[Vision2020] Suspect’s Past Fell Just Short of Raising Alarm [or: WTF?]

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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September 17, 2013
Suspect’s Past Fell Just Short of Raising Alarm By TRIP
GABRIEL<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/trip_gabriel/index.html>,
JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/joseph_goldstein/index.html>and
MICHAEL
S. SCHMIDT<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/michael_s_schmidt/index.html>

WASHINGTON — A month before a murderous rampage at the Washington Navy
Yard, Aaron Alexis called the police in Rhode Island to complain that he
had changed hotels three times because he was being pursued by people
keeping him awake by sending vibrations through the walls.

When officers came to his hotel room early on Aug. 7, Mr. Alexis told them
that a person he had argued with at an airport in Virginia “has sent three
people to follow him” and that they were harassing him with a microwave
machine, according to a Newport, R.I., police report. Mr. Alexis said he
had heard “voices speaking to him through the wall, flooring and ceiling,”
the report said.

Mr. Alexis told the police he was a Navy contractor, and then twice that
month he sought treatment from the Veterans Affairs Department for
psychiatric issues, according to a senior law enforcement official. But it
did not raise a red flag that might have prevented him from entering the
military base in Washington where, the authorities say, he killed 12 people
on Monday.

The episode in Rhode Island *adds to a growing list of questions* about how
Mr. Alexis, who had a history of infractions as a Navy reservist, mental
health problems and run-ins with the police over gun violence, gained and
kept a security clearance from the Defense Department that gave him access
to military bases, including the navy yard, where he was shot to death by
the police.

Time and again, Mr. Alexis’s behavior fell below a level that would have
brought a serious response, like a less-than-honorable discharge from the
military or involuntary commitment to a mental institution, experts and
officials said.

But the sheer number of episodes raises questions about the government’s
system for vetting people for security clearances, including the thousands
of contractors who help run the nation’s military and security system work.
Though the cases are different, the access granted Mr. Alexis, a former
Navy reservist who as an independent contractor serviced Navy computers,
raises questions similar to those raised about another outside government
contractor, Edward J. Snowden, who leaked national intelligence secrets.

“These two incidents combined suggest to me a very flawed system for
granting security clearances,” said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of
Maine, who called for a Congressional investigation into the granting of
security clearances to government contractors. “Who knows how many other
Snowdens and Aaron Alexises are out there?”

On Tuesday, President Obama ordered the White House budget office to
conduct a governmentwide review of policies for security clearances for
contractors and employees in federal agencies. In an interview with
Noticias Telemundo, the president said the nation did not have a “firm
enough background check system.” He also called once again for Congress to
enact legislation to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and those with
mental illness.

“I do get concerned that this becomes a ritual that we go through every
three, four months, where we have these horrific mass shootings,” he said.

Senior Pentagon officials also said that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel
intended to review physical security and access at all Defense Department
installations around the world.

Many planets aligned to place Mr. Alexis, 34, at the start of the workday
in the navy yard with a Remington pump-action shotgun, firing down from a
balcony, the police said, and killing the employees, all civilians.

As an honorably discharged veteran, he cleared a basic hurdle to receive a
Defense Department security pass. Despite his being investigated by police
departments in Seattle and Fort Worth, for firing a gun in anger, no
charges were filed that would have shown up in his F.B.I. fingerprint file.
Despite mental health issues — he twice went to Veterans Affairs hospitals
last month seeking treatment for insomnia — he was never committed and so
was legally able in Virginia to buy the weapon the police said he used in
the shootings.

“The system didn’t pick up the red flags because the red flags in this case
had not been fed into the system,” one Pentagon official said. “Perhaps we
need to look at the ‘filters,’ and whether some sorts of behaviors and
incidents, even if they do not rise to the level of punishment, should
nonetheless be part of the files for review.”

Law enforcement officials on Tuesday provided new details about the
shooting. They said that in addition to the shotgun Mr. Alexis was
carrying, he used a .45-caliber handgun that he may have picked up once
inside the Navy base.

The Washington police chief, Cathy Lanier, said that officers armed with
AR-15s were at the scene within two minutes of the first 911 call. But some
reported to the wrong building because callers had misidentified the
building. Chief Lanier said the entire shooting episode lasted at least 30
minutes.

The gunman was identified by an F.B.I. agent holding a machine to the
fingers of the dead body. Within seconds, it identified Mr. Alexis from
fingerprints on file because of his military service.

In the search for more information — and especially the unanswered question
of motive — federal and local authorities have interviewed hundreds of
people and are poring through the contents of Mr. Alexis’s Yahoo e-mail
account.

Mr. Alexis had shown a “pattern of misbehavior” during his four years as a
reservist, according to Navy officials. That pattern caused some of his
commanders to consider giving him a general discharge — one level below
honorable, which could have derailed his security clearance.

Instead, Mr. Alexis received an honorable discharge from the military in
January 2011, after he had applied for an early discharge under the Navy’s
“early enlisted transition program.” A major reason, officials said, was
that his misbehavior in the Navy was not violent. It included
insubordination, traffic violations and being absent without leave — two
days he spent in jail after a fight in a bar in DeKalb County, Ga.

Mr. Alexis was also twice investigated by other police departments in
shooting episodes — once for firing through his ceiling in Fort Worth,
Tex., and another time for shooting out a car’s tires in Seattle, during
what he described as an anger-fueled blackout.

Mr. Alexis, who worked for an independent contractor called the Experts,
worked on half a dozen military bases from North Carolina to Rhode Island
this year, said the company’s chief executive, Thomas E. Hoshko. If he had
known of the police reports about Mr. Alexis that have surfaced in the
news, “we would have never looked at him,” Mr. Hoshko said.

In any event, it was the responsibility of the Defense Department to grant
Mr. Alexis his security credential allowing him onto bases, known as a
Common Access Card. Pentagon officials said the Navy was responsible for
his clearance, using a check of F.B.I. records and another database with
the Office of Personnel Management.

Mr. Alexis left the Experts to attend school in January 2013, Mr. Hoshko
said, but returned in July, when he again passed a drug test and a
background check and received a secret clearance from the Defense
Department.

Mr. Alexis’s clearance was a midlevel designation required for many
military jobs, officials said. A secret clearance does not require as
extensive a background investigation as a top-secret clearance, can be
completed in one to three months and is good for 10 years. Among the
factors that can disqualify someone are conviction for a felony, illegal
drug use and financial problems.

Mr. Alexis’s father told the police after the Seattle shooting in 2004 that
his son suffered post-traumatic stress symptoms after volunteering in the
rescue after the attack on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

Colleagues who worked with Mr. Alexis at that time in a computer support
center at Manhattan Borough Community College, near ground zero, did not
recall him volunteering or mentioning Sept. 11.

One co-worker, Barry R. Williams, said Mr. Alexis had held onto grudges.
“Some small thing would happen, something so small I couldn’t even remember
the details, but two, three weeks later he’d still be bringing it up, be
upset about it,” Mr. Williams said.

In White Settlement, Tex., the Fort Worth suburb where Mr. Alexis lived in
recent years when he was not traveling for work, he told a friend, Melinda
Downs, that he had post-traumatic stress disorder, and that it caused him
to be withdrawn and suffer from insomnia. He once went three days without
sleep, said Ms. Downs, who owns a barber shop.

After the police in Newport responded to Mr. Alexis’ call for help on Aug.
7, a sergeant who reviewed the report, Frank C. Rosa Jr., contacted the
Newport naval base police and faxed a copy of Mr. Alexis’s wild statements.
It is unclear whether the account made it up the chain of command.

On Aug. 23, Mr. Alexis went to Veterans Affairs hospitals in Providence,
where he had been working as a contractor, complaining of insomnia but did
not say that he was hearing voices, according to a senior federal official.
Mr. Alexis said he could not sleep for more than a few hours. Doctors there
prescribed him an antidepressant pill commonly prescribed for insomnia,
Trazodone, the official said.

Five days later, Mr. Alexis went to a Veterans Affairs hospital in
Washington, where he had traveled to work on a job at the navy yard. Mr.
Alexis, who had not been given many Trazodone pills in Providence, said to
the medical personnel in Washington that he was still having trouble
sleeping and the doctors prescribed him more Trazodone, said the official.

In that meeting, Mr. Alexis told the medical personnel that he was not
using drugs, did not have suicidal thoughts, was not depressed or
particularly anxious, and was not having nightmares, the official said.

Reporting was contributed by Manny Fernandez and Lauren D’Avolio from Fort
Worth, Carl Hulse, Sarah Maslin Nir and Thom Shanker from Washington, Kirk
Johnson from Seattle, and Erica Goode, Timothy Williams, Ariel Kaminer and
Nate Schweber from New York.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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