Shootings ‘unsettling’ for Crozet

Western Albemarle County resident Lisa Miller was awoken at 5 a.m. Thursday when her phone rang. Miller’s sister was on the line.
“Lock your doors and your windows,” her sister warned.
The news was reporting that unidentified gunmen had shot four cars traveling on Interstate 64 with a rifle — just a few moments away from Miller’s home.
“It’s unsettling,” said Miller, who cuts hair at Modern Barbershop, a Crozet landmark founded by her grandfather in 1933. “You never think it’d happen here, but I guess it can happen anywhere, anytime nowadays.”

By Thursday afternoon, life had essentially returned to normal for most residents of Crozet and other communities close to the scene of the overnight highway shootings. Yet the so-called “sniper,” they said, was the topic of everyone’s conversation.
“People are just going crazy about it,” one cashier at the Crozet Great Value grocery store informed a patron at the checkout line.
Erica Haskins, a Crozet resident who commutes via I-64 to her job at a downtown Charlottesville hair salon, said she plans on taking an alternative route into the city for the foreseeable future.
“I think it’s scary,” Haskins said. “I have kids.”
Haskins praised the decision to close Albemarle County schools because of the shootings. Her 8-year-old son attends Brownsville Elementary School.
“I’m glad they did it,” she said. “You never know what can happen.”
For some area residents, the shootings brought back memories of the Beltway sniper attacks in which John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo killed 10 people in the Washington region and along the Interstate 95 corridor. Hank Baldwin, who moved to Crozet from Fairfax two years ago, said it reminded him of the uncertainty of those October 2002 killings.
“I was surprised it happened here,” he said. “It’s disturbing.”
Rich Svagerko, who passed through the stretch of I-64 that became a crime scene Thursday afternoon on his way home to Cleveland, said the case echoed a similar case in Ohio in which serial highway sniper Charles McCoy Jr. killed one person and shot several cars in 2003.
“I’ve seen something like this before,” said Svagerko, who was a police officer for 30 years in Ohio. “But I think people are getting stranger to tell you the truth. A lot happen these days that I just don’t understand.”
All day Thursday, the rest stop on I-64 near mile marker 114 was jam-packed with TV station satellite trucks from all corners of Virginia. Reporters questioned any passersby who stopped for a bathroom break or a vending machine snack.
Abby Boxler, a third-grade teacher in Waynesboro, dropped by the rest stop on the way home with her mother from a trip to Richmond, where she was trying on wedding gowns for her October nuptials. On the way, she said, they got calls from her father, her mom’s friend and others about the shootings.
“A lot of people were concerned about us coming through here,” she said. “We got like three calls.”
Will James, an audio engineer and Crozet resident, said it was shocking to think that such as shooting could happen in a tranquil community like Crozet where “everybody knows everybody else.”
“I’m definitely looking over my shoulder everywhere I go,” James said. “Pretty wild.”