So I just got a phone call from a friend. Apparently another friend of ours sister and infant child were just shot dead by her husband a day or two ago. We both went to high school with the guy who was in the army and killed them both, then failed at killing himself. To add insult to injury, they were in Alaska and her family is in Florida and the army isn’t paying to have her body shipped back down.
How can you seriously look at your 8 month old infant daughter and shoot her? For fucks sake…
was the guy this crazy in high school??
Too bad he failed at killing himself.
I hear they don’t take too kindly to guys like him in prison.
Tragic.
Was he a veteran?
Shit like this is (sadly) common place in the military.
The fucker will wish he was dead before too long.
He was active duty army. Got back from afgan in Feb apparently but was military police. I’m not saying he didn’t see combat, but I doubt it. And he wasn’t exactly “right” in high school, didn’t talk to many people, probably being emo that he was born into a middle class white family, how hard it was for him. I know what they do to people in the Marine Corps prisons, I can only hope the army is just as bad with this sack of shit.
On a tangent, I truly hope this incident will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back on that the military isn’t properly treating soldiers and marines who have been deployed to get back here. I don’t think they are properly preparing them mentally to go over in the first place though…
I hope the fucker gets everything he deserves. I’m sorry for the family that he destroyed. PTSD is fairly common IME these days, but there’s no excuse not to get treated for it if it is affecting your life. Another thing is that if someone is in fact “off” and they are put in a new, stressful environment, even if they never see someone die or kill someone that can be the catalyst to give them that nudge off the edge.
As to your tangent, I’m not sure how well they can prepare soldiers for what they might experience over there. I mean, if you’re combat MOS then you’ll probably do some form of live fire exercise where rounds are going over your head and obviously you’ll be using weapons a lot, but the best idea of what it’s like comes from your fellow soldiers who have already been over there and been in the shit. The problem is that you’ll listen to all of thier stories, think you know what it’s going to be like, and still be mind fucked by it when it happens.
I believe that the army at least is doing a better job of post deployment health treatment. Really, I think that the only way to cut down the numbers we’re seeing is to institute psych tests…at least for those who are in combat MOS’s. Nothing is worse than getting over there and some fucker who hardly ever leaves the wire finds out his gf is banging his best friend and suddenly he’s got “combat stress” and needs to be driven several clicks away to see a dr. a few times a week putting everyone around him at risk. Psych screenings might alleviate that a little bit.
But to come back to the post…that is tragic and I’m sorry to hear that happened.
I’m not sure coward is the right word. I mean he wasn’t affraid or anything.
The military in general has been putting a lot of effort to ease personnel back into life following a deployment. Last time I got back we had to go through no fewer than four “Don’t kill your wife” classes, sad to see that this chump needed more than that. The Army might do some heinous things sometimes, but this schmuck was the one who pulled the trigger, not the Army; and I can tell you for a fact this is going to be dissected with a fine toothed comb by many levels of his command on how the hell this happened. Guy should have shot himself first.
[quote]Stength4life wrote:
I’m not sure coward is the right word. I mean he wasn’t affraid or anything.[/quote]
Yeah. It sounds more like he was profoundly mentally disturbed. You have to be in order to take the life of your own child.
I very rarely feel compelled to say anything on these forums; I get enough pleasure from just readingâ?¦… I was in the Marine Corps for 4 years, 2 deployments and saw lots of combat. I can assure that the military is not responsible for this guyâ??s behavior. There is an unlimited amount of help for someone suffering from PTSD, this guy was messed up before he joined and is going to use the deployments as an excuse. The main reason why I got out of the Marines is because of the people I had to work with, donâ??t get me wrong there are tons of great guys, but there are also lots of fuck ups. Again there is so much that the military is doing to prevent this stuff, its just that the range of people they let in is VERY wide.
Its gotten to the point where I do not tell people that I am a combat veteran (which I am very proud of) because everyone assumes that anyone who as seen combat has PTSD and is going to snap at anytime. For me this couldnâ??t be any further from the truth, the deployments had a positive effect on my life, overall.
Wow. Interesting responses. This ‘fucker’ already wishes he was dead, that much should be blindingly obvious to the most dim witted among you. I’m not downplaying how despicable this situation is, but he was fucked over the moment he signed up to serve.
What kind of psych profiling does the US army have for new recruits? Seems to me it should be more stringent.
[quote]Makavali wrote:
Wow. Interesting responses. This ‘fucker’ already wishes he was dead, that much should be blindingly obvious to the most dim witted among you. I’m not downplaying how despicable this situation is, but he was fucked over the moment he signed up to serve.
What kind of psych profiling does the US army have for new recruits? Seems to me it should be more stringent.[/quote]
I guess that was directed towards me…How exactly was he “fucked” the moment he signed up?
[quote]Makavali wrote:
Wow. Interesting responses. This ‘fucker’ already wishes he was dead, that much should be blindingly obvious to the most dim witted among you. I’m not downplaying how despicable this situation is, but he was fucked over the moment he signed up to serve.
What kind of psych profiling does the US army have for new recruits? Seems to me it should be more stringent.[/quote]
I don’t really care that he wishes he was dead…doesn’t change what he did. I don’t know him from Adam obviously so I can’t speak to whether or not he had PTSD or had mental issues his whole life and was a ticking time bomb. I don’t believe anyone is ever fucked over enough to justify murdering their family though.
The army does zero profiling which is one thing that I think should change. I remember when I first enlisted that I was really surprised by the level of people entering with me. Bear in mind that an 11B MOS (infantry) requires some of the lowest test scores to get in. I know there are quite a few like me that scored high enough to do any job in the army, but chose infantry, but there are a lot of people whose cognitive skills are in the gutter that wind up with a weapon in thier hands because they can’t score high enough to do anything else.
Having said that, when I went through, basic/ait and home station all did a good job of weeding out the trash. It’s tough for anyone outside of the service (and in particular combat MOS positions that see combat) to understand or comment on though.