Quarrel likely preceded gunfire, fort officer says

FORT HOOD, Texas - The soldier who killed three people and injured 16 at Fort Hood may have argued with another service member before the attack, and investigators believe that his unstable mental health contributed to the rampage, authorities said Thursday.

The post’s senior officer, Lt. Gen. Mark Milley, said there is a “strong possibility” that Spc. Ivan Lopez had a “verbal altercation” with another soldier or soldiers immediately before Wednesday’s shooting, which unfolded on the same Army post as a 2009 mass shooting.

However, there’s no indication that he targeted specific soldiers, Milley said.

Lopez never saw combat during a deployment to Iraq and had shown no apparent risk of violence before the shooting, officials said.

The 34-year-old truck driver from Puerto Rico seemed to have a clean record that showed no ties to extremist groups. But the Army secretary promised that investigators would keep all avenues open in their inquiry of the soldier whose rampage ended only after he fired a bullet into his own head.

“We’re not making any assumptions by that. We’re going to keep an open mind and an open investigation. We will go where the facts lead us,” Army Secretary John McHugh said, explaining that “possible extremist involvement is still being looked at very, very carefully.”

Scott & White Memorial Hospital in nearby Temple, Texas, treated many of the 16 injured in Wednesday’s shooting. Late Thursday, the conditions of three who had been listed in critical condition were updated to serious condition.

No more fatalities are expected among the victims, who suffered wounds in the neck, chest, abdomen and extremities, said Matthew Davis, trauma medical director at Scott & White Healthcare, which runs the hospital.

Milley said three victims remain in Darnall Army Community Hospital at Fort Hood. He didn’t describe their conditions, but doctors have said that of all the wounded, the most severely wounded were taken to Scott & White Memorial.

The mother of a 37-year old Illinois soldier killed during the attack said that less than two weeks ago she was reunited with a daughter she had given up for adoption as an infant.

Mary Muntean of Effingham, Ill., said she was still celebrating that reunion when she got a call telling her that her son, Sgt. Timothy Owens, was dead. He was one of four soldiers - including the gunman - killed.

While sitting in her recliner Wednesday, Muntean saw television news reports about the Fort Hood attack. She placed a call to her son. Unable to reach him, she called his wife, Billie, who at first said he was in the hospital. But, before long, Billie called back.

“She said, ‘Mom, I want to tell you how sorry I am. Tim’s gone,’” Muntean said. “I broke down. I’m 77 years old, and I can’t hardly take this.”

Within hours of Wednesday’s shootings, investigators started looking into whether Lopez had lingering psychological trauma from his time in Iraq.

McHugh said at a Senate Armed Services Committee meeting that Lopez was being evaluated for post-traumatic stress disorder at the time of the shooting. Army officials said Lopez had been prescribed Ambien, a sleep aid, and medications to treat anxiety and depression.

Lopez had been examined by a psychiatrist within the past month, the Army secretary said, but had showed no signs that he might commit a violent act.

“The plan forward was just to continue to monitor and treat him as deemed appropriate,” McHugh said.

Investigators searched the soldier’s home Thursday and questioned his wife, Fort Hood spokesman Chris Haug said.

Lopez apparently walked into a building Wednesday and began firing a .45-caliber semi-automatic pistol. He then got into a vehicle and continued firing before entering another building. He was eventually confronted by military police in a parking lot, according to Milley.

As Lopez got within 20 feet of a police officer, he raised his hands but then reached under his jacket and pulled out a gun. The officer drew her weapon, and Lopez put his gun to his head and pulled the trigger, Milley said.

Lopez grew up in Guayanilla, a town of fewer than 10,000 people on the southwestern coast of Puerto Rico. His mother was a nurse at a public clinic, and his father did maintenance work for an electric utility company.

Neighbors recalled Lopez as a music lover from a tight knit family that was frequently involved in church activities, the Spanish-language El Nuevo Dia newspaper reported.

Guayanilla Mayor Edgardo Arlequin, who directed the high school band in which Lopez was a percussionist, told the newspaper that Lopez “was a really easygoing kid whose parents were very dedicated to him.”

Glidden Lopez Torres, who said he was a friend speaking for the family, said Lopez’s mother died of a heart attack in November.

Lopez was upset that he was granted only a 24-hour leave to attend her funeral, which was delayed for nearly a week so he could attend, the spokesman said. The leave was then extended to two days.

A neighbor, Aide Merlo Irizarry, described Lopez to the newspaper as “very loving toward his mother,” and said his mother’s death “hurt him deeply.”

Lopez joined the island’s National Guard in 1999 and served on a year-long peacekeeping mission in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula in the mid-2000s. He enlisted with the U.S. Army in 2008, McHugh said.

Lopez saw no combat during a four-month deployment to Iraq as a truck driver in 2011. A review of his service record showed no Purple Heart, indicating he was never wounded, McHugh said. He arrived at Fort Hood in February from Fort Bliss, Texas.

Suzie Miller, 71, a retired property manager who lived in the same Killeen apartment complex as Lopez, said few people knew him and his wife well because they had just moved in a few weeks ago.

“I’d see him in his uniform heading out to the car every morning,” Miller said. “He was friendly to me and a lot of us around here.”

Shaneice Banks, a 21-year old business-management student who lived downstairs from the Lopezes, said her husband, who also works at Fort Hood, helped the couple move in. Hours before the shooting, Banks said she ran into Lopez when he was home for lunch.

“He was going to his car, and I was like ‘Hey, how’s your day going?’ And he seemed perfectly fine. He was like, ‘Day’s going pretty good. I’ll see you whenever I come back home.’”

When news emerged that there had been a shooting at the post, Banks saw Lopez’s wife frantically calling her husband over and over, trying to reach him via cellphone from the apartment’s shared courtyard.

“She was bawling because they have a 2-year-old, and she was just holding the baby,” Banks said. “My heart just went out to her. I was trying to get her information when I could, but she doesn’t speak a lot of English.”

Xanderia Morris lives next door to Banks. She also saw Karla Lopez distraught in the courtyard.

“We tried to console her. She called some people over, and we were consoling her, and then she started up the stairs back to his apartment, and they identified him as the shooter on television. She just broke down. We had to rush her up the stairs so nothing would happen to her,” Morris said.

Neighbors took Lopez into Morris’ apartment, where she sat crying on the sofa for a long time.

The shootings revived memories of the November 2009 gunfire at Fort Hood, the deadliest attack on a domestic military installation in U.S. history. Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan was convicted last year in that attack, which he has said was to protect Islamic insurgents abroad from American aggression.

After that shooting, the military tightened base security nationwide.

Lopez bought his weapon at the same store that supplied those used by Hasan in his deadly rampage in 2009 and those used by an Army private in a failed plot to execute a similar massacre in 2011, according to two federal law enforcement sources.

Hasan killed 13 people and wounded more than 30 using a pistol bought from the Guns Galore store in Killeen. Two years later, an absent-without-leave private from Kentucky, Naser Jason Abdo, entered that store and bought gunpowder, shotgun shells and a handgun. In that instance the store notified authorities, who arrested Abdo at a nearby motel where he was plotting to attack a restaurant popular with Fort Hood personnel, according to sources.

An employee at Guns Galore said the owner’s wife had talked to the FBI about the latest shooting. An employee reached by phone declined to say whether store workers noticed anything of concern about Lopez, who legally purchased a semi-automatic .45-caliber Smith & Wesson pistol. “It’s an ongoing investigation. We have been told to redirect everybody to the FBI,” the employee said.

The weapon used in the killings wasn’t registered with Fort Hood authorities as required, Milley said.

In September, a Navy veteran opened fire at the Washington Navy Yard, leaving 13 people dead, including the gunman. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel ordered the Pentagon to review security at all U.S. defense installations worldwide.

Information for this article was contributed by Paul J. Weber, Will Weissert, Ramit Plushnick-Masti, Christopher Sherman, Robert Burns, Eric Tucker,Alicia Caldwell, Danica Coto, David Mercer and staff members of The Associated Press; by Molly Hennessy-Fiske, Adolfo Flores and Richard Serrano of the Los Angeles Times; by David Montgomery, Manny Fernandez, Ashley Southall, Timothy Williams, Emma G. Fitzsimmons, Andrew McLemore and Eric Schmitt of The New York Times; and by Esme E. Deprez, Harry R. Weber, Darrell Preston, Angela Greiling Keane, Gopal Ratnam, Alison Vekshin, Larry Liebert, Del Quentin Wilber and Nicole Gaouette of Bloomberg News.