JARRATT, Va. (AP) — John Allen Muhammad stepped foot into Virginia's death chamber, looked calmly at the floor, over to the stainless steel gurney awaiting him, and back down. Within seconds he was lying down, tapping his left foot as guards checked the leather and nylon straps securing him to the table.
"Mr. Muhammad, do you have any last words?" the warden asked Tuesday night as the mastermind behind the D.C.-area sniper attacks lay with his arms spread wide with a needle dug into each.
Defiant till the end, Muhammad stared without batting an eye at the death room ceiling, refusing to even acknowledge the warden's presence.
A life that caused so much terror and wrecked people's lives ebbed away without a sound.
Answers — why he and a teenage accomplice methodically hunted people going about their daily chores during three terrifying weeks in October 2002, why he chose his victims, how many were there — went to the grave with him.
After the first of the three-drug lethal cocktail was administered, the 48-year-old Muhammad blinked repeatedly and took about seven deep breaths. Within a minute, he was motionless.
Time of death: 9:11 p.m.
"Interesting," said Wendy McCarson, one of the six official state witnesses.
It wasn't clear if she was talking about the procedure or the connection to the Sept. 11, terrorist attacks that had put the nation on edge just a year before Muhammad's brand was unleashed on the nation's capital.
Aside from whispers, coughs and a growling stomach, the comment about 9:11 were the only words spoken by 27 witnesses crowded into the booth. About 20 victims' relatives watched in a private booth across the hall.
Muhammad's execution was exceptional in that it was not. He didn't resist. He didn't speak. It was over in about 10 minutes.
"Anticlimactic," said the prosecutor who sent Muhammad to his death. "Clinical," described the brother of a man shot down during the killing spree.
"I would have liked him at some point in the process to take responsibility, to show remorse. We didn't get any of that tonight," said Bob Meyers, whose brother Dean Harold Meyers, was killed at a gas station during the killing spree. It was the murder for which Muhammad was sentenced to death.
Bob Meyers described the experience as "surreal" and said other witnesses expressed a range of feelings, including some who were overcome with emotion.
Prince William County Commonwealth's Attorney Paul Ebert has sent more than a dozen men, including Muhammad, to that death chamber. Tuesday was the first time he watched one take his last breath.
"He died very peacefully, much more than most of his victims," he said outside Greensville Correctional Center, south of Richmond.
Muhammad died by injection, but that was only because he refused to choose between that and electrocution. He had a last meal, but did not allow the state Department of Corrections to reveal what it was. An attorney said it was a chicken dinner with some cake.
"He will die with dignity — dignity to the point of defiance," said J. Wyndal Gordon, one of Muhammad's attorneys, before the execution. He described Muhammad as fearless in his final hours, still insisting he was innocent.
Muhammad's spree across Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C., all but paralyzed the region until he and his accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, were nabbed. People stayed indoors. Those who went out bobbed their heads or zigzagged back and forth so they would not be easy targets.
No one was safe.
Muhammad and Malvo shot men and women, old and young. They killed morning and night. On weekends and weekdays.
Victims were shot down while doing everyday chores: going shopping, pumping gas, mowing the lawn. One child was shot while walking into his middle school.
Malvo, who was 17 when carrying out the attacks, was sentenced to life in prison without parole for killing Linda Franklin, a 47-year-old FBI analyst who was shot as she and her husband loaded supplies at a Home Depot in Falls Church, Va.
The pair were suspected of fatal shootings in other states, including Louisiana, Alabama and Arizona.
Cheryll Witz, who's father Jerry Taylor, was fatally shot on a Tucson, Ariz., golf course in March 2002, said she was unhappy that Muhammad didn't say anything before he died. But she said his execution begins a new chapter in her life.
"I've waited seven long years for this," she said. "My life is totally beginning now. I have all my closure, and my justice and my peace."
About 10 miles away, back at the prison, a dark blue medical examiner's van started its journey to Richmond with Muhammad's body.
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Associated Press Writer Steve Szkotak in Jarratt contributed to this report.
