The man at Fort Hood who killed three and wounded 16 of his fellow soldiers last week had requested leave shortly before the shooting rampage.
After a meeting where he had requested a leave to attend to personal matters, he was clearly agitated and disrespectful when his request was denied, reports the New York Times:
Fort Hood officials and a spokesman for Army investigators declined to comment on Friday about the meeting and its role in the shooting, but they confirmed in an afternoon news conference that the specialist,[] became angry with soldiers from his unit before the attack. Two of those he killed were in his unit, a transportation battalion of the 13th Sustainment Command. Officials stressed that they had still not established a clear motive.
But in an interview with a local Mississippi television station, Theodis Westbrook, of Smithdale, Miss., the father of Sgt. Jonathan Westbrook, who was wounded in the attack, said he was told that a soldier came to Fort Hood’s personnel office, where Sergeant Westbrook worked, to get a leave form. When one of the soldiers told the man to come back the next day to pick that form up, the man left, then returned with a gun and opened fire.
Lt. Gen. Mark A. Milley has acknowledged that the attacker was taking psychiatric medication before the shooting. Infowars reports:
“Was he on any sort of medications….SSRI’s, anti-depressants, anything of that nature,” an Infowars reporter asked Milley, to which the General responded, “He was on medications that’s correct.”
In a subsequent report, officials also admitted that Lopez had been prescribed Ambien, a sleeping pill associated with accidents and aggressive outbursts.
[…]
As the website ,SSRI Stories profusely documents, there are literally hundreds of examples of mass shootings, murders and other violent episodes that have been committed by individuals on psychiatric drugs over the past three decades. The number of cases is staggering, but the media has completely failed to generate a national conversation about the issue due to its obsession with exploiting mass shootings to demonize the second amendment.
A $65 million study produced three research papers which were published by The Journal of the American Medical Association Psychiatry. The study found that suicide rates for soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan more than doubled from 2004 to 2009 to more than 30-per-100,000, the trend among those who never deployed nearly tripled to between 25- and 30-per-100,000. USA Today reports:
Suicide rates soared among soldiers who went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan and those who never left the United States, according to the largest study ever conducted on suicide in the military.
[…]
The research tracked soldier records through the end of 2009. But suicides in the Army continued to rise thereafter, reaching a record high in 2012 before dipping last year.
Compiled by Alternative Free Press
Ft. Hood Shooter Was On Psychiatric Drugs & Was Denied Leave On Day Of Attack by AlternativeFreePress.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Alternative Free Press – fair use –