Richmond Times-Dispatch November 8, 2001
Help was on the way as 30-year-old Lia Selberis lay dead or dying in her bed at 12:55 a.m. yesterday, but her would-be rescuers never got all the way to her bedroom at 10 S. Boulevard Apt. 2.
A single booming gunshot - fired through Selberis' bedroom window by an either highly skilled or extremely lucky attacker standing outside on her wide porch railing - startled neighbors.
"Really loud, really close," said Ann Marie Lessig, who lives directly upstairs in the vast, subdivided house with her husband, Hugh. Both were already awake, and troubled by the blast.
Mrs. Lessig looked out her front window down onto the Boulevard sidewalk.
"I saw two guys standing on the sidewalk," she said, "just milling around."
The two men she saw apparently were neighbors who were so alarmed they came out of their separate apartments to investigate.
One of them dialed 911 as they nosed around in front of number 10, noticing the grapefruit-size hole in one of Selberis' front windows.
When three Richmond police officers pulled up a few minutes later, "I explained to them it sounded like a shotgun, the blast was so deep," said one of those neighbors, who asked not to be identified. (The other declined to be interviewed about the matter.)
The officers looked at the hole in Selberis' window, one of them saying it looked like someone threw a rock through it, the neighbor said.
The police knocked on Selberis' door, but got no answer. The neighbor told them she might be out having a drink with her boyfriend.
The officers told the men that Selberis could call them in the morning if she wanted a police report for insurance purposes.
"Then they left," the neighbor said. "They acted like it was nothing. I felt like being nosy, getting up on the rail and looking in the window. But I trusted the police."
"It appeared to them it was an act of vandalism," said Richmond police spokeswoman Cynthia Price.
But when Selberis' female roommate came home yesterday morning, she found her friend dead in her bed and called police at 8:42 a.m.
"I feel almost guilty myself," said the neighbor, who now wishes he had persisted in checking on Selberis. "She was very nice."
Next-door neighbor Ed Kassab said he can see why police assumed vandalism. "If you look at the hole, it looks like a rock was thrown through the window," he said.
Still, he added, "I wish they had checked it out. She might have been living. Obviously a crime had occurred, even if it was vandalism."
Police investigators would not say what part of Selberis' body was struck. An examination by the medical examiner will determine the time of her death.
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Her slaying is as mysterious as it is shocking to this increasingly stylish neighborhood of sprawling, 6,000-square-foot homes, most of them subdivided into large apartments renting in the $700 range.
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Selberis, her boyfriend and her roommate frequently sat out on their porch, chatting or barbecuing. The neighbor who came to check on her after the gunshot said Selberis was engaged to be married, and she seemed to be happy.
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Investigators tracked the trajectory of the killing slug, indicating the killer stood on the front porch rail attached to the house and fired down through the window and blinds into the dark room at an angle.
That's why investigators don't believe the homicide was random or accidental.
Clearly, said the neighbor who came outside at 1 a.m. to investigate, "whoever did it knew where the bed was situated in the room."
