On February 16th, 2002, Kenya Nicole Cook opened the front door of her aunt’s home, in Tacoma, Washington, to find a teenage boy standing outside. The pair chatted for a moment before the teenager produced a gun, and subsequently shot Kenya, a 21-year-old cashier.

Just over a month later, on March 19th, 60-year-old Jerry Taylor was killed after a single bullet fired from long range hit him while he practised at a golf course in Tucson, Arizona. Over the course of the next four months, two other deaths would occur, and a further four people would be injured by what seemed like stray or random bullets. On August 1st, John Gaeta, who was just 51-years-old, was changing his tyre after he discovered that it had been slashed in a car park in Hammond, Louisiana. As he carried out the task, he was shot in the back. The bullet exited John’s body, but he knew better than to show the shooter that he was alive. He pretended to be dead while the culprit searched him for valuables, coming away from the scene with the 51-year-old’s wallet. Once the shooter was gone, John climbed to his feet and made his way to a nearby service station, where he noticed he was bleeding. Afterwards, he went to the hospital and was released after an hour.

Then, on September 5th, at 10:30 pm, the shooter struck again. This time, the victim was a 55-year-old pizzeria owner named Paul LaRuffa, who was shot five times at close range while locking up his restaurant in Clinton, Maryland. Luckily, Paul survived. A few weeks later, on September 21st, Million Woldemariam became the next target. The 41-year-old was helping the owner of a Sammy’s Package Store in Atlanta, Georgia, close up for the night at around 12:15 am when he was shot in the head and back with a .22 calibre pistol. He died from his wounds. Later that same day, 52-year-old Claudine Parker, a liquor store clerk in Montgomery, Alabama, was shot in the chest and killed during a robbery. Her co-worker, 24-year-old Kellie Adams, was critically wounded after being shot through the neck but managed to survive. The final attack in this series of bizarre slayings occurred on September 23rd, at around 6:30 pm, when Hong Im Ballenger, 45, was shot in the head and killed in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The weapon used was later identified as a Bushmaster rifle.

While the string of seemingly random attacks came to an end, a new series of shootings began in the states of Washington, DC, and Maryland, this the the story of the DC Sniper Attacks

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