Afghanistan suspect's base had 2010 killing case

JOINT BASE LEWIS-McCHORD, Wash. (AP) ? A soldier suspected of killing 16 Afghan villagers Sunday comes from Joint Base Lewis-McChord, one of the largest military installations in the U.S. ? and one that has seen its share of controversies and violence in the past few years.

The base, home to about 100,000 military and civilian personnel, has suffered a spate of suicides among soldiers back from war. A former soldier shot and injured a Salt Lake City police officer in 2010, and on Jan. 1 a 24-year-old Iraq War veteran shot and killed a Mount Rainier National Park ranger before succumbing to the cold and drowning in a creek.

Most famously, four Lewis-McChord soldiers were convicted in the deliberate thrill killings of three Afghan civilians in 2010.

The military newspaper Stars and Stripes called it "the most troubled base in the military" that year.

Catherine Caruso, a spokeswoman for Lewis-McChord, said she could not comment on reports that the soldier involved in Sunday's shooting was based there. A U.S. official speaking on the condition of anonymity told The Associated Press that the shooter was a conventional soldier assigned to support a special operations unit of either Green Berets or Navy SEALs engaged in a village stability operation.

It wasn't immediately clear if the soldier was with Lewis-McChord's 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, which sent about 2,500 soldiers to Afghanistan in December for a yearlong deployment. The brigade had deployed to Iraq three times since 2003; this is its first deployment to Afghanistan.

Lewis-McChord, a sprawling complex of red brick buildings, training fields and forests, is about 45 miles south of Seattle and has grown quickly since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. Officials there have said that any community the size of the base is bound to have its problems, and its reputation has been tarred by "a small number of highly visible but isolated episodes" that don't accurately reflect the remarkable accomplishments of its service members, including their work overseas and the creation of new programs to support returning soldiers.

The controversies have indeed been highly visible.

In 2010, a dozen soldiers from the base were arrested on a slew of charges that ranged from using drugs, beating up a whistleblower in the unit, and deliberately killing three Afghan civilians during patrols in Kandahar Province. Four were convicted in the killings.

After the first killing, the father of one of the soldiers called Lewis-McChord to report it ? and to say that more killings were planned. The staff sergeant who took the call didn't report it to anyone else, saying he didn't have the authority to begin an investigation in a war zone. By the time the suspects were arrested months later, two more civilians were dead.

Army Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs, of Billings, Mont., the highest ranking defendant, was sentenced to life in prison. At his seven-day court martial at Lewis-McChord, Gibbs acknowledged cutting fingers off corpses and yanking out a victim's tooth to keep as war trophies, "like keeping the antlers off a deer you'd shoot."

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Johnson reported from Seattle

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/afghanistan-suspects-had-2010-killing-case-004426173.html

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