The haunting link between two mass shootings
‘Is this like a gang war?’
Rosalyn was in the front passenger seat of the family car on April 13, 1975. Cliff was driving. His parents were in the back holding the couple’s baby, Angela. As Cliff, then 28, steered his white 1973 Pontiac Grand Prix up Georgia Avenue, he noticed he was running low on gas.
“I was moving slow,” he recalls. “I had to find a gas station.”
And then: bang, bang, bang.
“I see all these people ducking everywhere,” remembers Rosalyn, who was 26. “What is going on? What is happening here?”
It was Sunday. A beautiful spring evening. “The Godfather: Part II” was playing at the Wheaton Plaza movie theater, the date-night destination for John and Lorene Sligh. The couple worked at what was then called the National Bureau of Standards, where he was a chemist and she worked in procurement. They were waiting at a red light at Veirs Mill Road and Reedie Drive when the shooting began.
Rosalyn and her husband were headed from a family dinner in Wheaton to their apartment in Annapolis, where Cliff, then a captain, taught leadership at the U.S. Naval Academy. He was following his uncle, Connie Stanley, a 52-year-old organic chemist, a few cars ahead in a 1972 Dodge.
The Stanleys, the Slighs, a young waiter at the Anchor Inn who had been sent to the store to replenish the applesauce — they all became targets of Michael Edward Pearch.
Michael Edward Pearch began firing bullets at black people in Wheaton in 1975, killing two and wounding five.
The 29-year-old unemployed former Army counterintelligence officer was staying at his mother’s house in Silver Spring. He was a Revolutionary War buff who had attended the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts after serving in Germany, says his sister, Marianne Scholer.
But something changed when he got home in 1972. “He told my mother that America was really loud,” Scholer says. A year before his rampage, Pearch shot and killed his mother’s cat.
The day of the shootings, Pearch slept most of the day. He woke up and put on a green Army field jacket, slipping away without his mother noticing. He had a .45-caliber handgun and a knapsack of ammunition. Witnesses later told police that he smiled as he pulled the trigger.
First, he opened fire at the Slighs through the car windows, hitting John, 43, in the throat and abdomen, and Lorene, 40, in the leg. He walked along Veirs Mill Road and shot a man in the foot.
[‘It couldn’t be someone shooting people in downtown Wheaton.’]
Pearch kept walking. He kept smiling. He found the waiter, Harold Navy, near the intersection of Georgia and University Boulevard, shooting him in the stomach. Then he put a bullet in Connie Stanley’s chest. Rosalyn and Cliff heard the gunshots, but they didn’t realize Connie had been shot.
Pearch came up on Rosalyn and Cliff at a red light. She saw him approach out of the corner of her eye and ducked. Pearch shot her in the back.
People ran for cover. A witness named Sigmund Fritz called 911. Four decades later, a recording of the call captures the shock and confusion.
“A man with a gun is shooting people as they go by in cars. Wheaton Plaza. Veirs Mill.”
“Is anybody hurt?” the dispatcher asked.
Fritz: “I think some people are injured seriously.”
“He shot some Negroes,” he added. “Man shot some Negroes.”
“Do you have a description of the car?”
Fritz: “No, he’s just standing in the street.”
A few blocks away, Steve Hall Jr., a Montgomery County police officer, was writing traffic tickets. Hall, then 25, had been on the force almost two years.
After hearing on the radio that someone had been shot at Wheaton Plaza, he raced over. He found the first officer on the scene giving first aid to John Sligh. Pop, pop, pop. More shots. People screamed at the officers to help, pointing up Reedie Drive, where the shooter had fled.
Hall got back in his patrol car, flipped on the flashing lights, and went after him. “Is this like a gang war or something?” he says he wondered. His father was a Montgomery police officer, too. Hall loved policing. Yet he had never heard of someone just walking around shooting people.
Moments later, he spotted Pearch. “We made eye contact. We looked right at each other,” Hall says. “Every instinct told me to run in the other direction.” Instead, Hall stopped the car. Officers were required to wear hats back then; he put his on. Then he grabbed his shotgun.
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