CHAPTER 1
Early one crisp fall day, rush-hour commuters got their morning pick-me-ups at the drive-through windows at Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts, then slogged down Mount Vernon or Chamblee Dunwoody Roads toward the Interstate 285 freeway that circles Greater Atlanta. Women in brightly colored tank tops and gym shorts power-walked to music from their iPods along the wooded trails that ran next to the traffic-clogged roads. The Dunwoody Village shopping center in the heart of Dunwoody, Georgia, was quiet but for the distant sound of a leaf blower and an impact wrench at the Goodyear store. The Village Barbershop waited for its first customer; a training car from Taggart's Driving School sat alone in the nearly empty parking lot. The post office would open within minutes, and people lined up outside in front of the glass door with the sign reading, WE APPRECIATE YOUR BUSINESS.
Shortly before 9 a.m., on Thursday, November 18, 2010, a silver Infiniti G35 pulled into the shopping center and came to a stop next to a red-brick wall in front of the Dunwoody Prep preschool. Russell "Rusty" Sneiderman, thirty-six years old, boyish looking with glasses, had his three-year-old son, Ian, strapped in the car seat in the back. The preschool run had become the morning routine ever since Rusty lost his CFO job, and his wife, Andrea, took her first full-time employment in the corporate world. Andrea usually took their five-year-old daughter, Sophia, to kindergarten on the way to her office at GE Energy in Marietta. Later in the day, Rusty would pick up both Ian and Sophia and take Sophia to ballet. In between he would squeeze in work on a voice-mail company he was trying to start up.
Rusty brought Ian to his classroom and returned to his car. His schedule this day called for an 11:30 a.m. meeting with a potential business partner. Based on his casual dress, it appeared that Rusty had planned to make the short drive back to his large house on Manget Court and change clothes.
By all accounts Rusty never saw the silver minivan following him into the parking lot, and if he did it didn't mean enough for him to do anything about it. Nor did he seem to recognize the driver, a bearded man in a hoodie sweatshirt who had waited behind the wheel until Rusty emerged from the school.
Rusty opened his car door, and the bearded man approached. If they exchanged words, nobody heard it. Without any apparent warning or provocation, the man pointed a handgun at Rusty's head.
The gun was large and chrome-plated, the morning sun glinting off the polished surface.
Four times the man pulled the trigger.
* * *
"Did you hear that?"
Fifty yards across the parking lot Craig Kuhlmeier, a chiropractor with a practice down the street, and his wife, Aliyah Stotter, were standing outside the post office to buy stamps when they heard four popping sounds from the direction of the Dunwoody Prep preschool and saw the silver minivan. Kuhlmeier thought it might have been a Chrysler. A man was "casually walking" toward it, Kuhlmeier would later say. The man stood medium height, between five foot nine and five eleven, and wore blue jeans. He turned and stared at the couple. In his hand was the silver gun, in Kuhlmeier's estimation a semiautomatic of some sort, definitely not a revolver.
The man started the van but struggled to get it in reverse, the gears grinding, as if he were unfamiliar with how to operate the vehicle. The van jerked away and peeled out of the parking lot, the tires screeching, raced straight down the street, made a U-turn, then continued on Mount Vernon Road into the rush-hour traffic.
On the pavement next to a silver luxury car a man lay dying.
The couple rushed across the parking lot and found the man horribly wounded and barely alive. Blood snaked from his head like a small stream across the parking lot. Brass shell casings lay beside him. The scene was surreal, like a movie scene. Kuhlmeier kept waiting for the director to yell, Cut, do it again.
The man gasped for air. Kuhlmeier checked his pulse. It was weak.
"Are you okay? Can you hear me?" Kuhlmeier asked. The man didn't respond.
Calling 911 on her cell phone, Stotter told the operator that a man had been shot outside the Dunwoody Prep preschool in the Dunwoody Village center. As a crowd began to converge, the bleeding man struggled for air. Panic overtook Stotter, and she later said she wished she'd had the presence of mind to have started CPR.
* * *
Across the street, Chris Lang had taken his daughter to the doctor at Dunwoody Pediatrics for an 8 a.m. appointment. Returning to his truck, he put the child into her car seat and was pulling out of the parking lot when he, too, heard the popping noises. He U-turned and heard another pop. That's when he saw the man in the hoodie, and what he'd later describe as a "noticeable" beard, firing at least twice more into the man on the ground before getting in the van and peeling off.
Through the rearview mirror, Lang watched the van exit onto Mount Vernon and race away before he drove up to the wounded man and saw Kuhlmeier talking to him and Stotter on her cell phone. Lang went to Dunwoody Pediatrics for help.
Dr. Terrence Gfroerer had just finished seeing a patient when one of his staff members told him that there had been a shooting in the parking lot across the street. He and a staff member went to the Dunwoody Prep lot, where he saw the victim on the ground slouched on his side, blood pouring from him. Dr. Gfroerer rolled the man onto his back and saw what appeared to be multiple gunshot wounds. He checked the vital signs. The carotid artery revealed a faint pulse. Gfroerer began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation while his staff member did chest compressions. The vital signs didn't improve.
Although not a trauma doctor, Gfroerer had been a physician for ten years. He didn't think he could save the man.
* * *
Inside Dunwoody Prep, school assistant Colleen McNulty had taken six three-year-olds from a classroom to the playground on the other side of the brick wall when she saw a flock of birds take flight. A fraction of a second later she heard loud noises, four in succession. Peering over the wall to the parking lot, McNulty saw a minivan race away and several people gathered over a man on the ground with blood pouring from his head.
She recognized him as Rusty Sneiderman, a parent whose son, Ian, attended the preschool and whose daughter, Sophia, had been a student a few years previously. McNulty ushered the children back into the classroom and tried to dial 911 on her cell phone but got busy signals. She told another teacher to go into the office and call for help.
In the office, Donna Formato at first thought it was a bad joke. She had worked at Dunwoody Prep for fourteen years and now was the assistant director, supervising a staff of about three dozen, including teachers, assistants, and support personnel. She went outside to find a crowd gathering around a prone man with what she later described as "very gray" skin. She did not immediately recognize him. Beside the man was an Infiniti, the driver's-side door still open, as if he had just gotten out or was about to get in when he was shot.
With somebody attending to the man, Formato went back inside the school to first check on the students. None apparently had seen the shooting. If any had heard the gunshots, they didn't make the connection between the loud pops and something horrible happening. An office worker told her the victim was Ian Sneiderman's dad, Rusty. Formato pulled the family emergency contact information card and dialed a work number for Ian's mother, Andrea Sneiderman.
* * *
The 911 call was relayed by the dispatcher at the DeKalb County emergency call center to the patrol car of Dunwoody Police Department officer Brian Tate, who this morning had been cruising around town in one of the department's gleaming new black-and-white patrol cars. Officer Tate was three hours into a twelve-hour shift that had started with a 5:45 a.m. roll call. Somehow the details of the incident had gotten garbled. The dispatcher initially sent him to the RBC Bank in the Dunwoody Village shopping center for what was described as an armed robbery. The suspect was said to be a Hispanic male, the victim a non-Hispanic white man. According to the dispatcher, the Hispanic male had a gun pointing at the white male, who had his hands in the air. Tate sped to the shopping center. A minute later the dispatcher changed the call to a person being shot at Dunwoody Prep in the same mall.
Tate arrived in just two minutes. It was an impressive response time in keeping with the three-minute-or-less goal of the Dunwoody Police Department. Aliyah Stotter flagged him down and directed him toward the entrance to the school. As he got out of his patrol car, he could hear the siren from the approaching paramedic. On the pavement Tate saw the victim on the ground with what Tate later described as "very serious" gunshot wounds. Dr. Gfroerer and a woman the officer took to be a nurse were performing CPR.
Within seconds, emergency medical technician Rhoda Berkeley from the DeKalb County Fire and Rescue was on the scene. She and her crew took over CPR from Dr. Gfroerer for another five to ten minutes, then transported Rusty Sneiderman fourteen miles to the Atlanta Medical Center.
* * *
It was about 9:15 a.m. when the phone rang at Andrea Sneiderman's desk. "I told her something had happened at the school, that Ian was okay and that she needed to come to the school right away," Formato later would say. Formato said nothing about people hearing gunshots or having seen the ashen-faced Rusty, who was Andrea's husband. She didn't want to alarm Andrea any more than necessary, presuming she'd be driving to the school. She later recalled, "I didn't want her to have an accident on the way to the school. I was worried about her safety, too."
Andrea started screaming into the phone. She demanded more information. Had something happened to Rusty? Formata refused to say more until Andrea got there. Andrea ran out of her office and down to the parking lot and drove off in her black SUV. Going against rush-hour traffic, she likely took Cobb Parkway South to Interstate 285 East-the northern tip of the Perimeter-and exited toward Dunwoody. Along the way, she made a number of calls on her cell phone. She called her parents telling them that she was on her way to the daycare center. She also called her brother with the same message. Her parents and her brother all lived nearby and would meet her. She also called Rusty's father, Donald Sneiderman, a retired accountant who lived in Cleveland. And she called her boss, Hemy Neuman, on his cell phone. She later said she intended to tell him she had to leave work abruptly for an emergency, but she got only voice mail.
She tore into the school parking lot, flung open her door, tumbled out, and ran toward the crime-scene tape. Behind it sat Rusty's parked Infiniti.
"What happened?" she screamed. "What happened?"
Detective Jesus Maldonado from the Dunwoody Police Department intercepted her as she headed toward the crime-scene tape. She was in her business attire, long dark skirt, black jacket, glasses. Repeatedly she asked what happened, and Maldonado didn't tell her anything.
"Calm down," he told her, leading her away from the crime scene and toward the front door of the daycare center. "You gotta relax."
Her knees buckled and Maldonado caught her from falling. He had no intention of saying anything about the case while she was in this condition. The crime scene had not been processed; witnesses had not been interviewed. The victim had been taken away by ambulance, condition unknown. Maldonado half carried her to the door where she was met by two women who worked at Dunwoody Prep and another detective, Sergeant Gary Cortellino.
Aliyah Stotter, already shaken by hearing the gunshots and seeing the bloodied man on the ground, had seen Andrea arrive. The screaming grief-stricken woman only made Stotter more upset and she started, in her words, "bawling." Stotter pulled up her hoodie, shielding her tear-soaked face from the woman.
In the daycare center, a teacher embraced Andrea but neither the teacher nor anybody else would tell her what had happened. "No one was talking, no one was saying a word," Andrea later recalled. Brought into a glass-enclosed office, Andrea was joined by several other people, including Sergeant Cortellino. The ranking officer on the scene, Cortellino had arrived twenty minutes earlier, after Rusty had been taken away, and he temporarily took charge. He told officers to look for witnesses, called in crime-scene techs to collect evidence, including the shell casings in the parking lot, and sent a detective to the hospital to talk to family members. He later acknowledged being taken by surprise that one of those family members would be right there in front of him. "I really didn't know she was coming," he later said. "I wasn't prepared for that."
Andrea continued to ask what was going on. Cortellino wouldn't tell her. Instead he asked if she knew where Rusty had come from and where he was headed. Andrea told him she had no idea, and she'd later express frustration that she had answered questions when nobody would answer hers. She would also claim that Cortellino refused to tell her where Rusty had been taken; Cortellino would say that he wanted a detective to drive her to hospital-"She didn't need to be at the school," he said. When it looked like she would get herself to the hospital, Cortellino called a friend who headed security there and "told them the family was coming down and to look out for them."
At some point while inside the school, Andrea spoke on her cell phone to her parents. They were driving to meet her from their home in Roswell, thirteen miles to the east.
Eventually, her parents arrived, as did her brother. Among the four of them they somehow ascertained that Rusty had been taken in an ambulance to an unidentified hospital after some sort of incident. Any more information-from the school, from the detectives, from anybody-would not be forthcoming. "We were instructed to go home," Andrea later said, but she couldn't remember by whom. "A police officer, I presume," she would recall. "I was in a fairly catatonic state."
At the recommendation of Donna Formata, Andrea left Ian at the school, feeling it was better for him there while everybody sorted out what had happened to his father. Andrea's parents drove her to her house, and then her father called all the local hospitals. The Atlanta Medical Center confirmed that a Russell Sneiderman had been admitted but wouldn't say why or what his condition was. Andrea and her parents piled into the car and headed for the hospital while Andrea worked her cell phone, calling a longtime friend, Shayna Citron, Rusty's father, Donald, and her boss Hemy Neuman, again.
* * *
The paramedics continued to perform CPR as they wheeled Rusty into the emergency room to attending physician Dr. Mark Waterman. A quick assessment told him the prognosis was grim. The man had suffered multiple gunshot wounds to his neck, near the carotid artery, and chest. It would later be determined that the first bullet entered the left side of the jaw, traveled through his jaw, and hit his right shoulder, ending up just below the skin in his back. The gunman fired at point-blank range; Rusty had stippling burns to the face from the gunpowder grains that shot out with the bullet. The second bullet came from farther away, probably while he lay on the asphalt. It entered the right side of his abdomen at the bottom of his rib cage and pierced his liver, diaphragm, and right lung, lodging itself just under the skin of the back, causing serious internal bleeding. Two more bullets went into his abdomen, slicing through his intestines and exiting from his back, causing more internal bleeding. Rusty also suffered a graze wound to his forearm, either from a separate fifth shot or more likely from one of the other bullets hitting him just below the elbow as he tried in vain to fend off the shots.
Dr. Waterman checked his patient's pulse and breathing. All vital signs were flat.
Within minutes he declared Rusty Sneiderman dead.
Copyright © 2015 by Michael Fleeman
