Federal marshals alerted abortion providers across the country to beef up their personal security, as the assassin of a provider here remained free, and radical foes of abortion rights refused to renounce further acts of deadly violence.
As Dr. Barnett A. Slepian was buried, three days after a sniper murdered him in his kitchen, investigators in the United States and Canada hunted for clues to whether the physician's killer is a rogue terrorist or part of an armed movement aimed at harming and intimidating abortion providers.The massive search unfolded as security specialists reported that acts of serious violence against abortion clinics and providers are escalating and radical antiabortion activists predicted that the trend will persist.
"We know for a fact that it will continue until Roe v. Wade is reversed," said Jonathan O'Toole, a member of the Creator's Rights Party, which has defended violence against Slepian and other abortion providers as morally justifiable.
"Just as (abolitionist) John Brown used violence to try to protect people who had been declared three-fifths human by the U.S. Supreme Court," O'Toole said, "the analogy applies to anyone who would take it upon themselves to defend the lives of the unborn."
A law enforcement task force, which reported no significant development in the investigation, held a news conference Monday to offer a $100,000 reward for information leading to the killer's arrest and appealed to the public for help.
The plea was overshadowed, however, when Amherst Police Chief John B. Askey, responding to a reporter's question, acknowledged that Slepian's wife, Lynn, had faxed the police department a warning of possible violence the doctor had received. She faxed the information, from the National Abortion Federation, hours before his murder.
Slepian, 52, was the fifth abortion provider in the United States and Canada since 1994 to be shot by a sniper with a high-powered rifle near Remembrance Day, which some anti-abortion activists in Canada refer to as "Remember the Unborn Child Day." The other doctors survived the attacks.