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Beltway Sniper executed

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By KEITH MORELLI

kmorelli@tampatrib.com

Published: November 11, 2009

Albert Michalczyk said that if the government televised executions, then he might watch Virginia prison officials give serial killer John Allen Muhammad a lethal injection for being one of two snipers who killed 10 people in Washington, Virginia and Maryland seven years ago.

Months before the shooting spree, Michalczyk was the victim of a similar attack on a Clearwater golf course and he thinks the shooters, who have never been identified, were Muhammad and his teenage accomplice.

Muhammad was executed by lethal injection Tuesday night. He was pronounced dead at 9:11 p.m. at Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt, Va., prison spokesman Larry Traylor said.

He said Muhammad had no final statement and didn't utter any words during the execution.

Muhammad was executed for killing Dean Harold Meyers, who was shot in the head at a Manassas gas station.

Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, then 17, were convicted of terrorizing the mid-Atlantic region in the fall of 2002 with a series of sniper slayings of 10 random people killed as they went about their lives unaware that they were in the crosshairs of a high-powered rifle's scope.

"If it's on television," Michalczyk said in a telephone interview from his home near Tucson, Ariz., on Tuesday morning, "I'll watch it."

Michalczyk is sure that his May 2002 shooting was among the sniper pair's first attacks.

During a visit to his daughter's home in Clearwater in 2002, Michalczyk went out for a round of golf at Glen Oaks. As he readied a tee shot on the seventh hole, he heard a bang and felt a thud on his chest. Then, he said, came the blood.

"I was with my family," he said. "They called paramedics right away."

The bullet, thought to be a small caliber round, likely from a .22-caliber rifle, passed through him and was never recovered, he said. "I was out of the hospital a couple of hours later," he said.

Initially, he and police didn't know who shot him. Then, the sniper rampage unfolded in Virginia, Maryland and Washington and in October 2002, authorities arrested Muhammad and Malvo.

Since then, Michalczyk has concluded that, even though no one has ever been charged with the shooting, Muhammad and Malvo are the snipers who shot him.

Police say the suspects may have been in the Clearwater area at the time and Malvo had mentioned to an acquaintance that they had singled out a couple of golfers before the D.C. slayings. However, the caliber of the weapon used in the Washington area and Clearwater shootings didn't match and police remain skeptical that charges will be filed in Michalczyk's case

Malvo is serving a life prison sentence in Virginia.

Information from the Associated Press was used in this report. Reporter Keith Morelli can be reached at (813) 259-7760.

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