Sniper victim’s laugh and love still resonate

PERKIOMENVILLE, PASEDONIA:  In the year since Dean H Meyers was killed by a serial sniper last October, his three brothers have divvied up his belongings and disposed of what they couldn’t use.

 In February, they sold his townhouse in Gaithersburg. In April, they sold the small parcel of land he owned in rural Virginia. In May, they sold his motorcycle. His ‘66 Corvette with the black leather interior will probably go to his brother Greg, who also has his canoe (the paddles are in his brother Bob’s garage). The black Mazda Meyers was driving the night he was killed was sold one Saturday morning in June. As his family prepares for tomorrow’s opening of the trial of alleged sniper mastermind John Allen Muhammad in Dean Meyers’s slaying, and the start of the extraordinary case’s legal climax, the physical trappings of the victim’s life are much diminished. Yet along the rural back roads and farm fields where he grew up, where his family has lived for generations, his presence seems as strong as ever, his relatives said. Although he is buried beside his mother, who died this past Easter, behind a red brick church along Route 73, his brothers sense him many places in the lush autumn landscape, even as they go about the painful task of parceling out his belongings. As they gathered in Bob Meyers’s home late Saturday, a ghostly pink sunset giving way to a full moon, Bob said of his brother: “He was very much a part of our lives. He was and still is.”

Dean Meyers, 53, a Vietnam veteran, was shot to death at 8.10 pm October 9, 2002, when he stopped to buy gas at a Manassas area service station near the engineering firm of Dewberry & Davis LLC, where he worked for 20 years. He had stayed late at his job and was headed to his home in Gaithersburg, where he had lived for 25 years. As he stood beside his Mazda, with the door to the gas tank open, he was struck behind the left ear by a .223 rifle bullet that broke into 14 pieces and killed him almost instantly. His ATM card was found near his body. His Timex watch, with its worn leather wristband, was broken by the impact of his fall and stopped moments later. He was the seventh person slain during the three-week October sniping spree and the ninth person shot. Three others were killed and one was wounded before the attacks ended. By fate, justice in his death will come first, but in many ways Meyers was just like the other ten people killed in the shootings last year — just someone going about his day-to-day life. Investigators have said that the bullet that killed Meyers was fired from the rifle found in Muhammad’s car when he and fellow sniper suspect Lee Boyd Malvo were arrested October 24, 2002. Malvo later allegedly boasted to interrogators about the accuracy of the shot, and police discovered the fingerprints of both suspects on a map found across the street from the gas station.

Over the weekend, Muhammad, 42, was flown from Manassas to Virginia Beach to be tried. Malvo, 18, is scheduled to go on trial November 10 in Chesapeake, where his trial was moved. He is charged in the October 14, 2002, shooting death of Linda Franklin, 47, outside a Home Depot in Fairfax County. Dean Meyers was the second youngest of the four brothers, the only one to move away from the Pennsylvania farm country, northwest of Philadelphia, where they were raised. He served in the Army during the Vietnam War and was seriously wounded in the left arm during a firefight in 1970. After the war, he attended engineering school at Penn State and then moved to Maryland, where he had found a job. At Dewberry, Meyers designed storm drain systems for housing developments. He had no children, had never married and was the faraway but benevolent “Uncle Dean” to his family. He would make about a dozen trips a year to Pennsylvania in his old white Isuzu Trooper, bearing fireworks on the Fourth of July and a carload of presents every Christmas. He never missed his father’s birthday in April, his brothers recalled, and he returned every fall and spring to remove and then replace the old-fashioned storm windows in his parents’ Cape Cod-style home. He was due to make just such a trip last October — the week he was killed.

Standing by Meyers’s grave behind Christ Evangelical Congregational Church on Saturday, his eldest brother, Larry, 60, a financial consultant who lives in nearby Stowe, said that he has been designated by the family to testify at Muhammad’s trial, if called. He said he would tell the court that his brother was a “very loving, kind, generous, gentle, considerate individual who loved life, loved people and related to everyone in a positive and caring manner.” “You know, sometimes you don’t know what you have until you lose it. …Such a guy. Now that (the trial) is coming around, I can just hear him talking more and more. The voice. The laugh,” he said. Growing up, Larry Meyers noted, Dean was always his little brother. They were ten years apart, but in adulthood, they had become very close. They often took photography trips together, sometimes to Boston or New York City, sometimes just through the local countryside. “My heart is not filled with hatred or any of that other stuff for this guy,” Larry said. “I believe he was twisted up, and once you’re twisted, you’re going to have some twisted results. I feel badly for him as a human being that he got himself into this situation.” As for the death penalty, which both Muhammad and Malvo face, “God is the final judge,” Larry Meyers said. “Whatever the justice system decides is fine with me. There is no revenge. Nothing that I can do. Nothing that I can feel can bring Dean back.”