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Alleged Gunman on Loose in Mount Rainier National Park plus Video
(ABC News) – The man suspected of killing a ranger at Mount Rainier National Park in Washington state apparently has died from exposure to the elements, according to police. Pierce County Sheriff’s spokesman Ed Troyer said the body they had located earlier today face-down in the snow without any identification is Benjamin Colton Barnes, 24, the sole suspect in Sunday’s shooting. “He was wearing T-shirt, a pair of jeans and one tennis shoe. That was it.”
Shortly before the discovery of the body, police said they had been honing in on Barnes’ location by following his footprints in chest-deep snow. Authorities said he had some survival training and appeared to be moving in and out of river beds to avoid being followed. Police said they did not know whether he had enough supplies to continue outpacing them.
Police had been searching the snowy park since early Sunday, using infrared radar, aircraft and ground units to try and track the suspect. Lee Taylor, a spokeswoman for the park, said 111 law enforcement officers from the National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, Washington State Patrol, FBI, and Pierce and Louis counties were assisting in the search.
Barnes is a military veteran who has a history of criminal violence, including threatening the mother of his child with guns during a bitter custody battle.
Continued below the fold …
Ex-soldier in Mount Rainier killing stationed at deeply troubled base
Barnes was from Riverside County, Calif., and as a teenager attended a community day school for expelled and troubled students, the Press-Enterprise newspaper reported.
Joint Base Lewis-McChord is a base ‘on the brink’
JOINT BASE LEWIS-MCCHORD, Wash. (StarsStripes/LA Times) Dec. 27, 2011 — Mary Coghill Kirkland said she asked her son, 21-year-old Spc. Derrick Kirkland, what was wrong as soon as he came back from his first deployment to Iraq in 2008.
He had a ready answer: “Mom, I’m a murderer.”
He told her how his team had kicked in the door of an Iraqi house and quickly shot a man inside. With the man now lying wounded on the floor, “my son got ordered by his sergeant to stand on his chest to make him bleed out faster,” Kirkland said. “He said, `We’ve got to move, and he’s got to die before we move.’ “
Not long after, Derrick told her, he had fallen asleep on guard duty, awakening as a car was driving through his checkpoint. He yelled for it to stop, but the family in the car spoke no English. “So my son shot up the car,” she said.
Summing up her son’s mental state after that deployment, Kirkland says: “What’s a nice word for saying that he was completely (messed) up?”
BASE ON THE BRINK
“At 24 years of age, a soldier, on average, has moved from home, family and friends and has resided in two other states; has traveled the world (deployed); been promoted four times; bought a car and wrecked it; married and had children; has had relationship and financial problems; seen death; is responsible for dozens of soldiers; maintains millions of dollars worth of equipment; and gets paid less than $40,000 a year,” Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli said in a report last year.
Here at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, described by the independent military newspaper Stars and Stripes last year as “the most troubled base in the military,” all of these factors have crystallized into what some see as a community-wide crisis. A local veterans group calls it a “base on the brink.”
Joint Base Lewis-McChord rocked by scandal
(StarsStripes) Dec. 27, 2010 — Plagued by one scandal after another, from violent mental breakdowns to steroid abuse and allegations of killing for sport, Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state this year developed a reputation as the most troubled base in the military. As the year wound down, the Army was conducting a top-to-bottom review of the 5th Stryker Brigade amid reports of misconduct from a wide swath of its soldiers and a failure of its leaders to curtail the issues.
Most disturbing has been the revelation that a dozen soldiers are linked to accusations of war crimes stemming from a recent tour in Afghanistan. Five of those soldiers are charged with murder in the deaths of three innocent Afghans. Some soldiers also allegedly mutilated corpses and took body parts for trophies. Base leadership has been accused of failing to act when the parents of one soldier passed on warnings after their son told them about one murder and acknowledged that he was aware of plans to commit more killings.
More than 14,000 servicemembers returned from deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan to the base, which has one of the most robust medical facilities in the country. But the Madigan medical center was accused of turning away National Guard soldiers seeking mental health care.
Army Soldier Ruben Colon Accused of Waterboarding Foster Son for Wetting the Bed
June 7, 2011 – Numbers were exactly what the Army needed when Andrews joined in May 2007 as it struggled to meet recruiting goals. He’d dropped out of high school after his sophomore year, but he enlisted as one of a vanguard of new recruits who came in with GEDs instead of high school diplomas. He went to court to get charges of assault and vandalism dismissed before he could head to Fort Benning, Ga., for basic training, at a time when the Army accepted thousands of recruits who’d had minor criminal trouble.
STATISTICS, JUST A NUMBER
Later, when the Army chaptered him out, Andrews joined a rising number of troubled soldiers quickly separated with general discharges or worse. Andrews was one of 8,175 soldiers separated from the military for misconduct in fiscal year 2010, up 42 percent from 2006.
Finally, when he killed himself last month, he became part of the grimmest military statistic of modern times: one of the 18 U.S. veterans, on average, who commits suicide each day.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."