Officials cast wide net in search for answers
Evidence seized from apartment
FORT HOOD, TEX . — Military and federal officials investigating Thursday’s mass shooting at this sprawling Army post spent the weekend poring over evidence they seized from the apartment of the alleged shooter, Army Maj. Nidal M. Hasan, including his computer and multiple e-mail accounts he may have controlled, according to a law enforcement source.
Investigators have interviewed 170 witnesses and plan to question more as they try to piece together what might have motivated Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, to gun down 12 soldiers and one civilian, Army officials said.
Hasan was sitting with hundreds of other soldiers, filling out paperwork in a cubicle, when he suddenly stood up and opened fire, said Army officials. More than a dozen of those who were killed and wounded Thursday were soldiers who were close to deploying with him and would have served alongside him in Afghanistan as mental health professionals.
Two of those killed were captains; one was a psychologist who had come to America barely able to read English. Of the 38 who were injured Thursday, fewer than half remain hospitalized. Two victims remain in the surgical critical unit.
All evidence suggests that Hasan acted alone, said a spokesman for the Army’s Criminal Investigative Division and investigators have released no information that would link the case to a terrorist group. Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) told reporters at a news conference Saturday that the shooting was an “isolated” incident, and President Obama, after being briefed by FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, cautioned that the public should not rush to judgment about the case.
In recent days Army, FBI and police investigators have sought out witnesses at Fort Hood, the mosque where Hasan prayed, his apartment complex in nearby Killeen and the gun store where he bought the firearm that officials said he used in the attack. Hasan, meanwhile, was moved Friday night to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, and is now breathing without a ventilator, an Army official said.
Returning to normal
The flurry of investigative activity to determine a motive for the shootings was a stark contrast to the Fort Hood post, where life returned to normal. At the Army post, which is full of veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there were no makeshift memorials, yellow ribbons or black armbands that have become a regular part of the mourning process in the United States after most mass killings. The only signs that there had been a shooting rampage three days earlier were the federal and Army investigators culling evidence near the processing center where the violence had occurred and the flags at the military installation, which were still at half-staff.
Obama and first lady Michelle Obama will fly to Fort Hood on Tuesday to attend a memorial service for the victims, the White House announced, delaying his trip to Asia by one day.
Investigators fanned out Saturday to interview members of the Muslim community living in the neighborhood around the Islamic Center of Greater Killeen, which was founded decades ago by retired veterans from Fort Hood. Investigators also have interviewed leaders of the mosque. “Many of them have come,” said president Manzoor Farooqi, “but what can we really tell them?”
Some acquaintances of Hasan have described the Army psychiatrist as a devout Muslim, saying he even refused to be photographed with female soldiers. But Farooqi said Hasan only occasionally prayed at the red-brick building. In May, Hasan indicated he had “no religious preference” in an Army personnel form, called an Officer Record Brief, which he filled out in preparation for his deployment to Afghanistan.
The mosque’s imam, Syed Ahmed Ali, last saw Hasan at 6 a.m. prayers on Thursday. The psychiatrist’s behavior seemed normal, the imam said he told the FBI when agents questioned him Saturday. A few hours later, Fort Hood chaplains arrived at the mosque and invited Ali to attend Tuesday’s memorial service with Obama.
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Fort Hood shooting: Residents begin long healing process
As investigators search for clues, officials offer comfort to a military community struggling to ‘absorb the blow.’
Reporting from Ft. Hood, Texas – After eight grueling years of casualties overseas and suicides at home, this vast Army base took an unusual step recently to aid soldiers and their families facing overwhelming grief.
A former chapel with stained-glass windows was transformed into a Spiritual Fitness Center. It offers counseling, soothing music, a religious library and meditation space, among other services, to help survivors cope with psychological trauma.
“When you’re hit, you don’t break,” explained Brig. Gen. William Grimsley, deputy commanding general at Ft. Hood. “You absorb the blow.”
Now, the center offers solace to those who survived an unimaginable tragedy: the shooting rampage Thursday, allegedly by a fellow soldier, that left 13 people dead.
FBI agents and other investigators swarmed over the base and surrounding area Saturday to interview anyone who knew Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, to determine whether the 39-year-old Army psychiatrist who allegedly planned and carried out the shooting acted alone. No evidence has emerged to suggest that he had outside encouragement or support.
But forensic investigators are examining Hasan’s computer, Internet accounts, bank reports and other records to document his movements and communications.
By Saturday afternoon, they had interviewed 170 witnesses, victims, co-workers and others, and more interviews are planned, officials said.
“The FBI and U.S. Army criminal investigators are aggressively investigating any and all information related to Maj. Hasan,” said Erik Vasys, a special agent in the FBI’s San Antonio field office.
Several FBI officials said they had not found any clear warning signs that might have tipped off authorities before the killing spree began.
Hasan, who was shot four times, was taken off a respirator Saturday and is breathing on his own under armed guard in an intensive care unit at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, officials said.
Life at the base remained far from normal. Operating under conditions described as “slightly enhanced security,” armed soldiers were deployed at housing areas, day-care centers and other base facilities that usually are not guarded.
Yellow crime-scene tape cordoned off the shooting site, the base’s Soldier Readiness Processing Center, a cluster of mostly single-story brown buildings with red roofs. A pair of soldiers stood guard.
Two soldiers with automatic weapons also kept watch over a Burger King, the base PX store, and the busy playground beside the Bronco Youth Center on Tank Destroyer Boulevard.
A base spokesman, Col. John Rossi, met reporters in the late afternoon to perform a timeworn military ritual: a roll call of the fallen. One by one, he solemnly read the names, ages and hometowns of the 12 soldiers and one civilian killed.
The dead included Pfc. Francheska Valez, a pregnant 21-year-old who was heading home to Chicago; Spc. Jason Dean Hunt, a newlywed who recently served in Iraq; and Lt. Col. Juanita Warman, a 55-year-old physician’s assistant with six grandchildren.
“These heroes are so much more than simply names,” Rossi said. “And I ask that we all take a moment to remember them all.”
Nearly half of the 30 people wounded in the shooting have been released from hospitals. Dr. W. Roy Smythe, director of surgery at Scott & White Memorial Hospital in Temple, about 20 miles from Ft. Hood, said the killer shot his victims in the head, neck, chest, arms and legs. “The wounds were random,” he said.
Some of the victims will be physically or psychologically impaired “for the rest of their lives,” Smythe added.
Gov. Rick Perry, who visited some of the patients at Scott & White, said that he was impressed by the valor of the survivors. “I heard time after time in the hospital rooms that it’s their honor to be able to serve their country, and that is a very humbling thing,” the Republican said.
President Obama and his wife, Michelle, will attend a memorial at the base Tuesday. In his radio address Saturday, Obama called the attack “all the more heartbreaking and all the more despicable” because it occurred on the nation’s largest Army base.
Obama lauded the two civilians — Ft. Hood police Sgt. Kimberly Munley and her partner, Sgt. Mark Todd — who finally ended the carnage by shooting Hasan.
Obama said that although “we saw the worst of human nature on full display” in the shooting, “we also saw the best of America.”
“We saw soldiers and civilians alike rushing to aid fallen comrades, tearing off bullet-riddled clothes to treat the injured, using blouses as tourniquets, taking down the shooter even as they bore wounds themselves,” Obama said.
Former President George W. Bush and his wife, Laura, visited soldiers at the Army post hospital Friday night, the Associated Press reported.
After the shooting Thursday, Col. Bill Rabena, who runs the Spiritual Fitness Center, made six chaplains and six counselors available, with 10 more chaplains on standby.
They’ve talked to only a few dozen people, by phone and in person, but that could change.
“It takes a little while before the grieving starts,” Rabena said.
At the 73rd Street chapel — known on base as the chapel near the Popeyes Chicken — the chaplain, Col. Frank Jackson, plans to speak about the shooting at Sunday’s service.
The people who live and work at Ft. Hood, he said, must “acknowledge the guilt, acknowledge the sadness, acknowledge the trauma.”
When the outside attention inevitably fades, when the TV trucks leave and the president goes home, he said, “the people are still here.”
Fort Hood shooting suspect endured ‘big pressure,’ uncle says
The uncle says Nidal Malik Hasan was a sensitive man who faced ethnic taunts and was haunted by soldiers’ wartime disabilities. Hasan was not political, his relatives in the West Bank say.
Reporting from Al Birah, West Bank – When Rafik Ismail Hamad last traveled from the West Bank to visit relatives in the United States, he was struck by the pressures one of his nephews was facing.
The younger man, a U.S.-born Muslim of Palestinian descent, spoke to his uncle of ethnic taunts by Army colleagues. A sensitive man, he was haunted by the wartime disabilities of soldiers he treated as an Army psychiatrist, Hamad recalled, and was overwhelmed by a growing caseload he felt unable to manage.
Late Thursday, Hamad was home in the West Bank town of Al Birah when he heard the news on television: A gunman in Ft. Hood, Texas, had killed at least a dozen people, and his nephew, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, 39, was being accused of the horrific attack.
“The whole family is in a state of denial,” Hamad said Saturday. “We don’t believe he is capable of doing something like that. I was amazed and shocked, because it’s not him. He’s very quiet, gentle.
“Maybe it built up together — the harassment, too many patients, the workload, the tragedies his patients brought to him,” said the 65-year-old retired real estate broker. “Whatever it was, it must have been big pressure, something terrible he couldn’t handle.”
Hamad and another West Bank relative, Mohammed Munif Hasan, said they learned recently that Maj. Hasan had consulted a lawyer about securing a discharge from the Army.
Hamad said he had not seen or spoken to his nephew since that visit in the early part of last year, when Maj. Hasan was stationed in Washington. But the West Bank branch of the family had kept up with him through relatives in the United States.
The major’s octogenarian maternal grandparents, Salha and Ismail Hamad, live in Al Birah with Rafik Hamad, their son. In an interview outside the family’s three-story apartment building, he declined to make his parents available to reporters.
Rafik Hamad, a heavyset man with a trim white beard, described his nephew as a gentle soul who once, as a young adult, mourned for three months after rolling over during a nap and crushing his pet parakeet. During medical school, his uncle said, Hasan switched his major to psychiatry after fainting at the sight of blood while delivering a baby.
The young man became more religious after the death of his parents, who were Muslims but not observant, Hamad said. He noticed the change during the visit last year, when his nephew urged him to accompany him to pray at a mosque.
His turn to religion had nothing to do with political identity, Hamad and other West Bank relatives said. He never traveled outside the United States except for two brief visits to the West Bank, the last more than a decade ago, they said.
“He never knew anything about politics,” Hamad said. “He didn’t know who is the president or the king of any Arab country. He’s American. . . . He once told me, ‘The chances I have in the United States I couldn’t have in any other country in the world, so I appreciate what this country has done for me.’ ”
Hamad said that although his nephew complained last year about ethnic slurs, he appeared to be handling them well.
Fellow soldiers once handed him a diaper and told him to wear it around his head, the uncle said; another time they sketched a camel on a piece of paper and left it on his car with a note that said, “Here’s your ride.”
“He told me: ‘They’re ignorant. I’m more American than they are. I help my country more than they do. And I don’t care what they say.’ He felt sorry for them. He didn’t feel grudges; he felt sympathy.”
Hamad said that during their time together last year, the major seemed more afflicted by his caseload of physically disabled and traumatized war veterans.
“He didn’t have time even to breathe,” Hamad said. “Too much pressure, too many patients, not enough staff. He would say, ‘I don’t know how to treat them or what to tell them,’ because he didn’t have enough time. They just kept coming one after the other.
“Sometimes he cried because of what happened to them. How young they are, what’s going to happen to the rest of their lives. They’re going to be handicapped; they’re going to be crazy. He was very, very sensitive.”
Mohammed Munif Hasan, 24, a cousin of the major, said he heard the same story from relatives in the U.S.
Maj. Hasan brought his caseload home, he said, seeing patients at his house when the clinic wasn’t open.
“He was a good doctor, and he liked working with soldiers and helping them,” Mohammed Hasan said as he absorbed the news of the shooting. “We’re the first to wonder how he could have done something like this. It’s baffling.”
The uncle said: “I think he snapped. Something big happened and he snapped.”
Hasan is in a coma after being shot during the attack, and his West Bank relatives said they were uncertain whether they would travel to Texas.
“I’d like to go visit the families [of the shooting victims] and apologize to them and give them my sympathies,” Hamad said.
“But for him, I don’t know what I can do. If he wakes up, I want to ask him, ‘Did you do it, and why?’ I want to know. Otherwise, I have nothing to say to him.”
Perry says he’s humbled after visiting wounded
TEMPLE, Texas — Texas Gov. Rick Perry visited victims of the Fort Hood shootings Saturday, describing his conversations with them as “humbling.”
“I heard time after time in those hospital rooms that it’s their honor to be able to serve our country, and that is a very humbling thing — to watch a young man or woman whose life has been irreparably harmed in a violent act, yet their concern and their interest is in continuing to be able to serve this country,” Perry told reporters outside Scott & White Hospital, where six gunshot victims remained Saturday afternoon.
Perry said he told the wounded soldiers the entire state was behind them, and that “there’s 24 million Texans praying for them and wishing them well.”
The governor said he didn’t speak with the victims about the Thursday shootings that left 13 dead and 30 wounded.
“We talked about these kids’ families, we talked about if they needed anything, we comforted them and loved on ‘em,” Perry said.
Perry said he spoke with Sgt. Kimberly Munley, one of two civilian police officers who shot at suspect Major Nidal Malik Hasan. Perry said he thanked Munley during their Friday phone conversation for her heroic actions.
“She’s very understated, a person who understands the gravity of what occurred, but also a classic public servant who is not interested in anything but getting on with her life,” Perry said.
The state’s priorities in the coming days will be supporting the victims’ families, the criminal investigation and the military, he said.
“The Texas Rangers were obviously one of the first on the scene” and will continue to help federal investigators, Perry said. “They’re not the lead, but they will support in anyway they are asked to.”
Some of Fort Hood’s wounded return home
KILLEEN, Texas — As the nation grieved for the 13 people killed in Thursday’s attack at Fort Hood, there was a glimmer of encouragement on Saturday as some of the people wounded in the shooting were able to leave one hospital near the Army base.
Four of the 10 shooting victims who were taken to Scott and White Hospital in Temple, Texas, were released Saturday. Two people were still in intensive care but were no longer on ventilators, said the chairman of surgery at the hospital, Dr. W. Roy Smythe.
“Some are out of the woods,” Smythe said at a news conference,” but some of them, again, their injuries are so severe, only time will tell how they will do in the long run.”
The authorities say that a gunman, whom they identified as Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, a 39-year-old psychiatrist, fired more than 100 bullets inside Fort Hood’s medical processing building on Thursday, killing 13 people and wounding 30 others. How he was able to execute such a deadly act — and why — has become the focus of federal investigators. Hasan was shot four times by a policewoman and is in serious condition at Brooke Medical Center in San Antonio, said investigators, who have yet to speak to him.
On Saturday, FBI agents went door to door in the predominately Muslim community adjoining the mosque that Hasan attended, asking residents if they knew him and what sorts of interactions they had with him.
The major was scheduled to be deployed to Afghanistan along with other mental health professionals.
Five of the 13 people who died in the shooting were from medical units. Three members of the 467th Combat Stress Control Detachment, of Madison, Wis., were identified as Sgt. Amy Krueger, 29, of Kiel, Wis., Capt. Russell Seager, 51, of Racine, Wis., and Maj. L. Eduardo Caraveo, 52, of Woodbridge, Va. Caraveo had been a licensed clinical psychologist for 20 years.
Two members of the 1908th medical detachment out of Topeka, Kan., were also confirmed dead in the attack: Capt. John Gaffaney, 56, of Serra Mesa, Calif., and Lt. Col. Juanita Warman, 55, raised in Pittsburgh and living in Independence, Mo.
The family of Michael G. Cahill, 62, a physician’s assistant working as a civilian at the processing center, and living in Cameron, Texas, confirmed his death on Saturday. Cahill, originally from Spokane, Wash., had spent 23 years in the National Guard before going into contract civilian work.
“He had always worked in rural health care clinics or VA hospitals, he just loved working with the soldiers,” his daughter, Keely Cahill Vanacker, said in an interview on Saturday. “He always took care of the soldiers as people.” Vanacker said that as a physician assistant, her father frequently counseled soldiers with mental health issues.
Three weeks ago, Cahill had a heart attack, and pushed his doctors to let him return to the base a week later.
It was not immediately known whether Hasan had made targets of stress counselors, but acquaintances have said that in the months before the shooting, he made no secret of his dismay with American foreign policy or his distaste for his coming deployment to Afghanistan.
President Barack Obama used his weekly radio and Internet address on Saturday to celebrate the diversity of the armed forces.
“They are Americans of every race, faith and station,” Obama said. “They are Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus and nonbelievers. They reflect the diversity that makes this America.”
In tribute to those killed, Obama has ordered flags at government buildings to fly at half-staff until Veterans Day, and the White House announced Saturday that he and the first lady, Michelle Obama, would attend a memorial service at Fort Hood on Tuesday.
Obama has made it a goal of his presidency to try to repair relations with Muslims around the world; in a major speech in Cairo this year, he called for a “new beginning” with the Muslim world. The shootings at Fort Hood, however, pose a different problem for the president, by shining a spotlight on the tensions Muslims can feel inside the United States.
In a Rose Garden appearance on Friday, Obama urged Americans not to “jump to conclusions” about the motives behind the shooting, a theme he echoed on Saturday.
“We cannot fully know what leads a man to do such a thing,” he said in the Saturday address. “But what we do know is our thoughts are with every single one of the men and women who were injured at Fort Hood. Our thoughts are with all the families who’ve lost a loved one in this national tragedy.”
Fort Hood Suspect Hasan Still in ICU, Off Ventilator (Update1)
By David Wethe
Nov. 7 (Bloomberg) — Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of a shooting spree that killed 13 people, remains in an intensive care unit at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio and is no longer on a ventilator, said Colonel John Rossi, deputy commander at Fort Hood, Texas, at a news conference.
The U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division, the lead agency investigating the shooting, said all evidence gathered so far points toward Hasan allegedly acting alone.
“At this time, we have one alleged suspect connected to this mass shooting,” said Chris Grey, a spokesman for the division. “We have not established a motive for the shootings at this time.”
The shooting at the largest military base in the U.S. left another 30 wounded, officials said. The carnage could have been worse as the suspect stormed a crowded waiting room, reloading and firing more than 100 rounds from a semi-automatic machine pistol with an extended magazine, officials also said.
The investigation, which is led by a joint task force that includes local police as well as the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, involves more than 170 interviews of witnesses and victims, Grey said.
Hasan, whose deployment date was set for “late November to Afghanistan,” and 17 others remain hospitalized, Rossi said. “Ten of those, including the suspect, are in ICU,” he said.
To contact the reporter on this story: David Wethe in Killeen, Texas, at dwethe@bloomberg.net.
