Top Stories - Google News
Officials Never Learned of Police Doubts on Gunman's Stability - New York Times
Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
A makeshift memorial outside the Washington Navy Yard on Wednesday, two days after a gunman shot 12 people to death there.
WASHINGTON — Naval police in Rhode Island did not alert superiors in Washington to evidence pointing to the mental instability of the former Navy reservist who the police say killed 12 people at a Washington Navy base, Pentagon officials said.
The police in Rhode Island who interviewed the man, Aaron Alexis, on Aug. 7 were concerned enough by his claims to be hearing voices sent by a “microwave machine” that they faxed their report to the naval police in Newport, where Mr. Alexis was working temporarily as a contractor. But the Newport police did not take further action because they did not consider Mr. Alexis dangerous.
“He’s just hearing voices,” said Lt. William Fitzgerald, a spokesman for the department. “We can’t arrest someone for that.”
The report was logged by security personnel at the naval station, but never made it into the hands of Pentagon officials who could have reassessed Mr. Alexis’s security clearance to enter the Washington Navy Yard, where the police say he opened fire on a crowd of civilians eating breakfast before police officers shot him to death on Monday.
“In a big organization like the Navy it is never as connected as it should be, so you have reports and things that come into offices and never make it back to headquarters,” said a former senior federal official who has been briefed on the investigation.
Mr. Alexis’s clearance, first obtained while he was in the reserves, has become the focus of intense debate in Washington over whether repeated signs of his problems, including insubordination in the Navy and arrests in three cities, were overlooked.
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel acknowledged at a news conference on Wednesday that the process of granting security clearances needed fixing, saying that “a lot of red flags” about the gunman’s past behavior were missed.
“Obviously, something went wrong,” Mr. Hagel said as he announced that he had ordered a sweeping review of procedures at Defense Department bases around the world. “We would hope we will find some answers to how can we do it better.”
Among the questions will be whether more personal information — even short of information on a criminal conviction — should be required, and whether reviews of personnel for security clearances should be conducted more often.
Two weeks after talking to the police about hearing voices, Mr. Alexis, 34, visited the emergency room at a veterans’ medical center in Providence, R.I., the Department of Veterans Affairs confirmed in a statement on Wednesday. But according to the department, he told a doctor only that he was having insomnia, and he was given a “small amount” of medication, which an official said was the antidepressant trazodone.
He requested and received a refill five days later at a veterans’ medical center in Washington, saying he could not sleep because of his work schedule.
When asked if he was having anxiety or depression, or was having thoughts of hurting himself or others, he answered no. “He was alert and oriented,” the statement said.
While he was in Rhode Island, Mr. Alexis also told his employer that he was hearing voices through the walls of his hotel room and having trouble sleeping, a person with knowledge of the company said. Human resources officials at the company where Mr. Alexis worked, the Experts, believed Mr. Alexis was describing actual noise and moved him to two different hotels in Newport. They were concerned enough to contact the Newport police after Mr. Alexis said he had spoken to officers. But the police told the officials that they had no information about Mr. Alexis, the person with knowledge of the company said.
In Brooklyn, Mr. Alexis’s mother, Cathleen Alexis, offered her first public statement since the shooting, expressing grief for the families of the victims.
“I don’t know why he did what he did and I will never be able to ask him why,” she said. “Aaron is now in a place where he can no longer do harm to anyone and for that I am glad. To the families of the victims: I am so so very sorry that this happened. My heart is broken.”
0 comments:
Post a Comment