Slow unsteady slide into trouble for Muhammad

SEATTLE (AP) _ John Muhammad was looking for something solid and steady. <br><br>He looked for it in the regimen of a military career and the self-discipline of exercise, karate and Islam. He looked in

Friday, October 25th 2002, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

SEATTLE (AP) _ John Muhammad was looking for something solid and steady.

He looked for it in the regimen of a military career and the self-discipline of exercise, karate and Islam. He looked in the bonds of marriage, in the obedient eyes of children, even in a new name. He looked from Washington to Tacoma, from Antigua to Iraq.

Everywhere, it was always the same: flux and frustration.

Finally, if authorities are right, he looked down the barrel of a rifle. He saw ordinary people, people who seemed to find meaning in the reassuring routines of their daily lives. And he dissolved their seemingly stable worlds with the twitch of a finger.

Though a teenager, John Lee Malvo, stands accused too, it is the 41-year-old Muhammad who, by virtually all accounts, would be the tortured force behind the unexplained immolations of the capital area's serial sniper.

If he is guilty, it is his story that will probably yield the most profound lessons of the dividing line between good and evil.

Was there one event, one moment when Muhammad became something inhuman _ perhaps leaving a wife or leaving the Army? Or was there a slow, almost imperceptible accumulation of frustrations, outrages, disappointments and indignities that finally dragged Muhammad into the darkness?

Or was it both?

___

John Allen Williams, later known as John Muhammad, was born to loss.

One of five children, he lost his mother to cancer when he was 5; his father went his own way. The children were left to be raised by other relatives in Baton Rouge, La., according to family members.

John found joy and forgetfulness in the surge and stretch of his own blood and muscle. He smacked tennis balls, sweated on the track, jarred his senses on the football field. He began wearing military fatigues.

Even in the neon glare of hindsight, though, his family and neighbors say they remember him as content, sociable, average. He graduated from Scotlandville High School in 1978 and soon entered the Louisiana National Guard, swapping scholastic for military regimentation. He married a local girl and later fathered a boy.

However, any hope of finding permanent anchors in marriage or the military was frayed within five years. Where hope retreated, defiance and rage rushed into the void.

In 1982, Muhammad admitted he was late to policing duty and was demoted from sergeant back to specialist. The next year, one of his fits of temper got him into more trouble. He was sentenced to a week in confinement, though it was suspended. He had hit an officer in the head.

He fell out with his wife, too, and they eventually went their own ways. But Muhammad was far from ready to give up, either as father or fighter.

In 1985, he joined the regular Army. He was sent to Fort Lewis, a foggy encampment in Washington state. The area was crawling with climbers, stoic Norwegians and semiretired hippies from nearby California, half a continent and a world away from the soul food and song-filled Baptist churches of the South.

He trained as a combat engineer, learning about land mines, bridge building and anti-tank ditches. He did not take special sniper training but earned an expert rating in the M-16 rifle _ the military cousin of the .223-caliber Bushmaster rifle used in the sniper shootings.

On the homefront, he completed his divorce and, within weeks, married another woman he had begun seeing. A convert to Islam, he would share a faith with her and later change his name to Muhammad. They would eventually have three children of their own.

In 1990, the boy from Baton Rouge was transferred to Germany with the 84th Engineer Company, but a longer, more wrenching journey was coming. Saddam Hussein's army invaded Kuwait, jolting the stability of the region. For a time, American forces struck back from the air. Foot soldiers had to follow. Muhammad's engineering unit rolled into Iraq at the vanguard of the American invasion. Military records say they cut through an 8-foot-high earthen wall on the Saudi-Iraq border to clear lanes for tanks and other forces.

The Pentagon says his unit may have been exposed to low levels of chemical weapons tucked away in bunkers destroyed by advancing U.S. troops. It is not clear if anyone was harmed.

For his war duty, Muhammad earned the Southwest Asia Service Medal, the Kuwait Liberation Medal, and the Saudi Arabia Liberation Medal as did many others.

Back home, he was assigned to Fort Ord, Calif., but soon returned to Fort Lewis. In 1994, he left active duty with an honorable discharge.

He began showing a powerful rigidity and need for control in civilian life. His 12-year-old son from Louisiana came for a visit and did not return as expected at summer's end, according Sheron Norman, his ex-wife's sister.

She says that when he finally did _ under his mother's court order _ he had lost 20 pounds. The boy complained of an exercise regimen and strict diet, as if he were in the Army.

Muhammad wasn't ready to give up the military in his own life. He went to Portland and worked in the Oregon National Guard for a year.

Weaned from the military _ in fact, if not in mind _ Muhammad would never find a way to lay a foundation for his financial security. He and a partner opened a karate school in Tacoma. Muhammad talked of signing up many Muslim students. The partners argued over money, and the school eventually went under.

Muhammad opened a car repair shop that advertised house calls. It didn't last.

He began to knock around with Malvo, a teenager adrift since his illegal entry into the United States from Jamaica. Despite the age disparity, they were both trim and liked to exercise at gyms. They both needed something: Maybe it was each other. At some point _ it's not clear when _ Muhammad began romancing the teenager's mother and began telling others that the boy was his son.

Muhammad's second wife filed for divorce in 1999. The court gave her full custody of the children. Blamed for ``actions of domestic violence and abduction of children,'' Muhammad was denied the right to visit them.

Muhammad began showing an intense interest in guns. In late 1999, he bought a semiautomatic .223-caliber rifle at a Tacoma gun shop. In March 2000, a judge issued a restraining order telling him not to harass or stalk his wife or children. Muhammad sold the gun back to the shop.

In January 2001, he took the children to the Caribbean island of Antigua _ he said with their mother's permission. Still, his ex-wife claimed in January 2001 that he was keeping them away from her. While in Antigua, Muhammad boasted to an acquaintance of being a CIA agent and sharpshooter who could ``take out a man'' a quarter of a mile away.

They returned a few months later and the children were reunited with their mother. But in another restraining order, she claimed Muhammad threatened to kill her.

Back in this country, Muhammad met up with Malvo again. By October 2001, luckless and ostensibly penniless, they lived in a homeless shelter in Bellingham, near the Canadian border.

Their suspicions aroused, authorities detained Malvo and his mother for almost a month as illegal aliens. Eventually, though, they let her go on bond and released her son to her. He soon fell back in with Muhammad.

``Anywhere the older guy went, the younger guy was there. It was like he was in his back pocket,'' said a neighbor who knew them when they lived together in Tacoma.

Muhammad kept living hand-to-mouth. In February, Tacoma police investigated him for allegedly shoplifting about $27 worth of meat and frozen food, a police spokesman says. He skipped court.

___

The downward spiral of Muhammad's life appeared to accelerate this year. Over the last six months, Muhammad visited an old Fort Lewis buddy, Robert Edward Holmes, and showed him rifles. He talked of aligning a scope and speculated on ``the damage you could do if you could shoot with a silencer,'' the government says in court papers.

In July, the FBI gave a heads-up about Muhammad to federal firearms investigators. Harjee Singh, of Bellingham, had told the bureau he knew Muhammad and Malvo from a local YMCA and they told him ``they were likely to do a sniper attack.'' The targets could be police and maybe a tanker truck. Faced with vague, possibly idle threats, authorities apparently didn't pursue the case.

That same month, the pair visited Baton Rouge. Neighbor Denitra King says Muhammad often talked of his Muslim beliefs. He didn't like the American role in Afghanistan. The Seattle Times has quoted federal sources as saying Muhammad and Malvo had spoken with sympathy about the Sept. 11 terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center last year. But there has been no sign that the two men participated in any terrorist group.

Still, old friends began noticing a change in Muhammad. King said of a visit, ``He wasn't the same person. He just looked different.''

Relatives in Louisiana were alarmed by Muhammad's seeming control over his teenage tag-along. Muhammad's former sister-in-law, Norman, said Malvo's diet was limited to crackers, honey and vitamins.

``You could tell he was scared,'' she said. ``You could tell he didn't like the way he was living.''

Back in Tacoma, Muhammad somehow illegally laid hands on another .223-caliber Bushmaster rifle, according to the manufacturer, despite a restraining order that barred him from keeping a gun. Neighbors at the house where they now lived in Tacoma reported the loud crack of a high-powered rifle in the back yard.

In August, as if totally unhinged from his own life, Muhammad appeared inexplicably in a bar in New Jersey, accompanied by a teenager who was presumably Malvo.

He bought a $250 Chevy Caprice with almost 150,000 miles. Authorities believe they used it in the shootings.

Within weeks, on Oct. 2, the sniper claimed his first capital-area victim, James Martin. Martin was also a military veteran. Unlike Muhammad, his life brimmed with meaning: He was a school volunteer, church trustee and Boy Scout leader.