Ivan Lopez: Truck driver. Dad. Drummer. Portrait emerges after Fort Hood attack.

Spc. Ivan Lopez, who authorities say killed three others and himself Wednesday at Fort Hood in Texas, reportedly was grappling with depression and anxiety. Authorities hint at a precipitating on-base event.

|
Tamir Kalifa/AP
Lt. Gen. Mark Milley, commanding general of III Corps and Fort Hood, speaks with the media outside of an entrance to the Fort Hood military base following a shooting that occurred inside, Wednesday, April 2, 2014, in Fort Hood, Texas. Four people were killed, including the gunman, and 16 were wounded in the attack, authorities said.

Emerging information about Army Spc. Ivan Lopez, who killed three people and injured 16, some critically, at Fort Hood on Wednesday, paint a picture of a troubled, perhaps injured soldier who was seeking treatment for mental problems before his transfer two months ago to the Texas Army base.

The Iraq war veteran, who drove a truck for his unit, is at the center of an investigation into the third major attack by a service member on his own comrades in five years. When a Fort Hood police officer drew her gun to confront Lopez during a barrage that involved two buildings at the base, he turned his .45 caliber handgun on himself, officials say.

Military officials, the FBI, and civilian police are now delving into Lopez’s past in search of a possible motive. 

Lopez, originally from the Puerto Rican village of Guayanilla, was a percussionist and former National Guardsman who had spent time in Egypt on a mission in the mid-2000s. His mother and grandfather recently died, according to El Nueva Dia, a Puerto Rican newspaper. He left the National Guard in 2010 to join the US Army.

He had recently moved to Killeen, Texas, with his wife and 3-year-old daughter from another Army base in Texas, neighbors say.

Lopez was being evaluated for post-traumatic stress distorder (PTSD) but had not been diagnosed with that illness, Fort Hood officials say. They also say that he had reported a brain injury – a concussion apparently not related to his military service. 

Lopez spent four months in Iraq in 2011, the year the US ended its combat mission there. Military officials are reporting that there are no records showing Lopez was engaged in combat during his tour there.

So far, investigators have found no evidence that Wednesday's attack was terrorism-related, though that possibility has not been ruled out. Fox News had reported a day before the shooting that the FBI was searching for a recent Army recruit believed to be planning a “jihad-style” attack at Fort Hood. But the name of that suspect, as reported by the FBI, is not Ivan Lopez.

Officials at Fort Hood, however, suggest a singular precipitating event may have sparked the shootings.

"Obviously, we are digging deep into his background, any criminal or psychiatric history, his experiences in combat. All of the things you would expect us to do are being done right now,” Lt. Gen. Mark Milley said late Wednesday. "There are initial reports there may have been an argument in one of the unit areas.”

Lopez had arrived at Fort Hood, the scene of the horrific 2009 attack by self-avowed jihadist Maj. Nidal Hasan, in February. He drove trucks for the 13th Sustainment Command (Expeditionary), but had not been assigned to the base’s Army Wounded Transition Units that help injured soldiers return to service.

The shootings began when Lopez walked into a building Wednesday afternoon and opened fire. He then got into a vehicle, and kept on firing before entering another building. Upon leaving it, he was confronted by the military police in a parking lot. All the victims were soldiers.

Last year, Major Hassan was sentenced to death for committing the worst attack on a US base in history, killing 13 fellow soldiers and injuring scores of others at Fort Hood in November 2009. Hasan said in court filings that he attacked soldiers about to ship out to Afghanistan in a bid to protect Islamic insurgents abroad.

Then in September, Navy veteran Aaron Alexis killed 12 people and then himself at the Washington Navy Yard. The FBI said Mr. Alexis had "the delusional belief that he was being controlled or influenced by extremely low frequently electromagnetic waves.”

The Pentagon has responded to the shootings with a variety of initiatives, but Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said after Wednesday’s tragedy that the repeated soldier-on-soldier attacks on military installations suggest that “something’s not working.”

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Ivan Lopez: Truck driver. Dad. Drummer. Portrait emerges after Fort Hood attack.
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2014/0403/Ivan-Lopez-Truck-driver.-Dad.-Drummer.-Portrait-emerges-after-Fort-Hood-attack
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe