‘It couldn’t be someone shooting people in downtown Wheaton’
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Version 0 of 1. That Sunday evening in Wheaton, Md., has nagged at Michael Dobson for 40 years. He was there, a witness to a 1975 racial shooting spree that killed two and wounded five. Now 63, Dobson is a writer and project management consultant in Bethesda. On the 35th anniversary of Michael Pearch’s rampage in downtown Wheaton, Dobson started blogging about it. His goal: Get people to remember. In post titled “Eyewitness to Murder,” Dobson wrote,” I’ve been trying to get the details of this story for a long time, but even in a Google world, it’s hard to find.” [The haunting link between two mass shootings] The front newspaper articles aren’t indexed in Google’s brain. The shooting doesn’t show up on any lists of mass shootings; it was a couple years later that a federal database started providing reliable information about the phenomenon. So Dobson decided to tell his story. “I heard a pop, pop,” Dobson remembered in an interview. He was driving home from the movie “Young Frankenstein” with his girlfriend. It was spring, the windows were down, a breeze swept through the car. Dobson had no idea he was in the middle of a mass shooting. “It didn’t sound like a car backfiring,” he said. “It sounded like gunshots, but I couldn’t overrule my mental thinking because I couldn’t be right, it couldn’t be someone shooting people in downtown Wheaton.” Dobson kept driving. A few seconds later, he saw a white guy standing next to a black man on the ground holding a brown paper bag. They were just a few feet away from him. He didn’t yet know that the white guy was Pearch and that the black guy was Harold Navy, a waiter just out buying some apple sauce. Trying to be a good Samaritan, Dobson drove to a nearby police station. He told an officer there was a drunk man passed out in the road. “About a minute goes by,” Dobson said. Then another officer came out and says, “Is that the eyewitness to the murder?” And then it clicked. “He could have gotten me and the girl I was dating with one bullet,” Dobson said. “We were that close.” But they were white. “I misread every single bit of it,” he said. “I still think, ‘Could I have done something?’ ” After that first post, in which he recalled being within a few feet of Pearch, Dobson heard from other witnesses, including one who wrote, “My ex-wife and I just missed being shot by the gunman. . . . The victims deserved to be remembered by someone.” He also heard from Alta Sligh, the daughter of John Sligh, who was one of the two people killed. She and Dobson now get together for lunch on the shooting’s anniversary. Those who found Dobson’s posts had to be looking pretty hard: A Google search for the phrase “Wheaton mass shooting” turns up no results. Manufacturing history, even for an event in which seven people were brutally shot, is difficult. It is especially difficult to turn that event into history when such shootings now happen with terrifying regularity. “I’d love to get enough info so that it has a Wikipedia page,” Dobson said. “It deserves a Wikipedia page.” There still isn’t one. |