City Has Sniper Trial in Its Sights

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. —  The lunch crew at Zero’s has never worked so hard. A midday crush of starved jurors and reporters is almost upon them, and there are scores of sandwich rolls and pounds of cold cuts to slice before they can rest.

Business is up in Virginia Beach, courtesy of the trial of serial sniper suspect John Allen Muhammad. The defendant’s lawyers, a team of prosecutors and investigators, scores of experts and witnesses and a caravan of satellite trucks and 300 reporters all rolled into town last week, jolting this Atlantic coast resort out of its autumn off-season doldrums. Opening arguments in the case are scheduled to start today.

Despite the spike in activity, many jaundiced onlookers in this city of about 430,000 wish the trial were over already. “We know the guy’s guilty, so they ought to get ready to fry him so things can get back to normal,” said Holly Crupper, 20, a Zero’s waitress who reports for work two hours early now to set up for the Muhammad trial lunch rush.

Virginia’s method of execution happens to be lethal injection, but Crupper’s impatience is a telling sign of how grudgingly people here accept their roles -- as hosts and as jurors -- in the flinty American spirit of frontier justice. If they have to put up with an accused serial killer for a month or so, many here say, their surrogates on the jury will not be shy about making short work of Muhammad.

“The jury will sit there and listen to all the sides fairly. And then they’ll politely sentence him to death,” painter Jeff Banks said with a laugh as he emerged from Bill’s Flea Market, a concrete and corrugated metal collection of junk and antique stalls on Virginia Beach Boulevard, the city’s main drag.

When Prince William County Circuit Court Judge LeRoy F. Millette Jr. ruled in July that the Muhammad trial would be moved here to find a jury untainted by blanket media coverage in the Washington, D.C., area, city officials quickly accepted the decision without carping. Virginia Beach merchants were overjoyed at the prospect of profits coming just as their resort business settled in for winter hibernation.

Hotels just emptied of summer beachgoers are filling up again. The city’s courthouse pulses with no-nonsense sheriff’s deputies and nearly $500,000 in new metal detectors and security equipment. All other jury trials have been suspended for two weeks to handle the media crush.

Inside the 53-seat courtroom last week, Muhammad’s trial lawyers selected 12 jurors and three alternates after long hours spent interviewing 120 Virginia Beach residents summoned to serve as prospective jurors.

Mayor Meyera E. Oberndorf likens the city’s shouldering of its role to a citizen’s responsibility to accept jury duty. Last month, after Hurricane Isabel roared through town, toppling hundreds of trees and cutting off power, Virginia Beach officials gratefully accepted help from outside -- an acknowledgement that civic duty requires being a good neighbor, even to neighbors 200 miles away.

“We had communities in South Carolina helping us out after Hurricane Isabel struck, no questions asked,” said David Sullivan, the city’s chief information officer. “It’s the same thing here. Helping out Prince William County was doing our duty.”

Millette settled on Virginia Beach, Sullivan said, chiefly because the town’s new courthouse provides ample space and a secure underground tunnel allows deputies to escort Muhammad from jail to the courtroom without running a press gantlet.

But Virginia Beach offers a less obvious bonus to Muhammad’s prosecutors: a jury pool known to be tough on crime and unblinkingly supportive of capital punishment. The city’s law-and-order outlook underscores the difficulty Muhammad’s defense lawyers faced as they tried to find jury candidates willing to keep an open mind about the sniper suspect’s alleged involvement in the killings -- and his possible punishment.

During an exhaustive round of questions probing attitudes on the death penalty and intrusive media coverage, jurors repeatedly promised to rule only on the evidence. But outside the courthouse, that pledge drew smirks and eye rolls.

“This is a military community, and we’re big on the death penalty around here,” said Enzo Holmes, 33, a government worker who sells rental camping and waterskiing equipment at the Navy Exchange, which sits on the edge of the sprawling Oceana Naval Air Station, five miles from the courthouse.

As gull-winged F-14 fighter jets screeched overhead, Holmes -- the son of a retired Navy man -- tersely described how Virginia Beach’s military community looks on at the sniper trial. “In the service, you got standards and you got rules,” he said. “If you don’t live up to ‘em, you pay the piper.”

Along the sandy boardwalk strip of Atlantic Avenue, Virginia Beach looks as laid-back and blissfully tawdry as any resort town, overrun with T-shirt shops, seafood shacks and tanned beachcombers who promenade in cut-offs even when a hard wind blows in from the ocean.

But inland, Virginia Beach is all spit and polish. Navy and Marine bases dominate the city’s marshy lowlands, surrounded by metastasizing strip malls and cul-de-sac hideaways where active-duty warriors retire or settle in for several years until they move on to their next assignment. South of the courthouse, Virginia Beach is all farmland, miles of soybean and corn stretching to the North Carolina border.

The service families, military contractors and farmers tilt the Virginia Beach jury pool toward a strong law-and-order mind-set. In a city that prides itself on having the lowest crime rate of any municipality of its size, that tendency could translate to zero tolerance for an accused serial killer. Jury selection ended Friday and those seated included five with military ties and eight women. Thirteen are white; two are African American.

“The juries you get here are pretty much all white, in their 40s and 50s, ready to throw the book at you and anything else they have handy,” said Claude Scialdone, a veteran defense attorney who works out of a white cedar-tile cottage across from the municipal center.

“They don’t have an ounce of compassion,” Scialdone said. “Not that this Muhammad deserves any, but he at least deserves some fairness. That’s also in pretty short supply around this town. God help you if you get a jury of your peers.”

Out at the Navy Exchange, in a government shed filled with rental camper shells, kayak paddles and jet skis, Holmes insisted that Virginia Beach residents were capable of judging a defendant fairly. But the sniper trial, he added, existed on another plane -- a horrific crime requiring swift and sure justice.

“We’re not gonna tolerate a guy who goes around shooting people for sport,” he said. “If I was on that jury, I’d let the guy make his case. Then, it’s case closed, you’re gone.”

“You’d never get on the jury,” scoffed a co-worker wearing an olive and brown camouflage jacket. “They don’t want you. They want somebody who’s been in a coma for the last year.”

As evidence, the man offered up the latest joke going around the base: “Knock knock. Who’s there? The sniper. Sniper who? Great, you’re on the jury!”