Drive-by shootings targeting seven homes and critically wounding one man followed by a stabbing two nights later has resonated expressions of alarm, shock and in some cases, resignation, among Sterling Park residents.
Authorities have characterized the shootings that began about 1 a.m., Wednesday, July 19, as possibly gang related. They have not identified the motive or which gangs were possibly involved. Teenagers lived in all five of the targeted homes. Stray bullets hit two other homes.
Gunfire first struck Holborn Court, then Margate Court, both in the Newberry Condominiums. Next the gunmen targeted a townhouse at Coventry Square in Providence Village and stray bullets hit two others. Then they fired at a home on Aster Terrace in the Rolling Ridge development. Finally, the suspects hit a house on North Argonne Avenue. They fired 30 to 40 rounds, using at least two guns, within a half hour, authorities said. One bullet wounded a Coventry Square man who had been asleep in his second-floor bedroom. He remained in critical but stable condition Monday.
The first bullets left a two-foot hole in a Holborn glass storm door.
A Newberry Condominium resident said she heard what sounded like gunshots. Her brother went out to smoke a cigarette and see what was going on.
"Then we heard it again," she said. "It definitely was too close for comfort. I haven't had a good night's sleep since."
Her apprehension was worsened by the memory of another crime in February 2005, when a group of masked men chased one man and cut him with a knife or machete at Margate Court, she said. Margate is across from Holborn, with Greenthorn Avenue separating the two courts.
"Something needs to be done, better patrolling, putting a [sheriffs'] substation in the area," the resident said. She also recommended homeowners intensifying their background screening on potential renters.
NEXT BULLETS flew on Margate, with one penetrating the dining-room window of a condominium and blasting the plaster off the kitchen ceiling. The homeowner, whose bed is above the kitchen, said she heard a loud noise, but thought a transformer had blown behind the condominiums.
"It was that loud," she said. "I looked out to see if there were sparks and if the lights were out."
Seeing neither, she went back to sleep, she said. The next morning she learned that gunfire was to blame for the noise. She first spoke with Loudoun County deputy sheriffs who were investigating the possibility of gangs intentionally targeting the homes.
Afterward, she stood outside the yellow tape that cordoned off her condominium and a quarter of the parking lot and talked to neighbors.
"I don't think there is any reason to believe it's not random," she said. "They're just picking neighborhoods."
She said she was staying calm. "Hysterics don't get you anywhere."
The homeowner's neighbor, said the gunfire was so loud that she jumped.
"But that was about it. I went back to bed. Dad slept right through it."
On Sunday, the neighbor, the mother of two teens, was revisiting the possibility that her home could have been targeted by a gang, but she could not think of any reason someone would single it out. The shootings could have been the result of a teenager talking to the girlfriend of a gang member and making him mad or something "as simple as that," she said.
THE NEXT TARGET was the Coventry Square townhouse, where the man was wounded. One resident had been living in the neighborhood for only two weeks. She woke up to the sound of the gun blasts. Her first instinct was to gather up her youngest child, who had fallen asleep downstairs, and take him to her bedroom in the back of the house. She said she was frightened for all three of her children.
"That's what I tell my kids. [Her concern is] not just for me. It's for them," she said.
She said she does not think it was a good idea to move to Providence Village, but a resident reassured her that it was the first time in her 15 years at Coventry that anything of this magnitude had occurred.
Another neighbor said she didn't know about the shooting until investigators knocked on her door the next morning. She said she is not afraid.
"It's like terrorism. I can't be looking over my shoulder all the time," she said. "It was unnerving, of course. That's the sidewalk my daughter walks to school," she added. "But I like Sterling. It's a relatively quiet neighborhood."
A follow neighbor said he couldn't understand why anyone would shoot his neighbor.
"He's a good guy," he said. "He helped me with the air conditioner when it went down."
He went on to say there did not appear to be any reason for a gang to target the teenagers in the house either.
"They're just general high-school kids," he said. "It looks like it was targeted, but nobody in that house looks like somebody would be out to get them."
A COVENTRY SQUARE SAID someone painted MS-13 on the tree in front of the targeted house in the spring. Loudoun County has Mara Salvatrucha or MS-13, 18th Street, South Side Locos and other gangs. They have committed a variety of crimes in the past two years, but the majority has been graffiti used to mark their territories.
The gang 18th Street's name is painted on a light green utility box next to the North Argonne Avenue house targeted in the drive-by shootings. The residents, which include two teens, would not come to the door for comment. Neighbors said the owner's car was set afire in late June, the mailbox has been run over repeatedly, and BBs were shot at the residence recently.
"I wonder if it's going to keep going on," the neighbor said. "I don't like the idea you have to be extra cautious. I don't like the idea it could keep escalating. We don't need this in any neighborhood."
Her husband said he was not worried, but she said the incident has been unsettling for her daughter.
"She asked me, 'What if they try to break in? What am I going to do.'"
Drive-by shootings on North Argonne Avenue and Aster Terrace were in the same vicinity of other houses defaced by graffiti in late January. At the time, authorities said they were not sure if the black painted words and symbols on cars, houses and a pool house were gang-related or a copy-cat crime.
The bullets from the shootings at the Aster Terrace home penetrated glass and splintered wood. A teen who lives there with his mother said he was "kind of surprised" by the gunfire, although he is aware of the gangs in Sterling. "They've been here once and they won't come back," he said, adding that he was not a gang member.
His girlfriend was not persuaded. "I'm afraid it will happen again," she said.
Back on Coventry Square, plywood covers the townhouse's shattered window. A sign on it reads "24/7 Emergency Response …. Fire/Wind/Water."