal-Constitution Staff Writers
SILVER SPRING, Md. -- They gathered to grieve and grumble Wednesday at the makeshift memorial to the sniper's latest victim.
"I think the police are messing up," said Calvin Alfore, standing by the flowers, flag and candles at a newly notorious bus stop near a suburban apartment complex. Conrad Johnson, a popular bus driver in this neighborhood, was shot to death there the previous day.
"Their logic is way off," complained Alfore. "Right after the shooting, the police jammed up traffic on the Beltway. Like he's stupid enough to go on the Beltway. This dude knows the back roads."
The killing spree entered its fourth week with police remaining tight-lipped about any progress they are making on finding the elusive sniper whose toll of killings has reached 10.
Meanwhile, there is growing dissatisfaction among frightened citizens about the investigation being conducted by a task force of local, state and federal law enforcement agencies, and even reports of infighting inside the task force itself.
This is a region accustomed to police failures. There still have been no arrests in the murder of Chandra Levy, for instance, nor any break in the cases in which anthrax-laced letters killed local postal workers and contaminated federal buildings.
Some folks agree with the assessment that the sniper himself made in one of his missives to his pursuers -- "incompetent."
The sniper tried in vain to call FBI headquarters at least four times since the Saturday shooting near Ashland, Va., conceded a law enforcement source. In one recording, he is heard proclaiming that he is God. That same reference was made on a tarot card found after a 13-year-old boy was shot outside a school in Bowie, Md.
Unfortunately, the woman handling the call was an FBI trainee and did not understand the significance of the call. She cut the caller off, the law enforcement source confirmed. In response, the sniper wrote in the letter found at the Ponderosa Steak House in Ashland, Va., that the people answering the tip line were "incompetent," and threatened more killings.
Many parents are particularly upset that the task force delayed telling the public that this letter contained a chilling warning from the sniper that "your children are not safe anywhere at any time."
"That should have been made known to the public sooner," said Maria Figueroa, who kept her 15-year-old daughter home from school Tuesday. "I would have liked to have known that (the sniper) said that as soon as the police knew."
"I know they don't want to give out too much information," said George Tinkham, a handyman at the apartment complex. "But there's a lot of stuff that the public needs to know."
Task force leaders defended the limited release of information.
"We release information when we can and whatever we can," said Mike Bouchard, the lead agent from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. "We're certainly not withholding anything as far as safety. We're all parents, and we're certainly concerned for the safety of our kids, as well as our co-workers, et cetera."
Officials also denied news reports Wednesday that many police officers were complaining that reluctance to share information among agencies was hampering the investigation.
"There is no friction among the agencies," one law enforcement official said. "There is so much cooperation that we all think it's unusual."
But he did say that there have been some complaints about police detectives about not being given access to all of the information.
Dissemination on any major investigation is handled on a "need-to-know basis," said the official, who asked not to be identified.
"There is a concern: when you expose too much you get a copycat out there," the official said. "You spin your wheels on false leads. That's why we aren't going to publicize the whole letter."
Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose said that he has heard the criticism and will not let it change his focus..
"We're trying to be very thoughtful about everything that we do here," he said. "There will be people that will judge it as good, and there will be people that will judge it as okay, and somebody will say, it was done very poorly. All I can say is that ... we're all trying the very best that we can."
Almost every day, the chief is questioned about whether the FBI should take over the investigation. On Wednesday, President Bush promised that the "full resources" of the federal government will be put into the case.
But White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters that the president did not mean that the probe will be federalized.
"The current mixture of local officials working with federal officials ... is what the law enforcement community believes is the best approach," Fleischer said. "It remains a joint operation."
Within federal ranks, there is also no push to take over the investigation.
"No. Frankly, we don't know what we would add," said one federal official. "We now have 700 agents from the FBI alone working this thing. There is not much more anyone can do. There have been unfortunate missteps with communicating with the killer, but it is hard to sort the real calls from the crazy calls."
He noted that an FBI trainee flubbed the tip line call, not a local police officer.
But on the street, the grumbling is growing louder.
After the shooting Tuesday morning, "the FBI came to the apartment and asked for our ID's," said Donnelly Carroll, who lives near the bus stop. "But as long as you had a driver's license you could have shut the door and had all kinds of guns inside." |
