Fort Hood Gunman Was Being Treated for Depression

KILLEEN, Tex. — Military officials testifying at a hearing on Thursday in Washington provided some detail about the soldier at Fort Hood accused of killing three people and wounding 16 others at the post on Wednesday before taking his own life.

The secretary of the Army, John M. McHugh, said at a Senate Armed Services Committee that the suspect, an Iraq war veteran identified as Specialist Ivan Lopez, was being evaluated for post-traumatic stress disorder at the time of the shooting. Army officials said that Specialist Lopez had been prescribed Ambien, a sleep aid, and other medications to treat anxiety and depression.

Specialist Lopez had been examined by a psychiatrist within the last month, Mr. McHugh said, but 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,” he said. Mr. McHugh also said that the suspect had had “no involvement with extremist organizations of any kind,” and that “he had a clean record.” He said the military was continuing to examine Specialist Lopez’s associations to try to determine a possible motive for the attack.

Information was emerging slowly Thursday about Specialist Lopez. He was raised in a small fishing village called Guayanilla on the southern coast of Puerto Rico, about an hour and a half from San Juan. While there, he had attended the School of Asunción Rodríguez de Sala, where he was active in the band. He joined the Puerto Rico National Guard in 1999.

In 2006, he was deployed to the Sinai Peninsula, at the border between Egypt and the Gaza Strip, said Brig. Gen. Juan Jose Medina of the Puerto Rico National Guard. In 2008, he transferred from the National Guard to the United States Army and by 2010 was stationed with the First Armored Division at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Tex. He served as a truck driver in Iraq in 2011 from August to December.

Two of Specialist Lopez’s supervisors in the Puerto Rico guard said they were stunned to learn he was the suspect in the Fort Hood shoot. They said he had been an exemplary soldier.

“I cannot believe you are speaking about the same guy,” one supervisor, Sgt. Maj. Nelfon Bigas, said. “He was the most responsible, obedient, humble person, and one of the most skillful guys on the line.”

Residents of Guayanilla, many of whom knew Mr. Lopez and his family well, were also stunned.

Edgardo Arlequín, the mayor, was also the band director at Mr. Lopez’s school and knew him well from those years. “I can talk about him as a boy,” Mr. Arlequín told a local newspaper, El Nuevo Día. “He was quiet. He liked the music.”

Mr. Arlequín told the newspaper that he and others in the community who know the family are wondering today whether the death of Specialist Lopez’s mother in November and the death of a grandparent within just a few months had magnified the soldier’s mental health issues. His mother, Carmen Lopez, had worked as a nurse and died of a heart attack.

“This is very difficult, especially for a family that I have always seen together,” Mr. Arlequín told the newspaper. “By now losing the mother, who was the trunk of the family, and now this.”

The Amy’s chief of staff, Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, said at the Senate hearing on Thursday that Specialist Lopez “was a very experienced soldier.”

According to news reports, the gunman’s wife has been interviewed and is cooperating with law enforcement officials.

The shooting led the authorities to shut down the sprawling Army base here in Killeen, the same post where an Army officer killed 13 people in 2009. On Thursday morning, the base announced that it was making counselors available and that a number of activities, including physical training, had been canceled for the day.

Nine of the 16 people wounded were taken to Scott & White Healthcare, a hospital in nearby Temple, Tex. for treatment, the authorities said. Three were in critical condition on Thursday. Hospital officials said doctors had operated on two patients — a man and a woman — who had sustained gunshot wounds to the abdomen and neck. The third person in critical condition has an abdominal injury.

The victims who had less serious injuries spent the night at the hospital with family members, Dr. Matthew Davis, the hospital’s director of trauma, said Thursday morning. “There was a lot of emotion seeing their loved ones last night,” he said. Some of the victims might be released as early as today, Dr. Davis said.

Fort Hood’s commanding general said Wednesday that the gunman had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The commander, Lt. Gen. Mark A. Milley, told reporters that the soldier’s motive remained unclear, but that the shooting did not appear to be related to terrorism.

General Milley said that although Specialist Lopez was being evaluated for post-traumatic stress disorder, no diagnosis had been made. There were indications that he had self-reported a traumatic brain injury when he returned from Iraq, General Milley said .

Reports of the shooting sent dozens of local, state and federal law enforcement officials rushing to the base as they had in November 2009. In Chicago, President Obama said that White House and Pentagon officials were following the events closely.

“We are going to get to the bottom of exactly what happened,” the president said. “We’re heartbroken something like this might have happened again.”

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, said that many questions remained but that officials’ focus was on supporting the victims and their families. “This is a community that has faced and overcome crises with resilience and strength,” he said in a statement.

The episode appeared to have unfolded around 4:30 p.m. at a medical support building. Witnesses described chaos as gunshots rang out.

The base was put on lockdown, as Army officials took to Twitter and Facebook to alert soldiers there to shelter in place and stay away from windows. The injured were transported to Fort Hood’s medical center and other area hospitals.

The authorities said Specialist Lopez appeared to have walked into one building, then gone inside a vehicle and fired shots from the vehicle with a .45-caliber Smith & Wesson semiautomatic pistol that had recently been bought in the Killeen area. He got out of the vehicle, walked into another building and opened fire again, and then engaged with a military police officer before shooting himself.

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He put his hands up, General Milley said, then reached under his jacket. The officer pulled out her weapon, and then Specialist Lopez put his weapon to his head and fired. General Milley described the officer’s actions as “clearly heroic.”

“She did her job,” he said. “She did exactly what we would expect of U.S. Army military police.”