Bloomberg News
Published: August 2, 2012
Sergeant John Russell lay awake, wondering what his wife would do if he killed himself.
He was so messed up that his first lieutenant removed the firing pin from his M16 assault rifle. Six weeks from the end of his fifth combat-zone tour, and five years from retiring on a 20-year Army pension, he suspected he wouldn’t see any of it.
Before dawn, shaking and stuttering, Russell walked through the still desert outside Baghdad to the quarters of Captain Peter Keough, the 54th Engineer Battalion’s chaplain. Keough listened, and hastily made the sergeant’s fourth appointment in four days at an Army mental-health clinic.
“I believe he is deteriorating,” Keough e-mailed an Army psychiatrist. “He doesn’t trust anyone.” Russell, the chaplain wrote, “believes he is better off dead.”
It was 10:07 a.m. on May 11, 2009. The battalion, military police and combat stress specialists had three hours and 34 minutes to avert tragedy. Instead, after lost opportunities and miscalculations, the blue-eyed sergeant from Texas used a stolen gun to kill three enlisted men and two officers in the deadliest case of soldier-on-soldier violence in the war zone. His victims’ bodies are buried across the U.S., from Arlington National Cemetery to the Texas panhandle.
Russell slipped through the safety net constructed to catch troubled soldiers. More and more are falling. The armed services’ mental-health epidemic has deepened since the Camp Liberty killings. In June, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta ordered a Pentagon review of every diagnosis from 2001 on.
Court Martial
“The military and the nation were not prepared for the mental-health needs from being in combat for more than a decade,” said retired Colonel Elspeth Ritchie, the top psychiatric official in the Army’s Office of the Surgeon General from 2005 to 2010, in an interview. “We now confront ourselves with a mental-health crisis that is a legacy of war.”
Prosecutors paint the 6-foot, 4-inch (1.9-meter) Russell as a cold-blooded killer, cunning enough to slip through a back door into a mental-health clinic where he mowed down unarmed men. His lawyers contend that he’s not guilty by reason of insanity, undone by repeat deployments and misdiagnosed in that same clinic.
His hands and feet shackled, Russell said in an interview that he doesn’t remember much about that day three years ago. He’s awaiting court martial at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in the shadow of Mount Rainier in Washington.
Military Life
The Army decided May 15 to seek the death penalty on five counts of premeditated murder, overruling the recommendation at a pre-trial hearing that Russell’s “undisputed mental disease or defect” made that punishment inappropriate.
“It scares me,” Russell said.
Prosecutors declined to comment. This account is based on thousands of pages of Army records, civilian documents obtained with public records requests and more than two dozen interviews.......
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