Also see:
AOL/Microsoft-Hotmail Preventing Delivery of Truthout Communications •
Go to Original
When Strains on Military Families Turn Deadly
By Lizette Alvarez and Deborah Sontag
The New York Times
Friday 15 February 2008
A few months after Sgt. William Edwards and his wife, Sgt. Erin Edwards, returned
to a Texas Army base from separate missions in Iraq, he assaulted her mercilessly.
He struck her, choked her, dragged her over a fence and slammed her into the
sidewalk.
As far as Erin Edwards was concerned, that would be the last time he beat her.
Unlike many military wives, she knew how to work the system to protect herself.
She was an insider, even more so than her husband, since she served as an aide
to a brigadier general at Fort Hood.
With the general's help, she quickly arranged for a future transfer to
a base in New York. She pressed charges against her husband and secured an order
of protection. She sent her two children to stay with her mother. And she received
assurance from her husband's commanders that he would be barred from leaving
the base unless accompanied by an officer.
Yet on the morning of July 22, 2004, William Edwards easily slipped off base,
skipping his anger-management class, and drove to his wife's house in
the Texas town of Killeen. He waited for her to step outside and then, after
a struggle, shot her point-blank in the head before turning the gun on himself.
During an investigation, Army officers told the local police that they did
not realize Erin Edwards had been afraid of her husband. And they acknowledged
that despite his restrictions, William Edwards had not been escorted off base
"on every occasion," according to a police report.
That admission troubled the detective handling the case.
"I believe that had he been confined to base and had that confinement
been monitored," said Detective Sharon L. Brank of the local police, "she
would not be dead at his hands."
The killing of Erin Edwards directly echoed an earlier murder of a military
wife that drew far more attention. Almost 10 years ago, at Fort Campbell in
Kentucky, a different Army sergeant defied a similar restriction to base, driving
out the front gate on his way to a murder almost foretold.
That 1998 homicide, one of several featured in a "60 Minutes" exposé
on domestic violence in the military, galvanized a public outcry, Congressional
demands for action and the Pentagon's pledge to do everything possible
to prevent such violence from claiming more lives.
Yet just as the Defense Department undertook substantial changes, guided by
a Congressionally chartered task force on domestic violence that decried a system
more adept at protecting offenders than victims, the wars in Afghanistan and
then Iraq began.
Pentagon officials say that wartime has not derailed their efforts to make
substantive improvements in the way that the military tackles domestic violence.
They say they have, for example, offered more parenting and couples classes,
provided additional victims advocates and afforded victims greater confidentiality
in reporting abuses.
But interviews with members of the task force, as well as an examination of
cases of fatal domestic violence and child abuse, indicate that wartime pressures
on military families and on the military itself have complicated the Pentagon's
efforts.
"I don't think there is any question about that," said Peter
C. McDonald, a retired district court judge in Kentucky and a member of the
Pentagon's now disbanded domestic violence task force. "The war
could only make things much worse than even before, and here we had a system
that was not too good to begin with."
Connie Sponsler-Garcia, another task force member, who now works on domestic
violence projects with the Pentagon, agreed.
"Whereas something was a high priority before, now it's: 'Oh,
dear, we have a war. Well get back to you in a few months,' " she
said.
The fatalities examined by The New York Times show a military system that tries
and sometimes fails to balance the demands of fighting a war with those of eradicating
domestic violence.
According to interviews with law enforcement officials and court documents,
the military has sent to war service members who had been charged with and even
convicted of domestic violence crimes.
Deploying such convicted service members to a war zone violates military regulations
and, in some cases, federal law.
Take the case of Sgt. Jared Terrasas. The first time that he was deployed to
Iraq, his prosecution for domestic violence was delayed. Then, after pleading
guilty, he was pulled out of a 16-week batterers intervention program run by
the Marine Corps and sent to Iraq again.
Several months after Sergeant Terrasas returned home, his 7-month-old son died
of a brain injury, and the marine was charged with his murder.
Deployment to war, with its long separations, can put serious stress on military
families. And studies have shown that recurrent deployments heighten the likelihood
of combat trauma, which, in turn, increases the risk of domestic violence.
"The more trauma out there, the more likely domestic violence is,"
said Dr. Jacquelyn C. Campbell, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing
who also was a member of the Pentagon task force.
The Times examined several cases in which mental health problems caused or
exacerbated by war pushed already troubled families to a deadly breaking point.
In one instance, the Air Force repeatedly deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan and
elsewhere Sgt. Jon Trevino, a medic with a history of psychological problems,
including post-traumatic stress disorder.
Multiple deployments eroded Sergeant Trevino's marriage and worsened
his mental health problems until, in 2006, he killed his wife, Carol, and then
himself.
The military declared his suicide "service related."
A Call to Action
Within a six-week period in 2002, three Special Forces sergeants returned from
Afghanistan and murdered their wives at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Two immediately
turned their guns on themselves; the third hanged himself in a jail cell. A
fourth soldier at the same Army base also killed his wife during those six weeks.
At the beginning of this wartime period, the cluster of murder-suicides set
off alarms about the possible link between combat tours and domestic violence,
a link supported by a study published that year in the journal Military Medicine.
The killings also reinvigorated the concerns about military domestic violence
that had led to the formation of the Defense Task Force on Domestic Violence
two years earlier.
National attention to the subject was short-lived. But an examination by The
Times found more than 150 cases of fatal domestic violence or child abuse in
the United States involving service members and new veterans during the wartime
period that began in October 2001 with the invasion of Afghanistan.
In more than a third of the cases, The Times determined that the offenders
had deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq or to the regions in support of those missions.
In another third, it determined that the offenders never deployed to war. And
the deployment history of the final third could not be ascertained.
The military tracks only homicides that it prosecutes, and a majority of killings
involving service members are handled by civilian authorities. To track these
cases, The Times used records from the Army, Air Force and Navy - the
Marines did not provide any information -and local news reports.
It is difficult to know how complete The Times's findings are. What is
clear, though, is that these homicides occurred at a time when the military
was trying to improve its handling of domestic violence.
The Pentagon's domestic violence task force, appointed in April 2000
and comprising 24 military and civilian experts, met regularly for three years
to examine a system where, they found, soldiers rarely faced punishment or prosecution
for battering their wives and where they often found shelter from civilian orders
of protection.
When the moment arrived to explain their findings and recommendations to Congress,
however, the timing could not have been poorer. Deborah D. Tucker and Lt. Gen.
Garry L. Parks of the Marines, the leaders of the task force, presented their
final report to the House Armed Services Committee on the very day that the
Iraq war began, March 20, 2003. Ms. Tucker called it "one of the more
surreal experiences of my life."
"Periodically, members of the committee would call for a break and there
would be some updated information provided on the status of our troops'
entry into Iraq and how far they'd gotten," she said. "There
was a map on an easel to the side."
"I knew that while we were at war all other considerations would push
back," she added, "and I hoped that Operation Iraqi Freedom would
be a quick matter on the order of Desert Storm."
The task force was disbanded, and its request to reconvene after two years
to evaluate progress was rejected. But the Defense Department embraced most
of its 200 recommendations and gradually made many changes, from the increase
in advocates to domestic violence training for commanding officers.
"The services have taken huge strides to implement the recommendations,"
said David Lloyd, director of the Pentagon's Family Advocacy Program,
starting with sending out "a strong message across the department that
domestic violence is not acceptable."
Further, after the killings at Fort Bragg, Congress passed a law that made
civilian orders of protection binding on military bases, and the Army gradually
slowed the transition from war to home to help soldiers adjust.
Mr. Lloyd said he could not verify or comment on The Times's findings
on domestic killings. But, he said, domestic fatalities do not provide a complete
picture of the incidence of domestic violence in the military.
"You have a pie, a nine-inch shell, and you have a slice of that pie,
but there are other slices: verbal abuse and psychological control and assault
that didn't result in a homicide," Mr. Lloyd said. "Even if
the fatality slice has increased and it would look larger, the other numbers
have gone down."
According to the military, the number of general spouse and child abuse incidents
reported to on-base family advocacy programs began declining in 1998, before
the special effort to address the issue began, and continued to decline significantly
through 2006. But whether those numbers reflect a genuine decline is a matter
of debate, given that large numbers of service members have spent considerable
time away on deployments and that the strengthening of sanctions for domestic
violence has made some women more reluctant to report abuse.
The accuracy of the military's domestic violence data has also been questioned,
by advocates, the Government Accountability Office and military officials themselves.
Last fall, in a statement released during domestic violence awareness month,
Mike Hoskins, a Pentagon official, said, "We shouldn't necessarily
take comfort in reduced rates of violence." He said they probably reflected
"good news" but urged caution in interpreting the numbers.
Dr. Campbell, the former task force member, said the task force had recommended
periodic anonymous surveys to ascertain the full extent of domestic violence.
She also said that she believed the "true incidence" of domestic
violence had probably increased as a result of service members returning from
Iraq with combat trauma, which can exacerbate family violence.
"It's sort of like, on the one hand, they're improving the
system, and on the other hand, they're stressing it," she said.
Others agree, noting that wartime places a burden on the military as a whole,
even on those who do not deploy to combat zones but absorb additional duties
at home.
Christine Hansen, executive director of the Miles Foundation, which provides
domestic violence assistance mostly to the wives of officers and senior enlisted
men, said the organization's caseload had tripled since the war in Iraq
began.
And John P. Galligan, a retired Army colonel who served as a military judge
at Fort Hood and now represents military clients in private practice, said he,
too, had seen a "substantial" increase in military domestic violence
cases in his area.
"Sometimes I just sit and scratch my head," he said.
The separation of deployment, in and of itself, often causes marital strains.
"Even with a healthy marriage, there is a massive adjustment,"
said Anita Gorecki, a lawyer and former Army captain who represents soldiers
near Fort Bragg and is married to an officer currently in Iraq. "Add on
to that combat stress and injuries and sometimes it can create the perfect storm."
Some researchers draw a fairly firm connection between post-traumatic stress
disorder and domestic violence. A 2006 study in The Journal of Marital and Family
Therapy looked at veterans who sought marital counseling at a Veterans Affairs
medical center in the Midwest between 1997 and 2003. Those given a diagnosis
of PTSD were "significantly more likely to perpetrate violence toward
their partners," the study found, with more than 80 percent committing
at least one act of violence in the previous year, and almost half at least
one severe act.
Pamela Iles, a superior court judge who was permitted by the Marines to set
up a privately financed domestic violence education program at Camp Pendleton
in California, views much of the domestic abuse on the base as "collateral"
from the war. She sees the domestic violence committed by marines, many of them
young, as a reaction to jumping back and forth between the dangers of war and
the trouble at home.
"One minute you are in Baghdad waiting for a bomb to go off and the next
minute you are in Burger King," Judge Iles said. "There is a lot
of disorientation."
A 9-Year-Old Witness
It was a little before dawn on Feb. 20, 2006, in a bedroom in Edwardsville,
Ill. Carol Trevino and her 9-year-old son, sleeping deeply after watching "Wayne's
World," were startled awake by a series of booms. "What was that?"
Carol Trevino asked her son.
In seconds, Sgt. Jon Trevino, her estranged husband, barged through the door,
according to a police report. Mrs. Trevino had just enough time to reach for
her pepper spray before he shot her five times, the last time in the head. Then
he shot himself.
Their son, wide-eyed, sat in bed watching his life explode, bullet by bullet.
Few details escaped the boy's notice. His father used a silver gun and
it "didn't have a wheel on it, like the cowboys used," he
told the Edwardsville police. The boy could even name the precise time of his
mother's death: 4:32 a.m., as the glowing clock read.
Outside in Mr. Trevino's car was the immediate motive for the murder-suicide:
divorce papers, evidence of a marriage destabilized by multiple deployments
to war zones and by Sergeant Trevino's own increasing instability.
T. Robert Cook, his brother-in-law, said he believed Sergeant Trevino's
domestic violence was triggered by his combat trauma. "I'm 100 percent
sure it was the war," said Mr. Cook, who is raising the Trevinos'
son along with his wife, Sheryl Gusewell, who is Carol's sister. "I
don't have any doubt their marital problems placed a burden on him, but
I am quite sure that, but for the war, he would have taken a different approach.
When you see people being shot every day, death is not a big thing."
Sergeant Trevino, who had endured childhood sexual abuse and a difficult first
marriage, suffered psychiatric problems long before he was dispatched to war
zones to perform the highly stressful job of evacuating the wounded.
And the Air Force knew it.
Air Force mental health records show that Sergeant Trevino, who was 36, had
been treated twice for mental health problems before the war: once in 1995 for
serious depression as his first marriage crumbled, and then in 1999 for post-traumatic
stress disorder stemming from the childhood abuse and marital problems with
his new wife, Carol. He was counseled and treated with medication both times.
As a result of these problems, the Air Force insisted that he secure a medical
waiver for a promotion that he sought to become an aeromedical evacuation technician.
And military doctors certified that he could handle the job, despite research
that shows that pre-existing post-traumatic stress disorder is exacerbated in
a war zone.
Col. Steven Pflanz, a senior psychiatrist in the Air Force, who was not involved
in the Trevino case, said the Air Force considered the stress disorder to be
treatable and therefore was willing to deploy an airman with a history of it.
But the decision is not taken lightly, he said.
"It's not an exact science," he said. "You try to make
your best prediction. We spend a lot of time with our customers."
In Sergeant Trevino's case, the prediction was wrong. He had trouble
shaking off the carnage that he experienced so viscerally while evacuating injured
service members. After one deployment to Afghanistan and two to Iraq, his mental
health and his marriage deteriorated. When he returned from his second tour
in Iraq, Sergeant Trevino acknowledged in a health assessment that he had "serious
problems" dealing with the people he loved and that he was feeling "down,
helpless, panicky or anxious."
The Air Force acted quickly. He was abruptly restricted from "special
operational duty." An Air Force doctor diagnosed "acute PTSD,"
calling it a reaction to the war and marital problems. Sergeant Trevino began
taking a cocktail of antidepressants and underwent therapy. According to doctors'
notes, he did not express thoughts of homicide or suicide. By the time Hurricane
Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in August 2005, he was considered well enough to
be deployed domestically.
But his wife's family, which had taken him under its wing, found the
once affable, quick-witted sergeant to be profoundly altered. His temper flashed
unpredictably, white-hot. He acted threatened and paranoid, his behavior so
erratic that he frightened his son. One late night, he took his son on a rambling
drive to nowhere, ranting to the boy about his mother.
At least one time, he struck his wife. A friend gave Carol Trevino the pepper
spray that she reached for the night of her murder. But she never considered
his abuse serious enough to report him to the authorities.
Four days before the murder-suicide, Sergeant Trevino bought a gun.
"This is just one of those things that unfortunately happens,"
he wrote to his son in a suicide note. "I love you, and I know I let you
down."
Justice Delayed
The Pentagon task force had one overarching recommendation: that the military
work hard to effect a "culture shift" to zero tolerance for domestic
violence by holding offenders accountable and by punishing criminal behavior.
There was, members believed, a core credo that needed to be attacked frontally:
"this notion that the good soldier either can't be a wife beater
or, if they are, that it's a temporary aberration that shouldn't
interfere with them doing military service," as Dr. Campbell put it.
The way the military handled several cases involving the deaths of babies and
toddlers indicates that this kind of thinking has been difficult to demolish
at a time of war.
In October 2003, four months after Jose Aguilar, 24, a Marine Corps sergeant,
returned from the initial invasion of Iraq, his infant son, Damien, wound up
in the intensive care unit of a local hospital with bleeding in his brain and
eyes.
Sergeant Aguilar, a mechanic based at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, acknowledged
to the local police that he had been rough with the 2-month-old baby, shaking
Damien to stop him from squirming during a diaper change. He said that he had
been abused himself as a child and that he did not mean to hurt the baby.
After the marine was charged with felony child abuse, he and his wife completed
a parenting program.
The following summer, while the felony charge was pending, Sergeant Aguilar
was deployed once more to Iraq, this time for nine months. His court case was
delayed, which did not surprise local prosecutors.
Michael Maultsby, the assistant district attorney in Onslow County, N.C., who
prosecuted Sergeant Aguilar, said that such frustrating delays in justice sometimes
occur in his county, home to Camp Lejeune.
"It depends on the needs of the unit," Mr. Maultsby said. "We
can't overrule them."
In April 2006, a year after Sergeant Aguilar returned from Iraq but before
his felony case was resolved, Damien, who by then was 2, died of a brain injury.
His father claimed that the boy had been injured by a fall in the bathtub. The
medical examiner disputed that explanation. The marine was arrested, pleaded
guilty to second-degree murder and felony child abuse, and was sentenced last
fall to 28 to 35 years in prison.
Marine officials would not comment on individual cases. Elaine Woodhouse, a
Marine Corps social services program specialist, said that "the family
advocacy program does not recommend or advise deployment of a marine when domestic
or felony child abuse charges are pending." Still, that decision, she
said, is left to the discretion of the commanders.
A conviction for domestic violence, unlike pending charges, almost always renders
a service member ineligible to go to war, but that restriction has not always
been considered binding, as is clear in the case of Sergeant Terrasas, who was
stationed at Camp Pendleton.
One night in late December 2002, Sergeant Terrasas, drunk and angry over a
telephone conversation about the looming war in Iraq, vented his anger by punching
his wife, Lucia, in the face.
"He seemed to just lose it," Mrs. Terrasas told the police in Oceanside,
Calif., who arrested him on misdemeanor charges.
But Sergeant Terrasas was deployed to Iraq before his case was heard. It was
not until his return seven months later that he pleaded guilty, was placed on
probation and was ordered to complete a 16-week batterers intervention program
run by the Marine Corps.
Sergeant Terrasas attended a few classes. But the Marine Corps, facing a runaway
insurgency in Iraq, pulled him out of the batterers program and shipped him
off to war for a second time in early 2004.
This deployment was illegal. A 1996 law bans offenders who are convicted of
domestic violence misdemeanors from carrying firearms, with no special exception
for military personnel. The ban is referred to as the Lautenberg amendment after
its sponsor, Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey.
Army and Marine regulations, formulated in response to the weapons ban, explicitly
prohibit deployments for missions that require firearms, and extend the policy
to felony domestic violence offenders, too. The Marine Corps would not comment
on Sergeant Terrasas's deployment, citing confidentiality rules.
When Sergeant Terrasas returned from war, he completed his batterers program,
said his lawyer, Philip De Massa. But his anger, tested by two tours in Iraq,
still surfaced. In September 2005, when the police responded to a domestic argument,
he broke down crying and told one officer that he suffered from "postwar
traumatic syndrome." There is no record that he sought or received mental
health help.
Nearly two weeks later, the Terrasases' 7-month-old son, Alexander, died
from a powerful blow to the head. Mr. Terrasas was charged with murder. Last
August, after a deal with prosecutors, he was sentenced to seven years in prison
for felony child endangerment.
He never admitted to abusing his child.
Broken Promises
Sgt. Erin Edwards, emboldened by a year in Iraq, returned to Texas with the
courage to end her troubled marriage.
"Being apart for such a long period of time enabled her to realize she
could survive without him," said Sgt. Jami Howell, 28, who was her best
friend.
When Erin Edwards told her husband that she wanted a divorce after four years
of marriage, he responded as she had long feared.
On June 19, 2004, he followed her to their baby sitter's house to hand
her a written proposal for a custody arrangement. When she did not immediately
respond, he beat her so badly that she wound up in the emergency room.
Even before the assault, William Edwards's troubles had so badly affected
his performance at work that his commanding officer, Capt. Brian Novoselich,
took the time to meet with him weekly to check on his welfare. After the assault,
it was the captain who confined him to the base.
But William Edwards repeatedly left unescorted and often stayed with his brother,
who lived across the street from Erin Edwards in Killeen. On several occasions,
she alerted the police and his superiors that he was lurking.
On July 21, 2004, Erin Edwards went to court to make the temporary protection
order permanent. At the hearing, William Edwards told the judge that he had
enrolled in alcohol and domestic violence classes after the June assault, according
to a transcript.
"I had hit rock bottom when I touched my wife, man," he said in
court. "That was the worst day ever in my life. I had always told my wife
that I would never touch her, ever, physically."
William Edwards also acknowledged that when the police showed up that day,
he begged his wife not to press charges, saying: "Don't do this
to my career. Don't do this."
Erin Edwards spoke of the effect on their children, who witnessed the assault.
"Since the incident happened, all my son talks about is how his father
hurt his mother, and that 'Daddy is going to kill Mommy,'"
she said.
She also stated, and her husband learned for the first time, that she was transferring
and moving with the children. William Edwards was "visibly upset"
by this, according to Army documents turned over to the police.
The following morning, after reporting to an exercise session with other soldiers,
William Edwards left the base alone one final time. After the murder-suicide,
local police officers securing the scene noted that both bodies were dressed
in military camouflage clothing with nameplates that said Edwards. Both were
24.
At Erin Edwards's funeral, her boss, Brig. Gen. Charles Benjamin Allen,
who was killed in a helicopter crash in late 2004, eulogized the soldier with
a cracking voice. More than three years later, her relatives note that not even
he, with his high rank, was able to ensure that the military was doing more
than taking a troubled soldier "at his word," as Mary Lou Taylor,
Erin's aunt, said.
"He couldn't or failed to help her be safe," Ms. Taylor said.
William Edwards's former commanding officer, Major Novoselich, said in
a recent interview that he was "shocked by the end result." Now
a professor at West Point, he said he had assumed that William Edwards's
immediate supervisors were monitoring him.
Near Fort Hood, Detective Brank of the Killeen police said soldiers continued
to defy restrictions to the base.
"I am surprised," she said. "Fort Hood is not enforcing these
orders."
The Army examined Erin Edwards's death as part of a fatality review program
recommended by the Pentagon task force "to ensure no victim dies in vain."
A one-paragraph summary of the review seemed to discount the findings of the
civilian police investigation. The summary noted that Erin Edwards had refused
the assistance of the base's family advocacy program, while William Edwards
had enrolled in it. It added that William Edwards had "appeared to comply"
with his restrictions. Until the day he "eluded his military escort"
and killed his wife.
-----------
Alain Delaquérière and Margot Williams contributed research.
-------
Jump to today's Truthout Features:
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. t r u t h o u t has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is t r u t h o u t endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
"Go to Original" links are provided as a convenience to our readers and allow for verification of authenticity. However, as originating pages are often updated by their originating host sites, the versions posted on TO may not match the versions our readers view when clicking the "Go to Original" links.
Print This Story
E-mail This Story