For those wounded by the D.C. snipers and for the relatives of those killed, the emotions leading up to Tuesday's scheduled execution of the mastermind behind the 2002 attacks vary as widely as those who found themselves in the cross hairs.

John Allen Muhammad, 48, is set to die by injection in a Virginia prison, seven years after he and his teenage accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, terrorized the area in and around the nation's capital for three weeks, killing 10 people and wounding three.

Some family members can't wait to see Muhammad take his final breath. Others plan to travel to Virginia but never step foot on prison grounds. And some plan to spend the night at home with their families, satisfied that Muhammad is paying for what he's done but indifferent as to how it will happen.

'The last chapter'

"I feel like it's going to be the last chapter of this book, and I want to see what his expression on his face is. And I want to see if he says anything," said Rivera, 38.

Lori Ann Lewis-Rivera, 25, Rivera's wife and Lewis' daughter, was killed as she vacuumed her van at a Kensington, Md., gas station. She left behind a daughter, Jocelin, then 2.

Rivera, a Honduran immigrant who recently became a U.S. citizen, has since remarried and had two more children. He now works as a public-schools groundskeeper outside Sacramento, Calif.

Still, "this is going to be with me the rest of my life," Rivera said.

Lewis, 57, a laid-off construction worker, said he would like to tell Muhammad how losing his daughter devastated their family.

"For the hurt, the pain that he's caused my family, I'd like to be his executioner, period," Lewis said.

'Payment of his debt'

Meyers, 56, of Perkiomenville, Pa., and his wife, Lori, plan to be in the witness booth, but not out of any bloodthirsty lust to watch his brother Dean Harold Meyers' killer meet his maker. Rather, he considers it justice being served.

"The reason why this life is going to be taken has everything to do with choices that he made and the process that those choices took him through," Meyers said.

Executions in Virginia, home of the nation's second-busiest death chamber, usually are intimate affairs observed by a handful of lawyers, prison officials, citizen witnesses, a few reporters, and family members.

But the sheer number of victims has the state scrambling to accommodate all the people entitled to watch.

Meyers said that he owed it to his brother to be there, and also wanted to be there for other victims' families.

Dean Meyers, 53, a Vietnam vet and civil engineer and the youngest of four brothers, was shot in the head at a Manassas, Va., gas station. It was Meyers' murder that sent Muhammad to death row. "We're expecting justice being done, but not from a vengeful standpoint," Robert Meyers said. "It is more about the payment of his debt to society, because that was decided by others."

'I don't know how I feel'

"The only thing that would give me closure would be if I knew that Lee Boyd Malvo was being punished properly," said Moore, 80.

Malvo, who was 17 at the time of the shootings, was sentenced to life in prison for killing Moore's daughter Linda Franklin, 47, an FBI analyst who was shot as she and her husband loaded supplies at a Home Depot in Falls Church, Va.

Moore, a retired bioengineer, said his daughter used to call him every morning "to tell me to get out of bed and start chasing my wife around the house or something." He struggles with Parkinson's disease now, and can't afford the trip to Virginia to watch the execution. He's not sure he would make the trip if he could, though.

"When my daughter was first killed, if I would have had a gun, I would have been willing to kill him, but right now I don't know how I feel," Moore said. "I don't want him turned loose on society, that's for sure."

'Enough killing already'

Sure, her ribs are deformed and a piece of mesh covers a hole in her diaphragm. But Seawell has been blessed with no major medical problems since a sniper's bullet raced into her back and through a handful of organs as she loaded a scarecrow and other Halloween decorations into her minivan.

She and her family moved to South Carolina not long after the shooting outside a Fredericksburg, Va., Michael's craft store. Her youngest son, now 11, doesn't even know about the shooting.

"I've been really good about being able to kind of just put it behind me," Seawell said.

In that defiant spirit, Seawell said she would not travel to Virginia to watch Muhammad take his last breath. He deserves to die, she said, but after watching both parents die from cancer, she has no desire to witness another death.

"There was enough killing already with all of us," she said.