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Despite the gunfire, community responds to stop gunman and save the wounded
Published on Saturday, Nov 07, 2009
From Beacon Journal wire services
FORT HOOD, TEXAS: From the first frantic 911 call that a shooter was rampaging through the Readiness Processing Center on this sprawling Army base, it took police officer Kimberly Munley just four minutes to get there.
But it was already bloody chaos.
Munley heard shots and saw a rush of scared people, some wounded by gunfire, scrambling to get away.
Figuring that the shooter must be between buildings for medical and psychiatric services, she rounded the corner and saw him chasing a soldier who was already wounded. She fired twice.
''He turned to her and charged, firing rapidly. She returned fire and fell to the ground to help protect herself,'' said Chuck Medley, director of Fort Hood's emergency services.
Munley and the gunman hit each other simultaneously; she took shots in both legs and the wrist. Altogether, she fired four shots into his torso with her Beretta 9 mm, dropping him to the ground and ending the worst mass shooting a U.S. military base has ever seen.
''She eliminated the threat. She did what she was trained to do,'' Medley said. ''She, in my mind, saved countless lives.''
Medley, who talked with Munley early Friday, identified the civilian officer as a hero.
But she wasn't the only one.
Firing into a room where hundreds of unarmed soldiers were lined up for vaccines and eye tests, the shooter had created a battle scene worse than most had witnessed in Iraq, killing 13 and wounding 30. Many stayed to help the wounded at a scene that most would have fled, falling back on their military and medical training, working furiously to save lives.
''There were many cases of soldiers and police officers yesterday putting their life on the line to save somebody else,'' Medley said, fighting back tears. ''And that's what I saw.''
The suspect, identified as Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, 39, was moved Friday to a military hospital in San Antonio.
Among the 30 wounded, several were still at ''significant risk'' of dying, authorities said.
The dead included a pregnant woman who was preparing to return home, a man who quit a furniture company job to join the military about a year ago, a newlywed who had served in Iraq and a woman who had vowed to take on Osama bin Laden after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Controlled chaos
Sgt. Andrew Hagerman, a military police officer from Lewisville, Texas, who was on his rounds in the barracks area, was about a mile and a half away when the first crackle across the radio of ''shots fired'' came in.
He didn't think much of it — probably someone throwing firecrackers off the roof again.
But ''shock and awe'' came, he said, when he heard, ''Officer down.'' With sirens blaring, he made it to the scene in three minutes.
Even so, a tremendous amount of damage had been done in a short amount of time.
People were screaming. Some were on the ground, with soldiers hovering over them and ripping off their own shirts to stanch the bleeding. Some were being carried out of the two buildings where most of the carnage had occurred.
''I did spin a circle a couple of times, thinking, 'What do I need to do here?' '' Hagerman said.
He walked past the gunman, unconscious on the ground in military fatigues. Ambulance drivers and medics had arrived and with his training taking over, Hagerman began directing traffic and sorting out the most serious who would need an ambulance first.
''It was controlled chaos,'' Hagerman said.
One man's courage
Pfc. Marquest Smith, on his way to Afghanistan in January, was completing routine paperwork about a bee-sting allergy when the sounds erupted.
A loud, popping noise. Moans. The sudden, urgent shout of ''Gun!''
Smith poked his head over the cubicle's partition and saw an extraordinary sight: An Army officer with two guns, firing into the crowded room.
The 21-year-old Fort Worth native quickly grabbed the civilian worker who'd been helping with his paperwork and forced her under the desk. He lay low for several minutes, waiting for the shooter to run out of ammunition and wishing he, too, had a gun.
After the shooter stopped to reload, Smith made a run for it. Pushing two other soldiers in front of him, he made it out of the Soldier Readiness Processing center — only to plunge into the building twice more to help the wounded.
Packed into cubicles with 5-foot-high dividers, the 300 unarmed soldiers were sitting ducks. Those who weren't hit by direct fire were struck by rounds ricocheting off the desks and tile floor.
When he decided that Hasan wasn't close to being out of ammo, Smith made a dash for the door.
He'd made it outside when he heard cries from within.
''I don't want to die.''
''This really hurts.''
''Help me get out of here.''
Smith rushed back inside and found two wounded. He grabbed them by their collars and dragged them outside.
His second time through the door, he ran into the shooter, whose back was to him. Smith turned and fled, bullets whizzing by his head and hitting the walls as he rushed outside.
Smith said some of the people he helped made it. But he knows others did not.
Afterward, Smith noticed a hole in heel of his right combat boot. A bullet had entered the boot, but he had somehow escaped injury — at least the physical kind.
After the adrenaline wore off, Smith was overwhelmed by a sense of betrayal, because this assailant who spilled so much blood was a soldier.
''We're supposed to be a family,'' he said.
The Dallas Morning News, McClatchy Newspapers and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
Get the full article here.
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