Iran Brown was running late for class and hustling to get out of his aunt's car and into school when the shot rang out.
Confused, the 13-year-old boy looked around the empty car park for the source of the booming sound, before he suddenly felt his knees give out and he collapsed to the ground.
It took Iran and his aunt one horrifying moment to realise he had been shot in the chest.
Somewhere out there in the suburbs of Maryland, an armed assailant was watching them through the scope of a long-range weapon.
With blood pouring from Iran's chest, his aunt dragged him back into her car before the sniper could shoot again.
"I love you," Iran whispered to his aunt as she sped him towards the nearest hospital.
As surgeons frantically tried to repair Iran's liver, stomach and spleen, police swarmed the school car park searching for clues.
Iran was the eighth person shot by an unknown sniper terrorising America in 2002.
From a series of seemingly unconnected shootings that started in February, a twisted pattern had slowly emerged. By October, Americans knew they were being hunted.
Petrol stations strung up tarps so customers could fill up their cars without fear of the sniper's bullet.
The streets in Washington DC were empty. Anyone out in public walked in a zigzag or darted between cars.
Local police chief Charles Moose nearly broke down in tears as he announced the snipers' latest target.
"Today it went down to the children. Someone is so mean-spirited that they shot a child," he said as his voice cracked.
"Now we're stepping over the line, because our children don't deserve this."
At the scene of Iran's shooting, police found a shell casing and a Tarot card.
On one side of the card was an image of the grim reaper astride a pale horse. On the other was a message scrawled in blue ink.
"For you, Mr Police. Call me God. Do not release to the press," it read.
The shooting of a child sent nervous Americans into a blind panic.
But despite a nationwide manhunt, it would be a chance encounter that finally snagged the DC snipers.
John Muhammed and his baby-faced accomplice Lee Malvo confounded the cultural trope of the white male serial killer.
Muhammed's affiliation with the Nation of Islam organisation led many Americans living in the shadow of 9/11 to wrongly assume he was driven by Islamic extremism.
Nineteen years after their arrest, myths and misinformation still surround the deadly rampage of the DC snipers.
And lost in the confusion is another possible motive for the attacks carried out by Muhammed and Malvo, who some believe carved a trail of terror across the United States in pursuit of one woman.
Unmasking the Beltway snipers
When the towers fell on September 11, 2001, the nation was gripped by panic.
But for those in America's capital, fear of terrorism was coupled with a spine-tingling possibility of being in a gunman's crosshairs.
They were known as the Beltway snipers. An unlikely duo made up of a former American soldier and a Jamaican teenager.
After meeting by chance at an electronics store in Antigua two years prior to their deadly rampage, John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo grew close.
Muhammad had just lost custody of his three kids.
He was a father-figure turned trainer to the 16-year-old Malvo, who had been staying with friends after his mother left him to work on the other side of the island.
Eventually, their intense bond would see the 41-year-old and his young accomplice become two of the most hunted men in America.
Dewey Cornell, one of Malvo's psychologists, said the then-teenager understood that Muhammad was training him for a mission.
The goal, it seemed, was "to get [Muhammad's] children back".
"John Muhammad was controlling everything in Lee Malvo's life, from his exercise to his diet to what he was thinking," Cornell told Vanity Fair years after the shootings.
Malvo also took part in special training exercises, according to Cornell. One included standing outside in the snow, chained to a tree for hours to learn how to withstand interrogations if he was ever caught.
He learned how to fire weapons and was fed a steady diet of teachings about how white people were the "devils" oppressing black people.
Prosecutors at his trial, however, rejected suggestions that Malvo was less responsible for his crimes because he had come under the influence of Muhammad.
As Malvo's training progressed, he said he was given his first test: To kill a woman in her own home.
Under the cover of darkness on February 16, 2002, Malvo made the short walk up the porch steps to a little "house on the hill" in Tacoma and rang the doorbell.
The woman who answered, Keenya Cook, was the niece of a friend of Muhammad's ex-wife.
The pair spoke for several minutes, laughing and joking around, Malvo said. He could hear her child in the background.
And then he pulled the trigger.
"I walked away as if nothing had happened," Malvo told VICE in an interview from jail for their I, Sniper documentary.
"That was my initiation. I was 16."
From Tacoma, Muhammad and Malvo embarked on a string of robberies and shootings across Arizona, Louisiana and Maryland.
Residents in nearby Washington DC watched reports of the shootings with alarm but thought they were safe.
Then the Beltway snipers turned their attention to the nation's capital.
A deadly rampage through two cities
On October 2, 2002, 55-year-old James D Martin was shot dead in a parking lot in Wheaton, Maryland. His only crime was standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.
By the end of the week, five more people were dead and another woman was injured while loading a van at an outlet mall.
The quick succession of the shootings had authorities spooked. Police feared the sniper was like a "ghost moving from one incident to the other".
A feeling of utter helplessness settled over investigators as they launched helicopter searches and scoured the streets with no way of knowing where and when the attacker would strike next.
Not only were the shootings themselves baffling, but the locations appeared arbitrary and the victims, total strangers who were out shopping, visiting restaurants, mowing their lawn or filling up their cars.
"The person or people have demonstrated a willingness and ability to shoot people of all ages, all races, all genders and they've struck at different times of the day, different days and different locations," former police chief Moose said.
For 23 days, the pair went on a rampage across Washington DC and Maryland, targeting everyday people as they went about their normal lives.
In what would be their last attack, Muhammed and Malvo targeted 35-year-old bus driver Conrad Johnson in Aspen Hill, Maryland.
The father-of-two was preparing to make his first run of the day through the leafy suburbs of Montgomery County.
Instead, he was shot dead while idling on the side of the road, the 10th person to die in the Beltway snipers' deadly shooting rampage.
The attackers had grown more confident as the weeks ticked over without capture.
But what they didn't realise was that authorities were slowly closing in on them.
Tarot calling cards and taunts brought killers undone
It was the snipers themselves who eventually sparked a breakthrough in the search to find them, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigations.
Muhammad and Malvo had spent weeks taunting authorities with tarot cards and requests to call them "God". They only grew bolder as their shootings continued, scaling up their demands.
In a four-page letter found tacked to a tree and wrapped in plastic outside a restaurant where the snipers shot a man as he walked to his car, the pair made another request.
They wanted authorities to hand over $US10 million.
Along with a 16-digit account number and a PIN for a stolen Bank of America platinum credit card, the killers warned police "your failure to respond has cost you five lives".
A financial statement tended to court after Muhammad's arrest indicated he was broke, with only a 1990 Caprice automobile and a laptop to his name. But the taunts were not always about money.
Police had also identified cryptic phrases in the tarot cards and letters, eventually using them in press conferences to directly communicate with the serial killers.
"Our word is our bond," Mr Moose said in one briefing, adopting the last words used by the snipers in their letter.
While the origins were unclear, it was believed the phrase may have had roots in Jamaican reggae music.
Authorities had started to form a profile of the serial killer they believed they were chasing: A white man in his 20s or 30s with a military background who worked either alone or with an accomplice.
A confused witness at a shooting told police he'd spotted a suspicious white van, leading detectives to ignore the growing chorus of concern about a strange blue sedan so frequently seen lurking at the murder scenes.
Eventually, authorities realised their error.
"We were looking for a white van with white people, and we ended up with a blue car with black people," Police chief Moose would later admit.
But it was a conversation on October 17 that would mark a turning point for investigators.
A caller claiming to be the sniper phoned the special hotline set up for the case to confess they had killed two women during a robbery in Montgomery a month prior.
When investigators began digging into the claim, they discovered not only a crime similar to the one the caller had described but evidence that could help identify a suspect.
Fingerprints found on a magazine at the scene matched those of Lee Boyd Malvo. A previous arrest record eventually tipped them off to another person of interest: John Allen Muhammad.
Five days after that mysterious tip-off, authorities were closing in on the two suspects.
A dark blue Chevy linked to the pair had been spotted at a resting stop parking lot off a main highway in Maryland on October 24.
A team of officers and agents quickly moved in, surrounding the car as the two men slept inside.
Their arrest marked the end of a dark period in America's history, but mystery remained over what had motivated the two men on their trail of destruction.
Was it terrorism or another motive?
Serial killings represent just 1 per cent of all homicides committed every year in the US.
But a macabre obsession with true crime has built a booming industry of podcasts, TV shows and documentaries, central to which is the brilliant psychopath trope.
From Ted Bundy to the fictional Hannibal Lecter, the public has consumed the myth of a white male genius who hides behind a veneer of charm while playing cat-and-mouse with police.
In reality, a study by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation found that "the racial diversification of serial killers generally mirrors that of the overall US population".
When Malvo and Muhammed were arrested, their motives were described by the media as "murky".
It was even speculated that Muhammed was perhaps inspired by Al Qaeda.
According to a recording of Malvo played at his trial, the sniper shootings were part of a strategy to throw the region into chaos.
But one woman has claimed from the beginning that she was the ultimate target of the DC snipers: John Muhammed's ex-wife, Mildred.
After years of escalating abuse, Mildred finally escaped her husband, who she said parted with a chilling vow: "You have become my enemy, and as my enemy, I will kill you."
Mildred believes the attacks were designed to confuse police so that when he finally came for her, they would assume she was another randomly chosen victim of the sniper.
"The theory was that he was killing innocent people to cover up my murder so that he could come in as the grieving father and get custody of our children," she told the Richmond Times-Dispatch this month.
"It was a domestic violence, child custody issue."
Muhammad was sentenced to death over his role in the killings. Malvo received a total of 10 life sentences without parole for shootings committed in Virginia and Maryland.
Now a domestic violence campaigner and educator, Mildred Muhammed said she has faced blame for her ex-husband's crimes.
"I'm so sorry that so many people were killed. It's not my fault. I was afraid of him like everyone else,"
"I stopped being afraid, I guess, when they executed him on November 10, 2009."
A life behind bars
Malvo was 17 years old when he faced a court over the shootings.
Now 36, he will spend the rest of his life in prison for his crimes.
Yet in recent years, debate over the issuing of such sentences to juveniles has sparked reviews and new rulings.
A Supreme Court ruling in 2012 ruled that defendants 17 and younger should not be sentenced to life terms without parole unless the judge has considered whether their crime "reflects unfortunate yet transient immaturity," or that the defendant is "the rare juvenile offender whose crime reflects irreparable corruption."
Such criteria did not exist when Malvo was sentenced in 2003 and 2004. And Virginia and Maryland have since passed laws abolishing life without parole for youths.
Malvo has claimed that the six life-without-parole terms he received in Maryland are illegal. The High Court has agreed to hear his case, with oral arguments set to be heard in January.
Over the years, psychologists have also sought to break the hold they believe Muhammad had over his former accomplice.
A remorseful Malvo has since reflected that there's no way to properly convey an apology to the friends and family of his victims.
"I was a monster. If you look up the definition, I mean that's what a monster is," Malvo told the Washington Post in an interview in October 2012.
"I was a ghoul. I was a thief. I stole people's lives."
