Beltway sniper John Allen Muhammad spent most of his adult life in Pierce County and Tacoma.
During his 17 years in the South Sound, he married for the second time, raised three children, started a business that failed and saw his second marriage crumble.
Muhammad joined the Army in 1985 and transferred to Fort Lewis. After he was honorably discharged in 1994, Muhammad and his wife, Mildred, moved to a house on South Ainsworth Avenue in Tacoma.
Mildred filed for divorce in late 1999. Muhammad briefly kidnapped his children and fled the Tacoma area. He formally changed his name from Williams to Muhammad.
He went to Antigua, and there he befriended a teen named Lee Boyd Malvo, who became his protégé. Malvo told Virginia prosecutors he stole a Bushmaster rifle from a Tacoma gun shop – a weapon that would become the snipers’ chief instrument of death.
Tacoma police named the two as suspects in the fatal shooting of 21-year-old Tacoma resident Keenya Cook in 2002.
Then-Pierce County Prosecutor Gerry Horne decided in 2004 not to file charges against Muhammad and Malvo in Cook’s death.
Horne said he couldn’t justify the expense when the men already will spend the rest of their lives in prison for other murders.
Cook died Feb. 16, 2002, after she answered the door to her aunt’s house and a man shot her in the face. Malvo, then 16, admitted he killed her to prove to his mentor, Muhammad, that he could set his feelings aside and kill dispassionately.
Cook was an accidental target. Muhammad was angry at Cook’s aunt for helping his ex-wife win custody of their three children, and he wanted to get back at her.
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