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For three weeks in 2002, John Allen Muhammad led a two-man sniper team that struck on his orders, claimed 10 lives and deliberately terrorized Virginia, Maryland and Washington. "Call me God," police were told in notes left at the scene of two attacks.
He is set to be executed by injection Tuesday for the slaying of Dean Harold Meyers, 53, shot in the head from long distance at a Manassas-area service station the evening of Oct. 9, 2002.
It was later that same night, in Pennsylvania, that Robert Meyers, 56, one of Dean's three brothers, learned of the snipers' seventh murder like the rest of the country.
"I was watching the news with my wife-to-be," he recalled. "I felt horrible that another person had been shot."
He didn't know that the latest victim was his own brother.
"We saw the picture that showed [Dean's] car and the crime scene tape and all that," but it did not register that it was his brother's car. "Honestly, it wasn't really clear. It was night. . . . It blew right by me."
At 5 a.m. the next day, a nephew knocked on Robert's door and told him that it was Dean, a bachelor and a civil en-gineer, who was slain the night before in Manassas.
Robert Meyers plans to attend Muhammad's execution, set for 9 p.m. at Greensville Correctional Center near Jarratt. An undisclosed number of family members of other sniper victims also hope to witness.
The shootings of October 2002 put millions on edge in Virginia, Maryland and Washington and triggered one of the largest manhunts in U.S. history.
Highways were shut down. Schools were closed. People quickly pumped gasoline while looking over their shoulder.
The terror ended early on the morning of Oct. 24, 2002, when Muhammad, then 41, and his accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, 17, were captured at an interstate rest stop in Maryland in a 1990 Caprice, a former police car purchased for $250 and used in many of the attacks.
Though more sniper victims were in Maryland, then-U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft turned Muhammad and Malvo over to Virginia for prosecution, where they were more likely to be sentenced to death if convicted.
At the time, Virginia -- second only to Texas in executions since 1976 -- executed juvenile offenders and Maryland did not. But in the end, Malvo was spared a death sentence in Virginia and is serving four life terms in Virginia's toughest prison.
The execution, like the 2003 capital-murder trials of Muhammad and Malvo, have drawn widespread media attention.
"The world is definitely watching," said David Clemenston, spokesman for the Virginia attorney general's office. "I've gotten calls from all over the globe, as international media outlets are interested in covering this execution."
The world also watched during the three-week period in October 2002, when Muhammad and Malvo spread fear in a region of the country already rocked by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the subsequent anthrax mailings.
No place in the region seemed safe -- a Fairfax County high-school football team moved a game to Richmond to avoid the snipers' territory and ended up eating its postgame meal at a Ponderosa restaurant in Ashland two hours before the snipers shot and wounded a man outside it.
And anyone could be a target -- victims included men and women, whites and blacks, the mothers or fathers of 21 children; a shopper; a man mowing grass, and a 13-year-old boy about to step through the door of his middle school.
"Your children are not safe anywhere at any time," said a note to police in Ashland near the scene of one wounding.
The same note, left in a plastic sandwich bag, sought $10 million to stop the killing and was the basis for one of two death sentences Muhammad was given for killing Meyers. The other was for killing more than one person in a three-year period.

Muhammad has had almost six years to consider his fate, if he is capable of doing so.
In an appeal last week to the U.S. Supreme Court, his lawyers contend among other things that he is mentally ill and delusional. He also has a clemency petition before Gov. Timothy M. Kaine.
But Prince William County Commonwealth's Attorney Paul Ebert, who won the death sentence against Muhammad, said, "This guy had absolutely no conscience. He killed people just like they were flies."
"He certainly created more concern and more heartache than anybody else that I'm aware of -- there are people who have never gotten over it, never will get over it. This random aspect of it was what was so frightening to most of the population," Ebert added.
A goal of snipers is to create fear and havoc, Ebert said. "I've often said the chances of him killing somebody were probably less than being run over by an automobile. But the fact that somebody was doing it intentionally really put fear in the population."
In an interview last week, Muhammad's second ex-wife, Mildred Muhammad, said she does not believe Muhammad is mentally ill. The two married in 1988 and separated in 1999.
"I've seen no sign of that," she said. She said that as the execution approaches, "it's going to be a difficult time for my children." John is now 19, Salena, 17 and Taalibah, 16, she said.
Muhammad is the founder and executive director of After The Trauma Inc., a support program and resource for domestic-violence victims, and is a board member of several domestic-violence organizations.
In her memoir published last month, "Scared Silent," she says Muhammad threatened her life, and that she believes the purpose of the October sniper attacks was to provide a smokescreen so that he could eventually kill her and make it look like she was another random victim.
She says Muhammad's ultimate goal -- and some experts agree -- was to regain custody of their three children. Muhammad had abducted them in 2000, but in September 2001, they were returned to her custody by authorities in Washington state.
She and the children fled to Clinton, Md., and hid from Muhammad, who found them. The home where they lived was near the scenes of some of the 2002 sniper attacks.
"I have moved on from John," Mildred Muhammad said. "I've remarried and I don't think that I would have been able to marry someone else if I still felt anything for John, good or bad."
"I have forgiven him," she continued. "But I have forgiven him for me so that I can move on. I don't need a particular event to occur for me to have closure. I already have that. My healing is complete, I feel, and my total concentration at this point is for my children," she said.
She said that if it could be arranged, she would like to take the children to see their father before his execution. "They need closure," she said.
Meyers agrees with Mildred Muhammad that forgiveness is important to move on with one's life. And, said Meyers, when you forgive an offender, "if there is a response . . . that's all the better."
But, he said, "I've never heard anything other than John Muhammad not taking any responsibility. To this point, at least, I haven't seen any movement."
In a May 8, 2008, letter to a judge, Muhammad called himself and Malvo "two innocent black men."
Meyers said, "I don't set myself up as judge and jury. I was just going to trust God and the system . . . to take care of it rather than feel like it was my job to make all the decisions and mete out the judgement."
"I didn't disagree at all with the decision that was made," said Meyers, referring to the death sentence. "God has been good to us to allow us to heal and move forward without forgetting how great a man Dean was and the wrongful death he suffered."