The Washington Post on Friday marked the murder of five local residents by celebrating how their deaths demonstrated the “diversity” of Montgomery County, Maryland where they were killed.
“Arbitrary Victims, Identical Fate,” read the October 4 front page headline over this subhead: “County's Growing Diversity Reflected in Those Gunned Down.”
Because of the byline strike by the paper's unionized staff, the story did not carry a byline. It began:
James L. “Sonny” Buchanan Jr. died doing a favor for an old customer.
Though he had been out of the landscaping business for months, he still drove from his new home in Virginia every week or so to trim the grass of a longtime Kensington customer he refused to disappoint.
He was operating the Lawn-Boy mower along a strip of grass on Huff Court near Fitzgerald Auto Mall when a sniper's bullet caught him in the chest shortly after 7:30 yesterday morning.
Like Buchanan, 39, the other four victims in yesterday's random violence were shot while conducting the mundane minutiae of life: buying groceries, pumping gas, vacuuming a van and resting on a bench outside a post office.
They included an Indian-born cabdriver who preached the value of education and dreamed of arranging a good marriage for his daughter, a federal worker with a passion for the Civil War and racial justice, a young mother who had moved from rural Idaho to make a life in the urban sprawl of Montgomery County, a woman who had paused for a moment after getting off a bus and the altruistic landscaper who wrote poems and nurtured underprivileged children.
Their names and faces reflected the diversity that has become Montgomery County: Sarah Ramos, Premkumar A. Walekar, James Martin, Lori Lewis Rivera and James L. Buchanan, the man almost everyone knew as “Sonny.”
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(This update courtesy of the Media Research Center.)
