Today, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the police can collect a DNA swab from people who have been arrested but not convicted of a crime. The justices were unusually divided—conservative Justice Antonin Scalia joined liberal justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan on the dissenting opinion.

For some deeper context, read Harry Jaffe’s story, “Truth and Consequences,” in the Washingtonian, which was featured on Longreads last month.

An oral history of the Beltway sniper attacks that occurred during three weeks in October 2002. Ten people were killed, three people were injured, and many people were too afraid to leave their homes:

Iran Brown, victim, now 23: ‘I remember every detail, down to what I ate for breakfast: chocolate-chip waffles. My aunt drove me to school, and it was very early because she had to go to work. I was the first to arrive.

‘I got hit right under my left chest. I fell to the ground. A teacher came out to help me. I had my hand over the wound, but it wasn’t like in the movies with blood gushing out. I explained that I’d been shot and needed help, but it didn’t seem to register in her brain.

‘My aunt heard the shot and reversed the car when she saw me on the ground. I got up on my own and walked to the car. Of course, I’m panicking and praying. Reality is kicking in. My aunt was a nurse, so she knew more than the average person. She rushed me to a clinic.

‘I had been watching the news. I was aware of what was happening. I had asked our PE teacher why we were going outside if the sniper was in the area.

“Terror in October: A Look Back at the DC Sniper Attacks.” — Alicia C. Shepard, Washingtonian

More from the Washingtonian

[Not single-page] A young football player kills himself after he sustained a concussion on the field:

Heading home, the Trenums stopped at the Chuck Wagon, a restaurant around the corner from their house, where the Brentsville High players gathered after games. Austin’s teammates recounted his sideline exchange with Scavongelli.

Scavongelli: “Do you know where you are?”

Austin: “Yeah. This is my field!”

Scavongelli: “No. Do you know what school you are at?”

Austin: “Yeah. My school!”

Scavongelli: “Do you know who you’re playing against?”

Austin: “No.”

“Did Football Kill Austin Trenum?” — Patrick Hruby, Washingtonian

More Hruby

Meet the man who’s been standing outside the Vatican embassy for 14 years—a vigil on behalf of the victims of sexual abuse in the Catholic church:

Time weighs on John Wojnowski. It wears him down. It winds him up.

Time, for Wojnowski, is not just the half century since the priest in the mountains of Italy touched him. It is also the lost days since then, the wasted months and years when he is sure he let everyone down: his parents, his wife, his children, himself.

Markers of time are there, too, in the ragged datebooks that cleave to his body like paper armor. While riding the bus late one night, after another of his vigils outside the Vatican’s United States embassy, he showed them to me: The 2010 datebook inhabits the right pocket of his frayed chinos, 2011 the left; the 2012 book, its pages bound by rubber bands, stiffens the pocket of his shirt.

He has come to this corner and stood with his signs for some 5,000 days. In his datebooks, he records—a word or two, just enough to jog memory—the sights and sounds that keep one day from bleeding into the next.

“The Passion of John Wojnowski.” — Ariel Sabar, Washingtonian

More from Washingtonian

You might wonder why the best writer in American journalism would have fake poop as his Twitter icon. Or spend an inordinate amount of time making prank phone calls. Or concern himself with monkey sex, fake sneezes, or bacon taped to cats. As he once put it in a column, “I mostly write about underpants.”

Weingarten is not a horrible person, but there may be something wrong with him.

“How Do You Explain Gene Weingarten?” — Tom Bartlett, Washingtonian

See more #longreads from Washingtonian