GAITHERSBURG, Md. (BP)–A Baptist church member was the second of the nine people murdered in a sniper’s random attacks in the Washington, D.C., area, since Oct. 2.
James L. “Sonny” Buchanan’s funeral was conducted Oct. 11 at First Baptist Church in Gaithersburg, Md., where he had been baptized as a child. The funeral service was the subject of a Washington Post story Oct. 12.
Buchanan, a 39-year-old landscaper, was killed the morning of Oct. 3 by a bullet to the chest as he was mowing the lawn at the Fitzgerald Auto Mall in White Flint, Md.
He had remained a member of the Gaithersburg church over the years but had devoted his volunteer energies to the Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater Washington, serving both as a mentor to at-risk youth for more than 10 years and as a regional board member.
Charles Updike, pastor of First Baptist, Gaithersburg, conducted Buchanan’s funeral.
One of Buchanan’s two sisters, Vicki Snider, is “one of our best Sunday School teachers,” Updike told Baptist Press. She teaches in the children’s division and also is involved in Vacation Bible School and the church’s outreach ministry, Updike said.
Buchanan’s father, James, is a retired Montgomery County, Md., police officer.
About 800 people attended the 11 a.m. funeral, Updike said. “I think it was a wonderful witness to the community,” he said, which included a reception organized by church members after the service. “There was a lot of love in here,” the pastor said.
Among Updike’s reflections in his funeral sermon: “A sniper’s bullet can end an earthly life, but it cannot separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.”
Faith Weidler, executive director of Graffiti Abatement Partners Inc., a Washington-area nonprofit organization, recounted in a Washington Post letter to the editor that Buchanan had played a pivotal role in a Montgomery County project to counter graffiti vandalism when he organized a group of teens from Boys and Girls Clubs to help plant more than 60 shrubs along a 250-foot wall, which two years later remains free of graffiti.
“Mr. Buchanan understood that to reach at-risk teenagers, one needed to engage them with meaningful, hands-on activities,” Weidler wrote.
Updike, in his 23 years at the Gaithersburg church, said he has never before sensed so much “free-floating anxiety in our citizenry.” A large outdoor “Festival of Families” sponsored by a local Christian radio station was canceled over the weekend, he noted, and children at local schools have been kept inside for recess.
The most recent victim, killed at 9:15 p.m. Oct. 14, was Linda Franklin, an analyst in the FBI’s cyber-crimes division and 47-year-old mother of two grown children. Franklin was shot as she and her husband were in a Home Depot parking lot in Falls Church, Va., in a trip to buy supplies for a new house.
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