Top Stories of 2011: The Hunt for a Gunman

The message flashed out from area police departments shortly after midnight on Aug. 28, as Hurricane Irene pounded the area: an armed murder suspect with a military background was on the loose in the dark of the storm.

The next 16 hours were some of the longest, scariest, saddest hours in recent memory for everyone from emergency responders to police officers to area residents to the families and friends of the victims and the shooter.

It started, seemingly, in the emergency room at St. Luke's Hospital in Quakertown. A little girl was dropped off with a note, but when hospital workers tried to confront the man who dropped her off, he pulled out a gun, climbed into his truck and drove off.

What we didn't know yet then was that Leonard Egland, an Army captain attached to Fort Lee, Va., already had killed his estranged wife, Carrie, her male friend and her friend's son in Virginia. Egland then drove up to Bucks County with his young daughter and broke into the Buckingham home of Carrie's mother, Barbara Ruehl, and shot her to death.

Egland shot at pursuing police on an exit ramp of the Rt. 611 Bypass in Doylestown, wounding and Dublin before speeding off into the night.

We for hours during the height of the storm, then early the next morning after word came that . Warwick neighborhoods were locked down and roadblocks were erected as the search for Egland continued.

His body was located hours later, dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, and we set to work writing up our final story of the day, "."

We followed up the next day with "" and a couple days later with "" and "."

As for Lauryn Egland, the little girl left without either her mother or father after the tragedy, both sides of her family came together at the Bucks County courthouse in Doylestown to that would make sure she was .