Posted on 08/27/2013 5:52:51 AM PDT by don-o
FORT HOOD —
Monday’s gut-wrenching testimony from Maj. Nidal Hasan’s victims — those he shot and the survivors of those he killed — was enough to test anybody’s opposition to the death penalty.
And it was more than enough to test anybody’s ability to withhold tears.
It was brutal testimony, sometimes in great detail about final meals and final photos and memories of officers knocking on doors to bring news of the death of loved ones.
Angela Rivera of Tucson told of how, for years after the shooting, she’d listen to her late husband Maj. Libardo Caraveo’s voice-mail greeting on his cell phone, a greeting that disappeared recently when Sprint upgraded the system.
It was a day when witnesses’ family photos were displayed as something they never were intended to be – prosecution exhibits. It also was a day when emotions could be triggered by a simple statement of fact.
“He was my son,” Karen Nourse of Johnson City, Tenn., said of Spc. Frederick Greene, who died in the 2009 Fort Hood shootings.
Witness after witness, memory after memory, it was difficult testimony to hear. Let’s all hope it was even more difficult for Hasan, who asked for and was granted two 15-minute recesses during the morning testimony. Later, he made this request to Col. Tara Osborn, the judge who has been accommodating to Hasan: “Given that it’s about one o’clock I move that we break early for lunch.”
This time, without a pause, Osborn turned to prosecutors and told them to call their next witness.
I found myself silently cheering for her, hoping that Hasan was, at the least, uncomfortable as he was forced to listen to the horror of his deeds for about another hour before Osborn called a recess.
The next witness was Mick Engnehl of Killeen, a private when Hasan shot him in the neck and shoulder, leaving his right arm severely restricted. As with each witness, the prosecution asked Engnehl, now unemployed, how the shooting changed his life.
“Nobody is going to hire a paralyzed mechanic,” Engnehl said. “I am 23, sir.”
It also was a day for witnesses to recall little things about lost loved ones. “My husband was a forever pen clicker,” Cindy Seager said of Capt. Russel Seager. Gale Hunt of Wausa, Nebraska, said her late son Spc. Jason Hunt “almost never cried as a baby.”
Many of Monday’s witnesses cried, but Jennifer Hunt of Noble, Okla., Hunt’s widow, managed to laugh at times as she recalled her husband of two and a half months. What strength, I thought, incorrectly perceiving that she somehow had found a way to move on and lean on happy memories.
But her final words showed how wrong I was. She said her two young daughters have “been doing really well for kids.”
“Me, on the other hand. I pretty much lost my mind for awhile. I got suicidal. I have had two suicide attempts,” Hunt said. “We’re barely making it.”
Some of the testimony from Cristi Greene of Nashville, Tenn., Spc. Greene’s widow, was difficult to hear. She began crying as soon as she took the witness stand.
“You can go about your normal life,” Osborn told Greene as she finished her testimony. The judge, who said a similar thing to each witness as their testimony ended, meant nothing by it.
For these souls, normal life ended Nov. 5, 2009, as a result of Hasan’s madness.
Why is this terrorist butcher still being refereed to with his military title.........he deserves just to be called piece of s#it Hasan
"Army Major (Hasan) Played Role in Presidential (Obama) Transition"
Hasan’s “case”?! What case?
Since they’re not going to kill him, is there a prison pig farm anywhere that he could be sentenced to?
“Hasan’s madness”
My foot. Hasan is a normal functioning Muslim of sound mind whose Koranic injunction was to kill what he regards as “infidels”. He did his job as a jihadi, nothing more, nothing less. And there are lots of these devils out there.
The judge’s cold indifference to the victims’ suffering is almost as cruel. It reflects the attitude of the regime & is the result of orders from above.
Big time.
Tim McVeigh murdered federal employees and was tried, sentenced and executed quickly.
Hassan, a jihadi muslim murdered federal employees and he is accommodated at every turn, his trial is delayed time and time again.
When sentenced to death, this jihadi scum should be wheeled to the middle of the Ft. Hood parade ground, cuffed to the flagpole, dumped out of his wheelchair, shot in the belly with the same .22 magnum pistol he used and then left to the mercy of the central Texas ants.
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