For 22 tense hours, Shareef Allman somehow eluded an army of officers, search dogs, and helicopters in one of Silicon Valley’s biggest manhunts ever, says the San Jose Mercury News. He melted into a neighborhood Wednesday, stashing weapons along the way — hiding an assault rifle under a garbage bin and propping another against a utility box. A massive search of about 400 houses turned up nothing.
Then, an hour after sunrise yesterday, Silicon Valley’s most wanted man suddenly appeared, crouching between two cars in a driveway, with a gun in his hand and a dog barking inside the house. Within seconds, three Santa Clara County sheriff’s deputies spotted Allman and ordered him to give up. Instead, he died in a hail of gunfire. The portrait of the 47-year-old quarry worker and single dad that emerged a day after he gunned down three co-workers and wounded seven other people — was not that of a spiritual, peace-loving man who snapped. It was one of a coldblooded killer who sheriff’s officials said kept a handgun at home hidden in the cutout pages of a Bible.