New York Times – by MANNY FERNANDEZ, ERIC SCHMITT and SERGE F. KOVALESKI
KILLEEN, Tex. — The Army specialist at Fort Hood who killed or wounded 19 of his fellow soldiers on Wednesday had a dispute with his superiors over their denial of a leave request shortly before the shooting rampage, a law enforcement official said Friday.
The law enforcement official said Specialist Ivan Antonio Lopez met with Fort Hood officials about the denial on Wednesday shortly before the shooting started and had been clearly agitated and disrespectful after the meeting. It was unclear why he wanted to take time off, but it appeared to involve his family.
The detail emerges as the family of Specialist Lopez, 34, released a statement, in Spanish, on Friday afternoon saying that mental illness must have played a role in his son’s decision to open fire with a .45-caliber handgun, killing three people and wounding 16 others.
On Thursday, Fort Hood’s commanding general, Lt. Gen. Mark A. Milley, said that although no clear motive had emerged, the underlying factor in the shooting appeared to be the troubled mental state of Specialist Lopez, who was being treated for depression and was being evaluated for post-traumatic stress disorder.
In the family statement on Friday in Spanish, the father, also named Ivan, said that the death of Specialist Lopez’s mother and grandfather along with his transfer to Fort Hood had surely affected his condition. “My son could not have been in his right mind. This is not who he was,” the father said in a statement signed by the family.
Specialist Lopez, who had served in Iraq in 2011, was part of a transportation battalion and had recently arrived on base after being transferred from Fort Bliss in El Paso.
On March 1, the same day he bought the semiautomatic pistol used in the shootings, Specialist Lopez wrote in Spanish on his Facebook page: “My spiritual peace has all gone away, I am full of hate, I believe now the devil is taking me. I was robbed last night and I’m sure it was two flacos” — a Spanish term for a skinny person, which is sometimes used to describe people who are skinny from drug use — “Green light and thumbs down. It’s that easy.”
“Flaco” has several uses and can be used as a term of familiarity, much as one American might refer to another as “dude.” The online Urban Dictionary says that “green light” often refers to a hit put out on members of a rival gang.
The post leaves several unanswered questions: Was Specialist Lopez actually robbed, or was he talking about being robbed in a figurative sense? Did he mean to imply they were drug users, or did “flaco” have another meaning for him?
On Wednesday, Gov. Rick Perry, Senator Ted Cruz and other Texas lawmakers visited wounded troops and Army officials at Fort Hood on Friday. Senator Cruz said he and Mr. Perry met one of those two soldiers who first called 911 at the Fort Hood medical center on Friday, describing him as a “young soldier who with a bullet wound in his abdomen stepped forward to save other soldiers and called 911, to help prevent even further loss of life.”
For the second time in nearly five years, Fort Hood has been reeling from a mass shooting, one that unfolded in eerily similar ways to the first. When Specialist Lopez opened fire on Wednesday, he did so in Army uniform after sneaking a high-powered handgun onto the base, just as Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan did in November 2009. Specialist Lopez bought his gun at the same shop near the base where Major Hasan bought his weapon. Each shooting started in a medical support area for troops, and each ended when the gunman confronted a female police officer rushing to the scene.
There was also a fundamental difference: Officials say there is no indication that Specialist Lopez was inspired by Islamic extremism, as Major Hasan was.
But the replay of a mass shooting at Fort Hood, particularly coming on the heels of the shooting in September that left 12 people dead at the Washington Navy Yard, raised questions about what lessons Army officials had learned from the 2009 rampage; how effectively military installations can keep out unauthorized guns; and how prepared they are to deal with threats from within, including from soldiers or contractors intent on doing harm to others on the base.
At Fort Hood, which sprawls for 340 square miles over the Texas prairie, Specialist Lopez would have undergone no security screening beyond showing his identification to enter the base and would have passed through no metal detectors.
Military personnel who are not police officers are not allowed to carry privately owned weapons on Army bases, concealed or otherwise, but they are permitted in some cases to transport and store them on base. Soldiers on post at Fort Hood must register their firearms, which Army officials said Specialist Lopez failed to do with the handgun he used in the attack. Fort Hood’s rules rely in large part on the honor system, and require all personnel bringing a privately owned firearm onto the base in a vehicle to declare that they are doing so and state why.
“Fort Hood is a big installation,” General Milley told reporters on Thursday. “We’ve got a population well over 100,000 here. It would not be realistic to do a pat-down search on every single soldier and employee on Fort Hood for a weapon on a daily basis.”
Those who work at the base or visit it agreed that it was not feasible for a post like Fort Hood to check thoroughly for guns. Fred Burton, a former counterterrorism agent at the State Department who is now a security analyst for an international intelligence firm, Stratfor, said he had visited the base the day before the shooting to do research for a book he is writing. “Nobody at the main entrance was asking me if I had a gun, and nobody was checking,” he said.
Around 4 p.m. on Wednesday, Specialist Lopez started firing on soldiers in the area of the First Medical Brigade. Two soldiers wounded in the shooting made the first call to 911 at 4:16 p.m. A chaplain shielded soldiers and broke the window of a building to get them to safety.
A military police officer arrived four minutes after the 911 call, officials said. Specialist Lopez approached her and put his hands up, but then pulled out his weapon. She fired her weapon, and he placed his gun to his head and fired, officials said. He died of the self-inflicted gunshot wound.
General Milley did not release the officer’s name, but commended her heroism. Her role echoed that of Sgt. Kimberly D. Munley, a member of Fort Hood’s civilian police force, who waged a gun battle with Major Hasan in 2009 that helped end the rampage.
Four of the 16 people injured on Wednesday remained at Scott & White Memorial Hospital on Friday morning, but the hospital said one patient would probably be released later in the day. A few victims remained at the Fort Hood medical center, but many of the 16 who were wounded have been released.
Physicians at the Scott & White hospital upgraded the three patients with the worst injuries to “serious” condition, and the chief trauma surgeon at Scott & White said the death toll was unlikely to rise. Nine people – eight men and one woman – were admitted on Wednesday to the hospital in Temple, east of Fort Hood, where they were all held in the intensive care unit because of security concerns.
The secretary of the Army, John M. McHugh, said at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Thursday that Specialist Lopez had been examined by a psychiatrist in the last month but had shown no signs that he might commit a violent act. “The plan forward was just to continue to monitor and treat him as deemed appropriate,” Mr. McHugh said.
In response to the 2009 attack, Army and Pentagon officials reviewed deficiencies in the procedures for identifying service members who might be a threat, assessed the military’s mental health programs, and examined how the Defense Department responds to “mass casualty” events at its facilities.
Their report recommended that the department devote the same energy to protecting its personnel from internal threats as it does to protecting them from external dangers; develop guidance and awareness programs so that commanders can better identify risky behavior within the ranks; share information about potential internal threats across the military bureaucracy; and develop more sophisticated and agile responses to emergencies like the shooting at Fort Hood.
The Navy Yard shooting led to a second review of military facilities, including security clearances for access.
Just two weeks ago, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced new security measures at United States military installations in light of a review that, he said, found “troubling gaps” in the Defense Department’s ability to protect service members and employees from threats from within. As the former defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, did in 2010, Mr. Hagel promised new measures to ensure that people working on military bases do not pose a danger to their colleagues.
On Thursday in Honolulu, Mr. Hagel struggled to address why those security measures either had not been put in place or had not been effective. “Obviously, something went wrong,” he said. “Anytime we lose an individual, something’s gone wrong.”
The independent review two weeks ago that examined the Navy Yard shooting called the overall security process at military installations outdated, saying it focused too much on keeping a secure perimeter against outside threats and not enough on potential threats from people granted security clearances. The review recommended that the Pentagon examine the number of people with clearances and consider revoking at least 10 percent.
A Pentagon official said on Thursday that the recommendations had not yet been put into effect at Fort Hood. There, very little had changed from 2009 regarding security procedures for soldiers at the entrance gates.
Specialist Lopez was living in an apartment off the base with his wife and child. He had other children from a previous marriage. Investigators have interviewed his wife lashed out violently. “The wife told investigators that she was surprised and saw no clues coming into this,” a senior law enforcement official said.
After the 2009 shooting, Army officials conducted a widespread evaluation of Fort Hood’s security protocols, as well as its mental health system for soldiers.
Dr. Stephen N. Xenakis, a brigadier general who is now retired from the Army, went to Fort Hood as part of a crisis team in 2009. At that time, he said, the base had high rates of suicide and domestic violence, deaths from motor vehicle accidents involving alcohol, and other problems.
“It was a stressful environment,” he said, adding that the size of the base was a factor, with thousands of young men and women coming and going, many of them heading for or returning from difficult deployments.
General Milley said the Army was looking into whether Specialist Lopez had received all of the mental health treatment he needed or whether there were gaps in the system he had fallen into. “He was under treatment,” he said, “so he was in the system and he was being looked at.”
Wonders who writes these fables?