On this day in 2009, 13 people are killed and more than 30 others are
wounded, nearly all of them unarmed soldiers, when a U.S. Army officer
goes on a shooting rampage at Fort Hood in central Texas.
The deadly assault, carried out by Major Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army
psychiatrist, was the worst mass murder at a U.S. military installation.
Early
in the afternoon of November 5, 39-year-old Hasan, armed with a
semi-automatic pistol, shouted “Allahu Akbar” (Arabic for “God is
great”) and then opened fire at a crowd inside a Fort Hood processing
center where soldiers who were about to be deployed overseas or were
returning from deployment received medical screenings. The massacre,
which left 12 service members and one Department of Defense employee
dead, lasted approximately 10 minutes before Hasan was shot by civilian
police and taken into custody.
The Virginia-born Hasan, the son of Palestinian immigrants who ran a Roanoke restaurant and convenience store, graduated from Virginia Tech University and completed his psychiatry training at the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland, in 2003. He went on to work at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington,
D.C., treating soldiers returning from war with post-traumatic stress
disorder. In May 2009, he was promoted to the rank of major in the Army,
and that July, was transferred to Fort Hood. Located near the city of
Killeen, Fort Hood, which includes 340 square miles of facilities and
homes, is the largest active-duty U.S. military post. At the time of the
shootings, more than 50,000 military personnel lived and worked there,
along with thousands more family members and civilian personnel.ADVERTISEMENT
In the aftermath of the massacre, reviews by the Pentagon and a U.S. Senate
panel found Hasan’s superiors had continued to promote him despite the
fact that concerns had been raised over his behavior, which suggested he
had become a radical and potentially violent Islamic extremist. Among
other things, Hasan stated publicly that America’s war on terrorism was
really a war against Islam.