On the night of December 7, 1988, Theodore Ted Squires, 39, was at home in Riverhead, New York, when a shotgun blast came through his kitchen area, striking his upper back and leaving him unable to move his arms. He survived after roughly a week in the hospital; surgeons removed some pellets but left others because removing them would cause more damage, and the retained shot remained visible on X-rays.

Squires’s shooting was one episode in a series of attacks over several nights that included the December 5 killing of Bernard Timothy Heaney, 30, outside his Flanders auto-body shop, and shotgun wounds to Richard Jensen the following night. Another resident, Donald J. Crump, was hit in the jaw by a .22-caliber bullet through a window, and a Southampton officer later found a bullet had struck his cruiser. Investigators say a caller claimed he was waging war on drug dealers and crooked cops.

Authorities arrested Yusef Abdullah Rahman on January 28, 1989; reporting indicates he was tried, found guilty, and received lengthy prison terms covering the Riverhead shootings and a Kansas City murder. Did anyone in Riverhead at the time have memories or information about those nights that could shed further light on what happened?