Press Downplays Hero Truckdriver's Role in Sniper's Capture
Back to the Beltway Sniper's Page
NewsMax.com
Friday Oct. 25, 2002; 12: 03 a.m. EDT
While the capture of the Beltway sniper has made Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose the man of the hour, the media seems to be downplaying the role of truckdriver Ron Lancz, without whose help it never would have happened.
It was Lancz who spotted the 1990 black Chevy Caprice parked in a Maryland highway rest area around 1:00 a.m. Thursday. He noted that its license plate number matched the one being broadcast by radio newscasters as belonging to a car driven by suspects in the case and promptly called 911.
Lancz then blocked the exit to the rest area with his truck, just in case the sniper and his partner, then sleeping in their car, woke up and tried to make a getaway.
Still, despite the critical role played by the hero truckdriver, of the thousands of media reports on the sniper's capture Thursday, only six mentioned Lancz's name, a Lexis-Nexis search revealed.
The man who led police to the notorious gunman gave this account to CNN earlier in the day:
"Well, I left Wilmington, Delaware at 11:00. Ten minutes to one, I pulled in the rest area at Myersville. It's a little town called Myersville. That's between Baltimore and Hagerstown, the rest area. I pulled in. I heard a they was talking about the description of the car, the make of the car, the model of the car, the license plate number.
"I pulled in with another driver behind me and I told the other that car don't look, looks kind of obvious and I stood there a little bit. I was talking to him on the radio but he said well, what are we going to do? I said, I'm going to call 911. So I called 911. They told me we'll be there as soon as possible, we'll be there right away. He didn't say how long. He said you stay right where you're at. I said OK.
"In the meantime, somebody else came on up there. I'm not going to tell you who. I don't know who it was and they told me to go up and block the entrance where they come out so they couldn't get out, so me and this other driver blocked the entrance so they couldn't get out.
"About 15, 20 minutes later at the latest, that place was full of FBI and all that stuff and they found the people. The found the gun. They found the tripod. They found the scope and they found the little hole in the back of the car that had been shot."
The hero truck driver credits, not himself, but divine providence and the power of prayer with the sniper's capture.
"I'm no hero," Lancz told CNN.
"I just want people to think what I did was what I should have done. I'm no hero at this, no hero whatsoever. I don't even want to be thought of as a hero. I just want everybody to tell me thanks and walk away and forget about it is what I want.....
"Last Thursday we had 50 drivers and one bunch had a prayer meeting up there 20 miles from where this happened and we thought - we knew our prayer was going to be answered. We knew that sometime or the other. That's the way we believe.
"I go to the Nazarene Church out here in Fort Wright and I'll tell you what, I know they'll be calling me. It's been a wonderful experience, but it's a sad experience to see what has been done in the last 21 days, 21 days today that it happened. So that's about the end of it as far as I know."
Lancz says that if he gets the half-million dollar reward offered by authorities for information leading to the sniper's capture, he'll give it to the families of the victims.
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