THIS is tragic, and we should remember ALL the families of the dead and wounded in our prayers and thoughts, because the family of the shooter has lost someone too, and not only are they dealing with his death but the horror of what he has done to others. From the Washington Post and NPR......
http://www.washingtonpost.com/posttv/after-shooting-army-secretary-sees-threat-across-the-whole-army/2014/04/03/5acbcb54-bb46-11e3-80de-2ff8801f27af_video.html
Video:
Here are key moments from the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on
Thursday where Secretary of the Army John McHugh and Army Chief of
Staff Ray Odierno testified about Wednesday's shooting at Fort Hood,
Tex.
Army Secretary John M. McHugh said the 34-year-old shooter had been prescribed “a number of drugs,” including Ambien, a sleep aid. After giving the soldier a full psychiatric evaluation last month, Army officials detected no indications “that there was any sign of likely violence, either to himself or to others,” McHugh told a Senate panel Thursday.
He said the investigation was still unfolding and did not comment on a possible motive. But he echoed other Army leaders in saying there was no evidence the shooter was “involved with extremists of any kind.”
McHugh did not identify the soldier, but other military officials and law enforcement officials have named him as Army Spec. Ivan A. Lopez, a military truck driver. He was dressed in his standard-issue camouflage uniform when he abruptly pulled out a .45 Smith & Wesson semiautomatic pistol Wednesday afternoon and opened fire in two different buildings on the vast Army post in central Texas.
The mass shooting immediately prompted flashbacks to another terrible day at Fort Hood. On Nov. 5, 2009, Army Maj. Nidal M. Hasan, a psychiatrist who had been in contact with an al-Qaeda leader overseas, gunned down soldiers preparing to deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan, killing 13 people and wounding more than 30.
Ever since, Defense Department officials have worked to bolster security and improve screening at bases across the country. Despite those efforts, insider attacks by people working for the military have persisted, frustrating military leaders and lawmakers alike.
In September, a government contractor who had been hearing phantom voices carried a shotgun into the Washington Navy Yard and methodically killed 12 people. That shooter, Aaron Alexis, a Navy veteran, had recently sought treatment for insomnia from Veterans Affairs medical centers.
When doctors asked Alexis if he had thoughts of harming himself or others, he said no. He was prescribed medicine for sleeplessness and anxiety, but, like Lopez, he was not labeled a potential threat. Nineteen days later, he carried out his attack.
Army officials said they were still trying to unravel a motive for Lopez’s attack. Investigators were questioning Lopez’s wife and searching their apartment in Killeen, the city that abuts the Army post. The couple were both natives of Puerto Rico, Army officials said.
Lopez grew up in the town of Guayanilla, on Puerto Rico’s southwestern side. The town’s current mayor, Edgardo Arlequín, was the director of a local band for school children when Lopez joined. That was about 1990, the year that Lopez turned 11.
The mayor said that Lopez came from a musical family: his father and brother both played music in the local Catholic church.
“Ivan was quiet . . . introverted, calm,” Arlequín said in Spanish in a telephone interview. He said he knew Lopez for several years and had never seen him show anger with another student. “Never. Never. I never saw him get in a fight.”
Lopez spent 10 years as a police officer in Puerto Rico and was still counted as an “inactive” member of the force while he served in the Army, a spokesman for the Puerto Rican police service said Thursday.
Gen. Ray Odierno, the Army chief of staff, described the shooter as “a very experienced soldier” who had served for nine years in the Puerto Rico National Guard before enlisting in the active-duty Army in 2010.
While with the National Guard, the shooter served a one-year deployment to the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt. In 2011, after he joined the Army full-time, he served four months in Iraq and was one of the last U.S. troops to come home at the end of the war.
McHugh said there was no record that the shooter had been wounded or injured in Iraq.
Lt. Gen. Mark A. Milley, the commanding general of Fort Hood, told reporters Wednesday night that the shooter had “self-reported” a traumatic brain injury from his Iraq deployment and that he was undergoing evaluation to determine if he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Milley said the shooter “had behavioral health and mental health issues” and was taking antidepressants. “We are digging deep into his background,” he said.
Lopez had been stationed at Fort Hood only for several weeks. He arrived in February and was assigned to the 13th Sustainment Command (Expeditionary) as a truck driver.
He had previously been stationed at another Texas installation, Fort Bliss, for two years as an infantryman with the 1st Armored Division, 4th Brigade. According to a person familiar with his military service, he was taking medications while stationed at Fort Bliss to help with depression and anxiety, but his behavior did not raise any red flags. Because of privacy restrictions, his commanders were unaware of the medications he was receiving.
Lopez had been experiencing some stress in his life; his mother had passed away in the past year and he had been seeing a chaplain for counseling on that and other undisclosed issues, according to the person familiar with his military record. The military monitors people for stress levels, and Lopez was deemed to be “low risk” at the time.
He left Fort Bliss in November for several months of training to become a truck driver, then won an assignment with a truck-driving unit at Fort Hood, starting in February.
In March, not long after his arrival at Fort Hood, Lopez legally purchased the .45-caliber Smith & Wesson from a Killeen gun shop, Guns Galore — the same store where Hasan bought the weapon he used in the 2009 Fort Hood rampage, according to two law-enforcement officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.
About 4 p.m. Wednesday, Lopez began shooting. Officials, while stressing that they were still trying to determine the precise sequence of events, said he opened fire inside two different buildings: one belonging to the 1st Medical Brigade and another belonging to the 49th Transportation Battalion. In between, he fired shots from a vehicle he had driven onto the base.
He was eventually confronted by a female military police officer. He put his hands up at first, but then pulled out a gun from under his jacket and shot himself in the head, according to Milley, the Fort Hood commander.
Milley said investigators were looking into reports that the shooter may have gotten into an argument with another soldier, but he did not give details.
Doctors at Scott and White Memorial Hospital in Temple, Tex., said Thursday that they were treating nine patients — eight men and one woman, all current service members — and that three remain in critical condition.
Matthew Davis, trauma director at the hospital, told reporters that five others are in fair condition and the remainder in good condition. He said it was possible that several victims with minor injuries could be discharged Thursday.
Davis said the patients in critical condition have injuries to the neck, abdomen and possibly the spine and that two of them require further surgery. The patients range in age from 21 to the mid-40s, he said.
Among the wounded was Maj. Patrick Miller, who had previously served in Iraq.His condition was not known.
Several of Miller’s Facebook friends posted messages asking for prayers for his recovery. His mother and wife took to Twitter asking for prayers. His wife tweeted directly to two football players on the Buffalo Bills, his favorite team, asking them to pray for her husband.
“I have no doubt he’ll pull through because of who he is,” Robert Heckler of Brazoria, Tex., who served in Iraq with Miller from 2004 to 2005, said in a phone interview. “Man, that guy is one of a kind. Honestly, he’s a straight dude, he’s a cool dude.”
Like many other soldiers and Army veterans, Heckler said he was stunned that the Army had been victimized by another insider attack.
“It happened at our home, at our house,” he said. “He was shot by another soldier. That’s a lot different than the Army I was in.”
President Obama directed officials to “utilize every resource available to fully investigate the shooting,” the White House said Wednesday night. The president spoke in a conference call with his national security team, including Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey and FBI Deputy Director Mark Giuliano.
Speaking during a fundraising trip to Chicago, Obama said he was “heartbroken that something like this might have happened again” and pledged “to get to the bottom of exactly what happened.”
At Guns Galore, which advertises that it has 3,000 guns in stock and 1,700 on display, general manager Cathy Cheadle said she could not comment because of the investigation.
But a part-time sales clerk, a retired police sergeant who gave his name only as Ebert, said, “We are religiously in compliance with state and federal law — to the point where we have pissed some people off.” He added: “We have refused gun sales before. It’s based on the little voice inside your head that says it’s not a good idea. . . . We have done good things since we’ve been here. We do whatever needs to be done to keep the community safe.”
On Capitol Hill, Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid said Thursday that Congress should revisit the issue of expanding the federal gun background check program in response to the latest shooting spree at Fort Hood.
“As I was told today, this young man bought his gun a day or two before he killed these people,” Reid told reporters. “Couldn’t we at least have background checks so that people who are ill mentally, or who are felons, shouldn’t be able to buy guns? Even NRA members, a majority of them, support that, so I hope we can bring it back up.”
When asked whether he would like to bring up a bill to expand the background check program, Reid said, “I would like to be able to bring it back up; I need some more votes.”
But Rep. Steve Stockman (R-Tex.) called on Congress to end a ban on carrying weapons at U.S. military bases. In a statement, he charged that the latest shooting occurred “because our trained soldiers aren’t allowed to carry defensive weapons.,” adding: “Anti-gun activists have turned our military bases into soft targets for killers.”
Although installations such as Fort Hood contain large storehouses of armaments, and many of their inhabitants have spent years at war, military posts are usually among the most idyllic communities in the country, a throwback to the 1950s, with manicured lawns, drivers who conscientiously abide by the speed limit and parents unafraid to allow their children to frolic out of sight.
Encompassing 340 square miles, Fort Hood is larger than the five boroughs of New York combined. But most of the area is open terrain, used for tank and artillery practice. Many of the post’s facilities are concentrated on its southern perimeter, near its gates to the city of Killeen. The facilities include the headquarters for III Corps, which is comprised of two full divisions and support regiments. More than 40,000 service members work on the post, which has about 6,000 family residences.
In the wake of the Navy Yard shooting, Hagel ordered a series of security changes at military installations, including more rigorous screening of personnel and the creation of an analysis center to examine “insider threats.”
“When we have these kinds of tragedies on our bases, something’s not working,” he said Wednesday during a visit to Hawaii. “We will continue to address the issue. Anytime you lose your people to these kinds of tragedies, it’s an issue, it’s a problem.”
Shelby Sementelli in Killeen, Tex.; Ernesto Londoño in Hawaii; and Sari Horwitz, David Fahrenthold, Clarence Williams, William Branigin, Colby Itkowitz, Ed O’Keefe and Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.
'We Do Not Expect Any More Fatalities,' Doctor Says Of Fort Hood Victims
Sgt. First Class Erick Rodriguez stood guard
at the entrance to Fort Hood as officials prepared to brief the news
media about Wednesday's attack at the post.
"We do not expect any more fatalities at this point," Dr. Matthew Davis, head of the trauma unit at Scott & White Memorial Hospital in Temple, Texas, told reporters Thursday morning. Three of the nine victims being treated at the hospital remain in critical condition, but Davis said all three should survive. Scott & White is where those who still need care are being treated.
The day's other developments include word that the gunman, who authorities have identified as Army Spc. Ivan Lopez, was reportedly being treated for depression but had shown no sign he was likely to do harm to anyone or to himself.
There was also word Thursday that three of those who were injured remained in critical condition — but that doctors expect they will survive their wounds. Officials said the nine people being treated at Scott & White Memorial Hospital are all members of the military and range in age from 21 to the mid-40s. Eight of the nine are men. Several may be discharged later today.
The latest news and our original post, which has much more about the deadly rampage, follow:
Update at 11:50 a.m. ET. Three Victims Critical, But Are Expected To Recover:
Three of the nine patients at Scott & White Memorial Hospital in Temple, Texas, remain in critical condition, Dr. Matthew Davis just told reporters at the hospital. He's head of the hospital's trauma unit. But he added this hopeful note: "We do not expect any more fatalities at this point."
Of the others, two are in fair condition and the others are in good condition, Davis said. Several of them may be discharged later today.
Davis said eight of the patients are men. All nine are now members of the military, he said. Their ages range from "21 to the 40s." the news conference at the hospital.
The doctor also said that the three patients in critical condition have injuries to different parts of their body — one has "injuries to the neck," another has a "potential spine injury" from a gunshot wound and another has an abdominal injury.
Update at 10:45 a.m. ET. "Early Evidence: Fort Hood Gunman Showed No Warning Signs":
Update at 10 a.m. ET. "He Had A Clean Record":
The gunman "had a clean record" in the military and background checks of him "show no involvement with extremist organizations of any kind," at the top of a previously scheduled Senate hearing. McHugh also told the lawmakers that the soldier had been prescribed multiple prescription drugs, including a sleep aid.
Our original post began with some of the day's headlines and rounded up the news:
We'll start with some of the morning's headlines and links to accounts about what happened Wednesday:
— "Fort Hood Suffers Another Shooting Tragedy." ()
— "Shooting forces victims of 2009 attack to relive the tragedy." ()
— "Fort Hood shooting comes less than 5 years after attack." ()
— "Shootings frustrate U.S. military efforts to secure bases." ()
— "Texans' hearts are once again very heavy." ()
It was around 4 p.m. local time when the gunman reportedly opened fire in one building, got in a vehicle and fired more shots from it, then entered another building where he fired again. Officials say that at least one MP then confronted the gunman in a parking lot.
, NPR's Tom Bowman said early reports indicate that the MP "drew her weapon," and that the gunman then pulled a handgun from under his shirt and "placed the gun to his head and killed himself."
The local Killeen Daily Herald :
NPR's Bowman adds that Lopez served in Iraq in 2011 and that there is "no indication he was wounded in combat," but that the soldier had apparently "self-reported a traumatic brain injury.""III Corps and Fort Hood commander Lt. Gen. Mark Milley said the shooter used a .45-caliber Smith and Wesson handgun, which he'd purchased recently. Milley said the soldier, who arrived at Fort Hood in February from another military installation in Texas, suffered from depression anxiety and other mental heath issues and was in the process of getting a diagnosis for post-traumatic stress disorder.
"Fort Hood officials did not release the name of the gunman Wednesday night pending notification of next of kin, but a Bell County sheriff's deputy identified him as 34-year-old Spc. Ivan Lopez.
"About 9:30 p.m., Milley said there was no indication the shooting was related to terrorism, but the investigation would leave nothing 'off the table.'
" 'We are not ruling anything out at this time,' he said."
Our colleagues at KUT in Austin :
Wednesday brought back awful memories, of course. In November 2009, Army when he opened fire on the post. Hasan has been convicted and sentenced to death."The region's only Level 1 trauma center, the Scott and White Memorial Hospital in Temple, Texas, has absorbed several of the Fort Hood casualties. The hospital has issued the following statement:
" 'We have accepted 9 patients, 8 are currently here and 1 will be arriving shortly at Scott & White Memorial Hospital. We currently have 7 male patients and 1 female patient that we continue to monitor. All patients are in the ICU, 3 are critical condition and 5 are in serious condition.' "
Note: As often happens when stories such as this are breaking, details about what occurred will likely change. We'll focus on reports from officials in a position to know about the investigation and news outlets with reliable sources. We'll update as warranted.
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