Ex-soldier in Mount Rainier killing stationed at deeply troubled base
The body of Iraq war veteran Benjamin Colton Barnes, 24, was found at Mount Rainier National Park, Wash. NBC's Kristen Dahlgren reports.
Updated at 8:50 p.m. ET: Brandon Friedman, an Army combat veteran in Afghanistan and Iraq and author of the highly regarded memoir "The War I Always Wanted," warned against linking post-traumatic stress disorder or conditions at Joint Base Lewis-McChord to Barnes' alleged behavior.There's "obviously no question of a tie between combat and PTSD," Friedman said in a Twitter message to msnbc.com. "But having PTSD doesn't signify a propensity to murder Americans."
Mount Rainier National Park remains closed until at least Saturday, park officials said.
Barnes was from Riverside County, Calif., and as a teenager attended a community day school for expelled and troubled students, the Press-Enterprise newspaper reported. A young man who answered the door at the family's home said the family had no comment, the paper said.
Original post: The Iraq war veteran believed to have killed a park ranger Sunday was last stationed at a Washington base considered among the military's most troubled facilities, where suicides and violence among service members have reached record levels.
Authorities said they believed Benjamin Colton Barnes, 24 — who was found dead Monday, apparently of hypothermia, in Mount Rainier National Park — shot and killed Park Ranger Margaret Anderson, 34, on Sunday. He is also believed to have shot and wounded four people, two of them critically, earlier in the day at a New Year's party in Skyway, near Seattle, authorities said.
Barnes, a private first class, was discharged from the Army for misconduct in 2009 after he was charged with drunken driving and improperly transporting a privately owned weapon at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Wash. Lewis-McChord has drawn national attention for widespread problems with post-traumatic stress disorder among service members returning from Afghanistan and from Iraq, where Barnes served in 2007 and 2008.
In July, the mother of Barnes' young daughter said in court papers seeking a protection order that he "has possible PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) issues," NBC station KING of Seattle reported. In seeking sole custody of the girl, she said Barnes was suicidal and "gets easily irritated, angry, depressed and frustrated."
The woman said Barnes had numerous weapons in his home, including firearms and knives, adding: "I am fearful of what Benjamin is capable of with the small arsenal he has in his home and his recent threat of suicide."
A year ago, the military newspaper Star and Stripes rated Lewis-McChord as the most troubled base in the entire U.S. military, with multiple criminal and military investigations under way into troops' behavior and the quality of the medical and mental health care for service members returning from the war.
dog gone:
ReplyDeleteIt's impossible to know without access to their service records but one has to wonder how many of the service members who have killed others or themselves at Lewis-McChord and elsewhere were recruited by the military without a lot of regard for their school or police records.
That same question might be asked about the troops who went on rampages in combat zones, against non-combatants or who abused or tortured prisoners in their care.
Improper background checks or no checks at all got a lot of people into BDU's in the last 10 or 12 years.