D.C. sniper attacks
series of coordinated shootings in October 2002 in the United States
The D.C. sniper attacks (also known as the Beltway sniper attacks) were a series of coordinated shootings that occurred over three weeks in October 2002 throughout the Washington metropolitan area, consisting of the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia. These were preceded by a series of murders and robberies in several states starting in February 2002. Five people were killed, and five others were injured in the preliminary shootings, and ten people were killed and three others were critically wounded in the October shootings.
In total, the snipers killed 16 people and wounded 8 others in a 10-month span. They shot 16 people in the D.C. metro area based on both events that took place that year. The perpetrators, John Allen Muhammad (41 years old at the time) and Lee Boyd Malvo (17), traveled in a blue 1990 Chevrolet Caprice sedan. In 2003, Muhammad was sentenced to death. He was executed by lethal injection in 2009. Malvo, a juvenile, received six life sentences in Maryland and three in Virginia.
Preliminary shootings
On February 16, 2002, 21-year-old Keenya Nicole Cook was shot and killed by Lee Malvo at the front door of her aunt's home in Tacoma, Washington.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “D.C. sniper attacks” is series of coordinated shootings in October 2002 in the United States. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through sniper, attacks and series, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q816220. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2002, 1990, 2003 and 2009.
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This entry incorporates text from “D.C. sniper attacks” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.