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After a hiatus, Little Known Black History Facts is back; hopefully you will learn some things about Black History that you didn't know before, or be reminded of some things that you learned long ago. Either way, I hope that you will share this site with friends, family, FB, Google+ Circles, Twitter; with everyone you know!

On This Day in Black History…

     Between September 5 and October 22, 2002, the country was rocked by a series of shootings which took place in the DC/MD/VA area. These shootings were seemingly

entirely random, subject to no pattern which the police were able to discern. Added to the panic was the fact that there was no evidence left, and no witnesses to help

discover who the perpetrator or perpetrators were. A total of 13 shootings occurred in this area during the “Beltway Sniper attacks”; 10 of these resulted in death. Before

John Allen Muhammad

the Beltway Sniper attacks there were 12 shootings which occurred in other areas; 6 of those were fatal. The victims were just as random as everything else about the shootings seemed to be; they ranged in age from 13 to 72; they were Black, white, Pakistani, Hispanic, and Asian. The killer(s) made no distinction between male and female, the only thing all the victims seemed to have in common was that in some manner, in the course of their day, they encountered the sniper.

     Through a series of mistakes on the part of the killer(s), and intensive police work, John Allen Mohammad and Lee Boyd Malvo were captured in October 2002, and in October the following year John Allen Muhammad was put on trial. He was convicted in Virginia of murder, and on November 10, 2009, at 9:11 pm, John Allen Muhammad aka ‘the Beltway Sniper’ was pronounced dead by lethal injection at the Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt, Virginia.

     His co-hort in the killings, Lee Boyd Malvo (who was a minor at the time) is serving life in prison without possibility of parole in Virginia. As of June 2013 he was still appealing his sentences, claiming that as the Supreme Court had declared that people who were minors at the time of their offense could not be given mandatory sentences of life without parole, his sentence is a violation of his civil rights. To date, the courts have not agreed.