He died the evening of September 2. ), On July 3, a fortnight after Wedel-Morales's body was found, Specialist Miguel Yazzie, 33, died at Fort Hood after his repeated requests to see a doctor were denied, according to Carma Johnson, whose brother died at Fort Hood. The next day, Wedel-Morales failed to show up for duty, and the day after that, he was classified as absent without leave, making him one of the thousand or so soldiers who go AWOL in any given year. The additional scrutinythe congressional delegation visit, press toursmeant that soldiers had to work harder. Back in Houston, Gloria recalled a conversation with her daughter not long before, when Guillen had been home for the weekend. That psychological trauma among veterans vastly exceeds physical wounds. Amid all those other deaths, on June 21, 2020, a search party found the charred lid of a cargo box along the Leon River 20 miles east of Fort Hood. Oct 29, 2021. In death, she is no longer a daughter or a sister or a partner. Failure to comply could incur fines of hundreds of dollars or other, more severe social censure. In fact, Casteel had been convinced that CIA agents were attacking him since last June. The deaths of Fort Hood soldiers have gained international attention in recent months after the slaying of Vanessa Guillen, a 20-year-old Army specialist the authorities say was killed on. He had then driven the body to the Leon River and had come back to pick Aguilar up from the gas station where she worked on Veterans Memorial Boulevard, five miles east of Fort Hood. Why was Robinson not put under watch? "From the age of 18, the only thing I knew how to do was kill people," Ring wrote on the website of his father's veterans' rights organization. At the Dollhouse, he got to know Penny Morales, a dancer and mother of two. Before Guillen, there had been Private LaVena Lynn Johnson, who was found dead in a tent in 2005 in Iraq. Eric Christopher Hogan and Pfc. Just before noon, Guillen left her keys, Army ID, and bank cards in one arms room and entered another adjacent arms room, separated by a hallway. Why was Robinson not put under watch? I've lost so much since I've been in. Also that year, Marine Lance Corporal Maria Lauterbach was raped by her superior, which she reported. "She is now for the movement.". That morning, Guillen had left her third-floor barracks and headed downstairs to her work station at the motor pool, a vast garage for military vehicles. Atop these sedimentary layers of desecration, displacement, and disorientation, the War Department set out to build a base that would go on to serve as a footnote to nearly every war in modern memoryKorea, Vietnam, Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, but also Grenada, Panama, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Garrison Policies and Regulations. There she encountered Specialist Aaron Robinson, also 20 years old but a rank above. 16 Apr 2021 Military.com | By Matthew Cox The Army 's People First Task Force on Friday unveiled sweeping actions underway to transform the service's sexual harassment and assault prevention. He died the evening of September 2. The wave of pain went away as suddenly as it had come on but returned again, and again, and again, over the next hour. Thomas Berg, whose son Private Brandon Rosecrans's Jeep was found burning in May, told me not to go out after dark. This was true of many I met at Fort Hood, including press officer Major Gabriela Thompson, my tour guide on base, who told me she joined to pay off her student loans: "It was my ticket out," she said, echoing other soldiers' sentiments about how the military had rescued them from hardscrabble existences. It is unclear if Killeen even bothered to visit his namesake town, which, by the early 1880s, comprised 40 people living across 360 acres, mostly working in the two cotton gins, two gristmills, and two saloonsit had the most saloons, gamblers, and shootings per capita in Bell County, according to historian Martha Bowmer. Five were murdered. Thirteen people were determined to have committed suicide. The soldiers said that Guillen's belongings had been found in the arms room, but otherwise she had left no trace. Guillen's superior confirmed she was missing. Joshua Diamond, 35, of Plymouth, Massachusetts, and Pfc. A soldier stationed at Fort Hood, Texas, was found dead over the weekend behind a barracks, according to local media reports, adding to the rash of deaths and disappearances of soldiers. Namely, the military. Atop these sedimentary layers of desecration, displacement, and disorientation, the War Department set out to build a base that would go on to serve as a footnote to nearly every war in modern memoryKorea, Vietnam, Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, but also Grenada, Panama, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Fort Hood might not even stand out were it not for a particularly bad year among many. "Is it possible Elder was murdered? Stump was going 82 mph in a 30-mph zone, the investigation report said, and had hit a tree on a mound. It was also an ancient Comanche Native American burial ground, discovered when construction workers unearthed more than 2,200 grave sites in 1998. (According to Killeen police, no such vests were found at the scene of the crash. As publication approached, it stopped responding to emails pertaining to both specific questions about individual cases as well as broader queries about the base.). Basic details of the incident kept changing. Fernandes wouldnt share much, nothing about what had caused him to be hospitalized, and said that he was using an insecure base hospital line. That most soldiers enlist when they are still teenagers, their yet-unformed minds taught to kill. The plan, Wedel-Morales told anyone who would listen, was to use the G.I. Staff Sergeant Devin Schuette was found dead in his pickup truck, fitted with a hose running from the exhaust pipe to the cabin, in January 2016. First came the British and Germans. May Jeong has written an in-depth analysis of the rash of unexplained deaths at Fort Hood. . Sergeant Brad Reynolds, 37, killed himself on May 16. On August 13, Staff Sergeant Bradley Moore died during a land navigation exercise on the base. I will tell you everything, he told his mother. What is behind the violence and tragedy at Fort Hood? He had messaged his sister beforehand to tell her something felt off. And how well will that look on your rsum?, Im 21 now, and let me tell you. Schuette's body was returned to his family "wrapped like a mummy." On Wednesday, April 22, 2020, Guillen reported for duty at Fort Hood. Since being stationed at Fort Hood in November 2016, Wedel-Morales had frequented the Dollhouse, a strip club not far from where his remains would eventually be found. (The Boley case remains unsolved.) Two days after Staff Sergeant Anthony Lovell, 40, disappeared in 2017, his body was found, eyes pecked clean, face split in half, in a creek off Killeens seedy main corridor called Rancier, the same street where Specialist Freddy Delacruz, 23, was shot and killed last March. Hockin was found dead behind his company barracks. CID and Homeland security believe the NVGs were stolen from shipping . She pleaded not guilty. The suicides, which reportedly jumped by as much as 20 percent across the military last year, work out to a rate of one soldier a month. These figures eclipse American casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq in the same year. Simply browse the Fort Hoods obituaries listing you can find on this page or conduct a search on the web site with your loved ones name. Most of the groups were aboveboard, even as they were ruled by certain strictures for meeting attendance, dress code, and how to appropriately signal respect. She had also missed her standing noon call with her fianc, Juan Cruz. Then they tried burning the body. Red White and Blue via The US Army is licensed with CC BY-ND 2.0. Thirteen killed themselves. Thirteen killed themselves. None of the grunts I spoke to was surprised by the number of casualties. In January 2017, Fox News cited reports to say the Army and local police were probing deaths of 11 Fort Hood soldiers who died on and off the base in the months before under mysterious circumstances, as per reports. None of the grunts I spoke to was surprised by the number of casualties. She has become that complicated, indelible thing: a hero. Terrie Boley, whose daughter Candance became addicted to crack cocaine while serving at Fort Hood and was murdered in a motel room in 2011, told me not to drink the water. He had been happy enough there that in February he reenlisted for an additional four years. Dozens of people were killed, died by suicide, or went missing from the Texas military base last year alone. When the family exhumed his body in November 2020 for want of a second opinion, the independent autopsy revealed that the bone had in fact gone missing.) On May 11, however, Fernandes reported to Fort Hood abusive sexual contact from a staff sergeant, whom he alleged groped him in a supply room, according to the redacted military investigation report. Here are some of the tragic deaths that have plagued the base in recent months: Pvt. It was unclear, in 2020, what American soldiers were fighting for. Bill to attend technical school in Houston to work on wind turbines or oil rigs off the coast of Louisiana. Amarillo - see the Potter County section below Arlington - see the Tarrant County section below "She doesn't belong to the Army anymore," AnaLuisa Tapia, a local organizer, told me. On March 5, 2020, Destanie Sawyer's five-year-old daughter found her father, Specialist Christopher Sawyer, 29, after he had shot himself dead in the bedroom of their Fort Hood housing. (Facebook) Two weeks later, Delacruz . Ozempic is also used by adults with type 2 diabetes who have heart and blood vessel disease to reduce their risk of a stroke, heart attack, or death . The pursuit of happiness, or simply stability, will invariably lure people to the American military, which may be why the undocumented, the indigent, or those with a criminal record are overrepresented in its ranks. Fort Hood informed Rodriguez that he had asked for this. He seemed weird, Rodriguez said. The brutal murders of four Idaho college students shocked millions. Maxwell Hockin. The suicides, which reportedly jumped by as much as 20 percent across the military last year, work out to a rate of one soldier a month. The tributaries that run through Fort Hood flow into the Leon River, where Guillen's remains were later found. On June 30, a construction crew found shallow graves containing human remains that belonged to Guillen. It was ruled a suicide until her father noticed her broken nose, black eye, loose teeth, and burns on her genitals. Who were the soldiers who had testified to seeing Guillen leave the arms room the day she disappeared? Schuettes body was returned to his family wrapped like a mummy. Later that year, Private Dakota Lee Stump left his barracks to report for work less than a mile away but never arrived for formation. His body was mostly intact but for his hyoid, which was never found. They pointed glumly to past cases, some of which there were public records for and others I could find no traces of in the official files. Later came Koreans, Japanese, and Vietnamese, who still run sushi and pho restaurants in Killeen. Ad Choices. Not long after Fort Hood opened, soldiers began bringing home souvenirs in the form of war brides. In the same week, Private Edward Casteel, who had been missing from Fort Hood since October 6, was found in a parish jail in Louisiana, arrested after a high-speed chase. (On July 14, 2020, a federal grand injury indicted Aguilar on one count of conspiracy and two counts of tampering with evidence. Fort Hood had refused to list him as missing, and it was only after his then fiance, Paradise Rodriguez, posted a video on Facebook that an officer at the parish jail saw it and got into contact. The small Texas frontier town was also a hotbed of Klan activity, according to Texas historian Gene Preuss of the University of Houston, so much so that when trains stopped in Killeen, Black passengersrelegated to colored carsknew to pull down their window shades to avoid a pelting with rocks by locals. Fernandes had just been stationed at Fort Hood in January. And being mission-ready, the perpetual vigilance it requires, ensures a kind of endless possibility of war, which in turn justifies the $740 billion annual defense budget. Fifty six . And so his disappearance was no surprise, his father told me. "Give me the name and I will report the bastard," Gloria told her daughter, who refused to tell her mother more for fear of worrying her, and also, Gloria later suspected, for fear of reprisal. Eleven of the deaths remain unresolvedsome legally; others for the victims families. (Fort Hood does not count Moore in its official casualty list, as he was a member of the National Guard.). Toxic leadership is nothing new. THE GREAT PLACE. After a chase along Rancier Avenue, the same street near which Lovell was found dead, Robinson shot himself and died. Casteel had told Rodriguez "he was getting away from the abuse.". (According to Killeen police, no such vests were found at the scene of the crash. Eleven of the deaths remain unresolvedsome legally; others for the victims' families. Fernandes transferred to another unit where he was called a snitch and worse. Chris and Moses friends of Gregory Wedel-Morales at the site of his remains, Killeen TX. July 2, 2022 (86 years old) View obituary Chong Thigpen November 12, 2021 (66 years old) View obituary Jaylen Tristian Bush April 3, 2021 View obituary Cecil Earl Garrison February 21, 2021 (87 years old) View obituary Daniel John Hunt January 29, 2021 (79 years old) View obituary Aage John Hoffman January 26, 2021 (86 years old) View obituary Hoover, Alabama. That gun safety is a distant concern in a community where the Second Amendment tops the Maslow charts. Linda Schweers, whose specialist son, Justin, died in a car crash in June while suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, wanted me to "be careful of cartels," which she said ran the area. 2023 Cond Nast. The 20-year-old small arms specialist, then a private first class, was supposed to be off that day, so she showed up in civilian clothesblack tee, purple leggings, and a fanny pack. Many complained specifically of being made to cut grass to ready for such official visits. Highway renamed & dedicated to late Fort Hood soldier . Frantic, she called around, to no avail. She filled out the paperwork that is the lifeblood of the Army before heading toward the arms room, a few paces away. Driving into Killeen last fall, what greeted me was a deer, roadkill, that had been severed in half, Next I passed Club Dreams, where Specialist Shelby Jones was shot, bled out, and died last March; then Guns Galore, where Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Hasan purchased a semiautomatic pistol that he would use to kill 13 people in 2009. You can find Osama bin Laden, but you cant find a soldier that went missing on your own base? Guillens youngest sister, Lupe, says. III Corps Inspector General. And on June 19, skeletal remains were found in a field behind a cul-de-sac of a residential neighborhood in Killeen. Vanity Fair may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. Last year, at least 39 Fort Hood soldiers vanished or died, including 13. So when, the following spring, Fort Hood offered a $15,000 reward for information about Guillen, then raised it to $25,000 in June, Kim called to demand the same. When Ailina contacted the military police at Fort Hood, they told her that Fernandes was an adult, and that if he was missing, he likely didn't want to be found. One of the first times she stepped onto the base, a rosary she had been carrying in the palm of her hand tore apart, its beads scattering over the concrete ground. All rights reserved. After 8 p.m., Guillen's sister Mayra called the base. First it was a five-mile run, then it was a two-mile run.
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