VA VA - Paul Zeller, 24, Arlington, 30 June 2006

[Elizabella]

[Paul] Zeller's family said he worked long hours at the College Park Honda dealership, commuting between Arlington County and Maryland on Metro. They said Zeller was walking home from the Pentagon City Station just after midnight when he was shot. He did not appear to have been robbed, family members said.

"We don't have a clue why this happened," said Lydia Robertson, Zeller's sister, with whom he lived in Arlington. "It's just tragic."

Police said Zeller was found dead at 12:06 a.m. Friday on the sidewalk in front of the upscale retail center's World Market store in the 1300 block of South Joyce Street. Zeller died from multiple gunshot wounds to the upper body.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/01/AR2006070100970.html

 

[Elizabella]

This case seems odd. I didn't see any threads open on it so figured I would create one.

 

[UnderSea]

Bump with a link to the Arlington Police cold case list: https://police.arlingtonva.us/cold-cases/

 

[meade]

Bump, there must be more details.

 

[JLouEllen90]

Another cold case in Arlington is the murder of 24-year-old Paul Matthew Zeller, an Iraq war veteran murdered on June 30, 2006, while walking near the Pentagon Row shopping center. Zeller, on his way home from working at a Honda dealership in College Park, Maryland, exited the Pentagon City metro station just before midnight and stopped at a nearby Harris Teeter grocery store. As he walked toward his home in the Aurora Highlands neighborhood in the 1300 block of South Joyce Street, someone shot him in the head with a shotgun.

The sound of that blast should have alerted hundreds of residents living in nearby high rises, but police have not discovered any witnesses to the murder.

Paul, an adopted child and the youngest of six children in the family, came from a long line of military people. His father, Dwight Zeller, is a retired Navy chaplain and the founder of a seminary in Westcliffe, in rural Colorado. “Paul finished high school and went into the 82nd Airborne and was with the group that went into Iraq from Kuwait,” Dwight Zeller says. “And he saw a lot of things that upset him a lot, which is natural. He was very disturbed.”

When he got back to Arlington and out of the Army in September 2004, he lived with his sister, Lydia Robertson, a Navy captain and retired public affairs officer for the U. S. Pacific Command, and her husband, an Army colonel. He got the job at the Honda dealership and appeared to be getting better, his father says. Then, for some reason, he was targeted for murder.

“Robbery didn’t seem to be part of the murder, and that is what makes it a mystery,” his father says. “It appears, and I use the word advisedly, that this could have been a random shooting of some kind. That is the only thing that the detectives have come up with.”

It would have been much easier to accept the murder of his child if he had been shot and killed in Iraq, Zeller says. “But it wasn’t. So that’s the way it is.”

He says he is not looking for peace or resolution, and doesn’t want to meet the perpetrator when that person is arrested, for a one-on-one talk about his son—except to ask that person why he did this. “Whoever did this, that just needs to be found out to serve the cause of justice,” he says.