Few GIs tried to stop Fort Hood shooter
By Sig Christenson and Scott Huddleston- Express-News
Web Posted: 11/05/2010 12:00 AM CDT
FORT HOOD — Like everyone in the first moments of the mass shooting here one year ago today, Chief Warrant Officer 2 Christopher Royal was stunned beyond belief.
Many of those sitting in rows of fold-out chairs at Station 13 were war veterans, but only a few like Royal fought back as the shooting ensued. They went into survival mode as the gunman methodically fired into the crowd.
Talking with a counselor near the crowded waiting area of the post deployment center, Royal heard gunfire and told a shaken worker it was an exercise.
“Shortly after that, two soldiers, one male and one female, ran into the same cubicle that I was sitting in,” Royal testified during an evidentiary hearing for Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, a psychiatrist charged with killing 13 people and wounding dozens more. “They asked me to help them at that time. Things were going so fast.
“I saw two soldiers low crawling, bleeding from their chest,” he said, adding that he, too, got on all fours. “I tried to calm myself down.”
Some in this room had survived bitter fights in Iraq and Afghanistan but, wounded and pinned down, tried to avoid drawing attention. Royal, a 20-year combat medic, was one of a handful who confronted Hasan, 40, before two Department of the Army police officers exchanged fire with him.
Testimony from 56 prosecution witnesses in a recent evidentiary hearing underscored the surreal nature of that day.
No one imagined this kind of battle. The shooting was on home ground, Fort Hood, where car accidents were considered the greatest threat to veterans returning from war.
What made the episode even more bizarre was that the man accused of the shooting in the deployment center was one of them — a fellow soldier, an officer and physician. Many hid behind chairs, desks and dividers. Spc. Megan Martin played dead. Others did as well.
“I laid as still as I possibly could because he was shooting at everything that moved,” Martin recalled.
As the troops and civilian workers took cover or tried not to draw attention, physician's assistant Michael Cahill emerged from a cubicle carrying a chair high over his head.
“Maj. Hasan at that time turned his weapon on Doc Cahill,” said Sgt. Alonzo Lunsford, a combat medic who would be blinded in one eye in the attack.
Cahill was shot dead.
A veteran of the California National Guard and the Navy, Army Reserve Capt. John Gaffaney went back on duty after 9-11 and was a psychiatric nurse headed for Iraq. It was his second day on Fort Hood.
“Capt. Gaffaney got up and charged the shooter, but he wasn't fast enough and he got shot at close range,” Martin said.
Army Reserve Spc. Logan Burnett, who is posted to Fort Sam Houston, said he saw an empty magazine hit the floor. Thinking this was his moment to act, he reached for a chair.
“I tried to throw it toward the shooter,” he said.
Shot in the hip, Burnett fell and crawled to a cubicle.
At the Article 32 hearing, which will resume Nov. 15, Sgt. 1st Class Maria Guerra, the noncommissioned officer in charge of the center's medical processing department, said she “was thinking whether I could rush him, or not rush him. I was too far.”
Maj. Steven Richter, the officer in charge of the center, said he also thought of charging the gunman after he began firing outside the building. But he never got close enough.
Richter said the gunman trained the red laser of his 5.7 mm handgun on him just before civilian police officer Kimberly Munley fired.
Richter ducked behind a car, and the gunman turned and shot Munley. Seconds later, Sgt. Mark Todd shot Hasan four times, leaving him paralyzed from the chest down and in a wheelchair.
Royal's transformation from hunted to hunter began when he got out of a four-point stance in the cubicle and made his move.
His timing was lousy.
“As I got up on my feet, he reloaded his weapon. He cleared the magazine from his weapon, stuck his hand into his right cargo pocket and jammed another clip,” Royal recalled. “I knew that I had to get out of the building. Because of the training I have been fortunate to have ... I knew I had to get out of that building.”
He escaped without incident, but stopped halfway into the parking lot and made a snap decision. Royal eyed the door he'd just escaped from. If the gunman opened it, he would be there and pounce.
Out of nowhere, Royal said the badly wounded Lunsford, a towering figure at 6 feet, 9 inches who was shot five times, knocked open the door and ran to the parking lot. The gunman emerged, took aim and fired. Lunsford went down.
A minute later, Royal got Lunsford's attention.
“I told him to just lay there and basically play like you're dead, and the shooter I think at that time went into the building,” Royal said. “I tried to make my way to the corner of the building to leave some kind of element of surprise, and as I'm going to the building, he comes adjacent to the other side and sees me again and he starts firing at me.”
On the defensive, Royal scrambled to a sport utility vehicle and hugged a rear tire. The gunman fired at him relentlessly, slugs ripping through the SUV.
“I felt something jump me in the back, but I wasn't sure what it was,” Royal said.
It was a bullet.
Linear Mode
