Texas shooting suspect no longer on ventilator
Last Updated: Saturday, November 7, 2009 | 9:46 PM ET
CBC News
The suspect in the 13-death shooting at a Texas military base has been taken off a ventilator but is still in intensive care at a military hospital, a U.S. army spokeman says.
Spokesman Col. John Rossi told reporters Saturday night that he did not know if Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan can communicate.
Hasan was shot four times — including at least once in the torso — by two civilian officers after Thursday's rampage.
Rossi said Hasan, a military mental health doctor, had been slated for deployment to Afghanistan in late November. There were earlier reports that he was scheduled to be sent to Iraq but didn't want to go.
Thirteen people — 12 soldiers and one civilian — were killed and 30 wounded at Fort Hood on Thursday when a gunman opened fire in a room crowded with hundreds of soldiers. The dead included a pregnant woman.
Seventeen victims who received gunshot wounds remain in hospital, Rossi said.
Long-term trauma likely
Meanwhile, the head of surgery at one of the hospitals said Saturday that some of the survivors may never completely recover from their injuries and may suffer from long-lasting psychological trauma.
Roy Smythe, chairman of surgery at Scott & White Memorial Hospital in Temple, where some of the victims are being treated, said progress has been seen in most of them.
Of the original 10 patients admitted to his hospital, four have gone home. Six had been in the surgical intensive-care unit, Smythe said, but on Saturday only two remained there.
Those in the ICU were no longer on ventilators and were considered stable.
"I would say that some of them are out of the woods, but some of them — again their injuries are so severe that only time will tell how they’ll do in the long run,” he said.
"Some of these patients are young and sometimes young patients will surprise you in regards to their rehabilitation. But there is a possibility that some of these patients will be physically impaired for the rest of their life.
"And there's certainly no doubt that many of them will be psychogically impaired the rest of their lives."
U.S. President Barack Obama used his Saturday morning radio and internet address to pay tribute to those killed at the military base, calling the shooting a "crime against our nation."
"It is an act of violence that would have been heartbreaking had it occurred anyplace in America," Obama said. "It is a crime that would have horrified us had its victims been Americans of any background. But it's all the more heartbreaking and all the more despicable because of the place where it occurred and the patriots who were its victims."
Six of the 13 people killed at Fort Hood, from top left: Specialist Jason Dean Hunt, 22, of Oklahoma; Sgt. Amy Krueger, 29, of Wisconsin; Pte. Aaron Thomas Nemelka, 19, of Utah; Pte. Michael Pearson, 21, of Illinois; Russell Seager, 51, of Wisconsin; and Francheska Velez, 21, of Chicago. Velez was pregnant and preparing to return home. (Associated Press) The casualty toll could have been much higher if two civilian police officers had not intervened, officials told reporters Friday.
Police Sgt. Kimberly Munley was directing traffic on the base when she got the call. She was at the shooting scene in less than four minutes, said army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey.
Munley is listed in stable condition following surgery Friday after being shot at least three times.
Another police officer, Senior Sgt. Mark Todd, saw Munley lying on the ground and also fired at the suspect, who was hiding at the side of the building where the massacre took place, a deployment processing centre.
It's not clear whose bullets hit the suspect.
In his radio address, Obama praised those who stopped the suspect and those who tended to the injured for their "valour, selflessness and unity of purpose."
"We saw soldiers and civilians alike rushing to aid fallen comrades, tearing off bullet-riddled clothes to treat the injured, using blouses as tourniquets, taking down the shooter even as they bore wounds themselves," Obama said.
"We saw soldiers bringing to bear on our own soil the skills they had been trained to use abroad — skills that been honed through years of determined effort for one purpose and one purpose only: to protect and defend the United States of America."
With files from The Associated Press
