D.C. sniper’s ex-wife, children cope with execution

One of the Washington, D.C. sniper’s ex-wives says she has fully healed from the abusive marriage she endured with him, and is helping her children cope with knowing their dad won’t be a part of their lives. Mildred Muhammad, 49, told the Associated Press in a phone interview that she and her three children watched news coverage of John Muhammad’s execution in silence at their Maryland home. When his death was announced, the children—John, 19, Salena, 17, and Taalibah, 16—went into different rooms and cried. “It was very difficult to see them in that kind of pain,” Mildred Muhammad says. “Because I know what was going through their head—’this is my dad, he should be in my life, this should not be happening.’” Her ex-husband was put to death by lethal injection Tuesday in Virginia for killing Dean Harold Meyers at a gas station during a series of killings in 2002 that terrorized the Washington, D.C., area for three weeks. His then-teenage accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, is serving a life sentence without parole for his role in one of the slayings. For Muhammad, however, the execution marked her recovery since leaving her abusive ex-husband a decade ago. She expects John Allen Muhammad’s funeral next Tuesday in Baton Rouge, will bring some closure. The family also plans to retrieve letters he left for the children from another ex-wife.