A daughter remembers her father nearly 20 years after two snipers killed him and several others in a series of attacks that terrorized the D.C. area. News4’s Darcy Spencer reports.
Pascal Charlot was standing on a street corner in Northwest D.C. when he was shot and killed at the hands of two snipers who terrorized the D.C. region for weeks in 2002.
The 72-year-old husband and father was a devoted family man, and a respected leader in D.C.'s Haitian community.
"When you lose a family member, it’s hard on you. It's like a part of you is gone," Charlot's daughter, Myrtha Cinada, told News4.
Charlot was the caretaker for his wife, who was fighting Alzeimer's disease.
On the night of Oct. 3, 2002, he made his wife dinner and walked out of their home to pick up a prescription.
He was shot on Georgia Avenue NW in the Petworth area of D.C. a little more than an hour later.
"Although nobody deserved that, but I didn’t expect my dad to be victim of the snipers," Cinada said.
John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo were convicted of multiple murders, including Charlot's. Malvo, who was 17 at the time, is serving a life sentence. Muhammad was executed.
"You have to be evil or out of your mind because any normal person wouldn’t do that," Cinada said.
Cinada said she felt relief when Muhammed and Malvo were captured.
"So many people were already killed. The more they on the loose, like, more people would be victimized," she said.
Charlot was a retired carpenter and the father of five children.
He came to the U.S. from Haiti in 1964 and spoke about living to 100.
His grandsons say his death left a void in their lives, too.
"Sometimes when you were at the park you would see grandparents playing with their kids. I just never really got that experience," Charlot's grandson Mardo Cinada said.
"I’ve heard great things about him. So, his legacy lives throughout my parents, my uncles and aunts and his grandchildren," Nathan Cinada, another grandson of Charlot's, told News4.
Every year when the anniversary of his death approaches, Cinada said she takes time to remember her dad.
"I will always miss him and I will always carry him in my heart because he’s my dad," she said.
