Posted on 11/06/2009 4:49:23 AM PST by Perseverando
The suspect, a Virginia Tech graduate and one-time Vinton resident, was shot but survived at Fort Hood, Texas.
Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of shooting 12 people to death and wounding 31 others at Fort Hood, Texas, on Thursday, was the son of Roanoke merchants and restaurateurs, lived in Vinton and graduated from Virginia Tech.
Hasan was born in Arlington to Palestinian immigrants from near Jerusalem who later settled in Vinton.
Neighbors on Vinton's Ramada Road remembered him as a "studious" boy who went by "Michael."
While his brother Eyad -- "Eddie" -- would play football with Zachary Garlick, 21, who lived across the street, Michael didn't come out to play much.
"Michael was more school and less play," said Zachary Garlick. "He'd get home and he'd have his book bag, and he'd go straight inside."
That quiet demeanor and apparent social awkwardness would follow Hasan into adulthood.
Hasan's family settled in an apartment on Lancelot Lane off Cove Road in Northwest Roanoke, the 1987 Roanoke City Directory shows.
Hasan's father, Malik Awadallah Hasan, immigrated from Palestine to Virginia in 1962, when he was 16, stories in the Times' archives show. He moved to Roanoke in 1985, with his wife, Hanan Ismail "Nora" Hasan, following in 1986. Neighbors on Ramada Road said they moved to the Vinton neighborhood in the early 1990s.
The Hasans ran the infamous Capitol Restaurant on the Roanoke City Market from 1987 to 1995. It was a dive beer hall and diner with a bad reputation and a lot of down-and-out regulars. The Hasans closed the Capitol to open the short-lived, Mediterranean-themed Mount Olive on Jefferson Street.
The Hasans also owned the Community Grocery Store on Elm Avenue in Roanoke.
Shabo Karkenny bought the Elm Avenue property from the Hasan family, including Nidal and his brothers, Eyad and Anas, in 2006.
Karkenny said Thursday he met Nidal Hasan once, when he came into the store earlier this year and the two chatted briefly.
Karkenny said he was surprised to see the same man's picture on the news Thursday, identified as the suspect in the Texas shootings.
Hasan's father died in 1998. Neighbors on Ramada Road said he died of a heart attack in the house. Hasan's mother died three years later. Neighbors said she had kidney disease.
The Garlicks said Nidal Hasan went to Virginia Western, and The Roanoke Times archives show he graduated from Virginia Tech in 1995.
He went on to the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences' F. Edward Hebert School of Medicine in Bethesda, Md., where he finished in 2003. He did his residency at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., through 2007.
He was also a fellow at the Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress at the Bethesda military medical school, where he was a fellow in disaster and preventive psychiatry.
The Associated Press reported he commissioned in the Army as a captain and was promoted to major in May.
Virginia Tech, however, had no record of Hasan's participation in its Corps of Cadets or ROTC program. The Washington Post reported he enlisted in the Army after high school.
"His parents didn't want him to go into the military," said Nader Hasan, a cousin in Northern Virginia. "He said, 'No, I was born and raised here, I'm going to do my duty to the country.' "
"He would tell us the military was his life," Hasan's aunt, Noel Hasan of Falls Church, told the Post. He "did not make many friends."
He was unmarried and had no children. Colleagues at Walter Reed reported he shied away from contact with women.
He remained a devout Muslim, praying daily at the Muslim Community Center in Silver Spring, Md., sometimes arriving in his Army fatigues.
Since Sept. 11, 2001, the aunt said, he had been harassed about his Muslim faith and sought to be discharged from the military.
He went as far as retaining a lawyer to see if he could get out of the Army before his contract was up, The Associated Press reported.
While an intern at Walter Reed, Hasan had some "difficulties" that required counseling and extra supervision, said Dr. Thomas Grieger, who was the training director at the time.
Grieger told The Associated Press that privacy laws prevented him from going into details but noted that the problems had to do with Hasan's interactions with patients. He recalled Hasan as a "mostly very quiet" person who never spoke ill of the military or his country.
Others reported Hasan was plain-spoken about his opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He told a former Army colleague, Col. Terry Lee, "Muslims should stand up and fight against the aggressor," Lee told Fox News.
Hasan was also deeply distressed by his impending deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan, family members said.
While he worked to aid people scarred by war, that work in turn scarred Hasan.
"He must have snapped," Noel Hasan said. "They ignored him. It was not hard to know when he was upset. He was not a fighter, even as a child and young man. But when he became upset, his face turns red. You can read him in his face."
Staff writers Tonia Moxley and Amanda Codispoti, news researcher Belinda Harris, online producer Jordan Fifer, The Washington Post and The Associated Press contributed information to this story.
Actually they will probably try to ram more gun control probably down our throats with Rahm leading the way, so Obama doesn’t get the flak.
Get ‘em all out of our military and out of this country.
He was a MILITARY DOCTOR- A MILITARY PSYCHIATRIST
he KNEW every reason for medical discharge!
Criminy. Prolly to avoid deployment all he had to do was prescribe himself antidepressants or antipsychotic meds.
Used to be they pulled your clearance if you even admitted you “might” need mental counseling, and officers required a MINIMUM SECRET clearance to perform their duties
And if in today’s Army those reasons do NOT disqualifty someone from being armed 24/7 stateside, and then sent into a war zone- we need to KNOW, NOW
Not to be pedantic but.... 1967 was the Six-Day War, when the Jordanians foolishly joined the Egyptians and Syrians in attacking Israel, mostly whipped up by Nasser. It was in that conflict that the Israelis fully recaptured Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights.
The Yom Kippur War took place in 1973.
In 1946 the British-administered Palestinian Mandate still existed, so it is not inaccurate to say Hasan's parents were from Palestine.
Funny that, huh?
That and being brainwashed by a Death Cult that wants to kill infidels. Sorta like the Establishmedia PC brainwashing.
Pray for America and Ft Hood
I served as a naval officer 1965-72, including a year in Vietnam and another 8 months off the coast. I never heard of security clerances being pulled because someone "might need" mental counseling. Moreover, people who refused to go into a combat zone were given a general or dishonorable discharge depending upon the circumstances along with a judicial proceeding.
hmm, well I used to be an SSO, so I may have known why a few folks got detailed to work only in unsecure areas
this was in the 80’s. I knew plenty of folks who sucked it up rather than risk their careers by admitting they needed help.
however, in my 10 years of joint service, I got to see that the Navy was sometimes “different” in what it accepted- especially field grade officers :-)
We are at war. I doubt that it is that easy to get out of the service for any reason. This guy had never even been deployed anywhere overseas from what I have read about him.
Then there is only one reason for them to be here - jihad. Why else come to a country you dislike, even hate?
The media have for years totally distorted the goings on of Communism. A NYT's writer, Walter Duranty, received the Pulitzer Prize in Literature for the lies he reported about the USSR and Josef Stalin during WWII, saying it was indeed a workers' paradise.
Immediately after WWII the Communists expanded their goal of world domination by seizing Eastern Europe and fomenting discord among the Arabs and the West. The creation of Israel in 1949 was prime fuel for that schism.
Imams were/are trained at Mohammad University in Moscow in the tactics of Communists ways of disrupting a society. Capturing the media is one of the first things they do. Then the universities.
Read David Horowitz's Unholy Alliance" to get more details.
Well I have to think you are a typical racist “Christian” who spends more time worrying about Islam than about your children.
Stereotyping sucks huh.
This isn’t sociological, it’s political. Allah Akhbar does not translate to ‘I am an Amish pacifist’.
and we will never hear a thing about it. Refused to be disclosed due to National Security issues.
Is it OK if we sterotype cowardly pigs who shout Allah Akhbar before murdering 13 unarmed soldiers as a Muslim terrorist?
Worrying about Islam’s deisre for radical takeover of the U.S. IS WORRYING ABOUT MY CHILDREN!!! Since your statement is illogical, I take no offense to it.
Here’s another: Two mohammedans shoot ten people in Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia.
Mind-numbed Robot, you are correct. Ciwwaf, I do not believe it is a stereotype when I am speaking from my own experience of what I observed among a majority of my students. They literally screamed at me when I called them Americans (even though the ones screaming were born in Ypsilanti, Mich.) They defended bin Laden and suicide bombers.
I have to assume from your rude comment that you must truly think I am speaking as a knee-jerk reaction. To the contrary, teaching at that school is a large part of what turned me into a conservative. I started teaching there feeling very sympathetic toward Muslims. I was quite shocked at the extent of the anti-American sentiment among these Muslim-Americans. I fail to see how this is stereotyping. It makes me think that you don't really understand the extent of the threat here within our borders.
The only innacurate racist stereotype of Muslims is the one that portrays them as peaceful, innocent immigrants, akin to the Europeans entering through Ellis Island a hundred years ago. This stereotype defies all logic, common sense, experience, and evidence to the contrary.
Muzzies should never be allowed into this country. They can never really be citizens, because their true allegiance is to the Ummah, and their religion requires them to undertake jihad on its behalf.
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