The search for the fugitive accused of killing a judge, a court reporter and a sheriff's deputy in a courthouse rampage ended Saturday morning when the man surrendered peacefully after a SWAT team cornered him in the Gwinett County apartment of a woman he had taken hostage.

Before his arrest, the fugitive might have killed a fourth victim - at 8:30 a.m. this morning, carpenters found an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot dead at his unfinished Buckhead home near Lenox Road. Two people visiting Atlanta for the SEC tournament were assaulted, possibly by the fugitive, Friday noght on Lenox Road, not far from the house where the agent’s body was found.

The agent’s house is not far at all from where I live, and I had crossed Lenox Road just a few blocks south of where the agent’s body was discovered not once, but twice, Friday night as I went to and from the Zen Center for the evening service.

At around the time the carpenters found the body this morning, I was crossing Lenox Road two more times as I headed back to the Zen Center to meet some others for our Saturday hike, and again as we headed from the Center up to the North Georgia Mountains.

Also, the meeting in Doraville that I went to yesterday, when I saw the messages alerting motorists to the car the suspect was believed to be driving, was very close to where he had taken the woman hostage and later surrendered to the police. I probably couldn’t have crossed the fugitive’s path more times if I had tried.

Greetings from the third most dangerous city in America.

The Atlanta police suffered a public embarrassment when the green Honda that investigators believed the fugitive had car-jacked and used in his escape was found in the very parking garage where he commandeered it more than 12 hours earlier. Authorities had issued an all points bulletin on the Honda, broadcasting its description and license plate number over television, radio and the highway alert network. But about 10 p.m. Friday, someone noticed the car in the garage and notified the police.

Today’s hike itself could not have been nicer. The weather, after a cool and cloudy week, was perfect – sunny and in the 60s up in the mountains (76 when I got back to Atlanta). The turnout was relatively small – only five of us – but we had all hiked together before, so we were an intimate group, very comfortable together. We had the trail to ourselves most of the time, only encountering a very polite group of college boys taking a spring-break backpacking trip and the expected crowd on top of Springer Mountain.

The next Zen hike will be June 11, if the creek don’t rise and the City manages to keep all of its felons behind bars.