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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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January 12th,
2008 - 3 Buddies Home From Iraq Are Charged With Murdering a 4th News article from the New York
Times Summary
of the Fort Carson 2nd/4th Brigade Combat Team Killings |
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3 Buddies Home From Iraq Are
Charged With Murdering a 4th By Dan Frosch New York Times January 12, 2008 Colorado Springs - After
surviving intense combat in Iraq, Specialist Kevin Shields was killed on what
he had thought was friendly soil. His bloody, bullet-riddled body was found
by a newspaper deliverer, sprawled on a downtown sidewalk here on Dec. 1. Three of Specialist
Shields’s buddies, all current or former soldiers who served with him in Iraq
before their return last year, have been charged with murdering him. Details
are still emerging, but his death, and that of an Army private whose killing
has now been attributed by the authorities to two of the three men charged in
the Shields case, have shaken this staunchly pro-military city and Fort
Carson, an expansive Army base on the edge of town. According to court documents
released this week and accounts from his family, on the night of Nov. 30
Specialist Shields celebrated his 24th birthday by getting together with
those three friends: Louis Bressler, 25; Kenneth Eastridge, 24; and Pfc.
Bruce Bastien Jr., 21. The four men, who had served together as members of
the Second Infantry Division’s Second Brigade Combat Team, based at Fort
Carson, went drinking at a Colorado Springs nightclub. Most of what is publicly
known about the events of that night comes from a police interview about a
month ago in which, prosecutors say, Private Bastien, having earlier denied
knowledge of the killing, declared that he was present when Mr. Bressler
committed it. And that was just one of several crimes that Private Bastien
said the three had carried out around Colorado Springs. Investigators say Mr.
Eastridge has confirmed most of Private Bastien’s account of the Shields
killing, but have revealed little else. In that account, the
authorities say, the four friends had met at the nightclub when Mr. Bressler
and Mr. Eastridge began discussing plans to commit a series of robberies in
Colorado Springs. After leaving the club, the men drove to a park, where Mr.
Bressler and Specialist Shields engaged in a drunken quarrel. The two came to
blows, Private Bastien said, but appeared to patch things up and returned to
the car. Soon afterward, the four
stopped again, because Mr. Bressler felt ill. But when they got out of the
car, the police quote Private Bastien as saying, Mr. Bressler walked over to
Specialist Shields and, without provocation, shot him five times with a
snub-nosed .38-caliber revolver. The police say Private
Bastien told them that he thought the attack had been motivated by Mr.
Bressler’s fear that Specialist Shields would tell someone about the robbery
plans. “It’s such a tragic event
that none of us were expecting,” said Capt. Ben Jackman, who commanded both
Specialist Shields and his three friends at Fort Carson. “Everyone was
shocked to hear about this.” J. D. Hill, a Vietnam
veteran who manages a local post of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, says the
killing has outraged many onetime soldiers in Colorado Springs. “A lot of
veterans here can’t understand how this happened,” Mr. Hill said. “This man
had just returned from Iraq. What these guys were thinking is beyond
comprehension.” Specialist Shields’s family
feels particularly stricken at the thought that his death may have come at
the hands of fellow soldiers. “We don’t know if it was something from Iraq
that might have set them off,” said his grandfather, Ivan Shields, who raised
him in and around Roscoe, Ill. “We don’t know what in the world made them do
this.” The arrest of the three
accused may have solved the killing of another soldier here. Mr. Eastridge,
officials say, has accused Private Bastien and Mr. Bressler of involvement in
the robbery and fatal shooting of Pfc. Robert James, whose body was found in
the parking lot of a Colorado Springs bank last Aug. 4, and Private Bastien
says Mr. Bressler was the triggerman in that slaying as well. Both Private Bastien
and Mr. Bressler have now been charged with murder in the James case. Mr. Bressler, from North
Carolina, was honorably discharged last summer after Army doctors found that
he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of his service in
Iraq, says his lawyer, Ed Farry. Mr. Bressler was framed by his two
co-defendants, Mr. Farry says, because they knew that his memory had been
distorted by the condition. Mr. Eastridge, from Ekron,
Ky., received a Purple Heart after being wounded by a mine in Iraq. A public
defender representing him would not comment on the case. A lawyer for Private
Bastien, a medic from Fairfield, Conn., who received a commendation for
administering aid in combat, also declined to comment. Beyond additional local
shootings and a stabbing in which investigators say Private Bastien has
implicated himself and his co-defendants, court records show that he has
accused Mr. Eastridge of firing without provocation on Iraqi civilians while
on patrol in Baghdad, using stolen AK-47s. In that accusation, made to
an Army investigator a few days after Private Bastien had given details in
the Shields killing, he “said that he knows that an Iraqi civilian was struck
on at least one occasion,” according to the court records. A spokesman for the Army
Criminal Investigation Command, Chris Grey, said the military was conducting
a preliminary inquiry but had not uncovered any credible evidence to
substantiate Private Bastien’s account. At a court hearing in the
Shields case on Tuesday, Mr. Bressler and Mr. Eastridge, both strikingly
youthful, fidgeted nervously with their shackles, their eyes darting around
the courtroom, their lips flashing an occasional grin to the gallery. Afterward, Mr. Bressler’s
wife, Tira, said in an interview that he had thought of Specialist Shields
“pretty much like his brother.” “He’s not the person who
would do something like this,” Ms. Bressler said. Specialist Shields, who
suffered head injuries when a roadside bomb exploded next to his Humvee, was
haunted by his time in Iraq, particularly the searing images of children who
had been killed in cross-fire, his family says. He was overjoyed to be home
and was awaiting the birth of his second child. He loved computers, says his
grandmother, Madlyn Shields, and was preparing for his Army discharge and the
start of a new job at Hewlett-Packard. “If it had happened in
combat,” Ms. Shields said, “we would have understood. But not this. This is
senseless.” Copyright 2008 The New York
Times Company External link: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/12/us/12soldier.html |