For nearly 17 years, the families of the 13 people killed at Fort Hood have waited for the military justice system to finish what a courtroom in Texas began. This week, that wait moved closer to an end.
President Donald Trump has approved death by firing squad for Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army major turned domestic terrorist whose 2009 shooting rampage at the central Texas post remains the worst mass shooting at a military installation in American history. The decision, disclosed in a statement from Sean Parnell, follows a formal recommendation from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and clears the procedural path for an execution method the military has not carried out in more than six decades.
It is, by any measure, an extraordinary coda to a case that has tested the patience of survivors, the endurance of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the politics of capital punishment in a modern democracy.
A November Afternoon in Texas
The story that brought the country to this moment began at 1:34 p.m. on Nov. 5, 2009, inside the Soldier Readiness Center, a low-slung building where troops gathered for routine medical checks before shipping out to Afghanistan.
Hasan, then a 39-year-old Army psychiatrist, walked through the north door carrying an FN Five-seven semi-automatic pistol fitted with two laser sights, one red and one green, and an older Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolver he would never use. He asked a soldier at the front desk for an officer named Maj. Parrish, who had been helping him prepare for deployment. When the soldier left to find him, Hasan slipped behind the desk, bowed his head for several seconds as if in prayer, then stood and shouted the words that would define the massacre.
Allahu Akbar. God is great.
Then he opened fire.
The first shots were indiscriminate, witnesses later told investigators. Then Hasan began picking off individual soldiers, methodically, the red and green dots of his laser sight sweeping the room before each trigger pull. Army Reserve Capt. John P. Gaffney charged at him and was mortally wounded before he could close the distance. Civilian physician assistant Michael Cahill of Cameron, Texas, rushed Hasan with a chair and was shot dead. Army Spc. Logan Burnett threw a table and was hit in the left hip, then crawled to the cover of a nearby cubicle.
Inside the building, the carnage unfolded with a speed that overwhelmed the people who tried to stop it. Deputy Director of Human Resources Lt. Col. Tom Eberhart arrived within minutes and later recalled stepping over bodies to enter through the north door, folding chairs strewn across the waiting area. He helped a soldier perform CPR on a wounded man, then noticed another soldier outside the south doors and went to help him.
Staff Sgt. Alonzo Lunsford, a medical assistant, lay unconscious with two wounds to his abdomen and a third to his scalp. Eberhart commandeered a table, and he and other soldiers lifted Lunsford onto it and carried him inside to triage.
The Gunfight Outside
Hasan had moved outside by then, still firing at soldiers as he went. He had several opportunities to shoot civilians, investigators noted, but for the most part chose not to, preferring uniformed targets. At one point, according to an Army Criminal Investigation Division report, he approached a group of five civilians hiding under a desk, swept the dot of his pistol's laser sight over one man's face, and turned away without firing.
It was outside the building that the rampage finally met resistance. Civilian police Sgt. Kimberly Munley encountered Hasan and the two exchanged gunfire. Shrapnel wounded Munley in the hand, then two bullets struck her, one in the thigh and one in the knee. Hasan walked up to her, kicked her pistol out of reach, but did not kill her.
The end came moments later. Herman Toro, director of the Soldier Readiness Center, arrived as Hasan rounded an outside corner, still shooting. Toro and another worker rushed to help Lt. Col. Juanita Warman, who lay wounded on the ground north of the building. They grabbed her by the arms and were trying to carry her to safety when Hasan returned. The red dot of his laser sight danced across Toro's chest, but he did not fire. Toro took cover behind an electrical box.
From there, Toro watched as civilian police Sgt. Mark Todd arrived, confronted Hasan and shouted commands to surrender. Hasan turned and fired at Todd, then Todd and Hasan exchanged gunfire until Hasan emptied his weapon. As Hasan reached for another magazine, Todd felled him with five shots, ran over, kicked the pistol from his hand and handcuffed him as he fell unconscious.
Within about 10 minutes, the shooting was over. The toll was not. Of the 13 killed, 11 died at the scene and two more died later in hospital. One of the dead was pregnant; her unborn child, who also perished, has never been individually counted among the victims. More than 30 others were wounded.
A Man Prepared to Kill More
The investigation that followed was sprawling, drawing in military investigators, civilian police, Texas Rangers, state troopers, Bell County sheriff's deputies and FBI agents from field offices in San Antonio, Austin and Waco. What they found was a killer who had planned the attack with chilling deliberation.
On July 31, 2009, Hasan walked into a gun store and asked, according to a regular customer named Army Spc. William Gilbert, for the most technologically advanced weapon on the market and the one with the highest standard magazine capacity. When asked what he wanted it for, Hasan refused to answer. He left, said he wanted to research the weapon, and returned the next day to buy it.
Over the following weeks he visited the store once a week to buy extra magazines, accumulating 3,000 rounds of 5.7x28mm SS192 and SS197SR ammunition. He practiced at an outdoor range in Florence, Texas, honing his accuracy on silhouette targets at distances of up to 100 yards.
None of the soldiers at the readiness center were armed; the Army prohibits troops from carrying personal weapons while in uniform. When medics finally reached Hasan at the scene, one reported that he was still carrying 177 rounds of unfired ammunition in his pockets, stowed in 20- and 30-round magazines. Investigators counted 146 spent shell casings inside the building and 68 more outside, accounting for 214 rounds fired by Hasan or the officers who subdued him.
The Trial, and a Defendant Who Helped the Prosecution
Hasan's wounds left him paralyzed from the waist down, but they did not slow the machinery of military justice. He was charged with 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted murder under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and flown to the Bell County Jail, which had to build a hospital intensive care unit in its infirmary to house him for nearly four years before trial.
The court-martial began on Aug. 7, 2013, with Hasan acting as his own attorney, a decision that would prove decisive in its own strange way. In his opening statement, he admitted he was the gunman. He had told a judge beforehand that he had gunned down the soldiers at Fort Hood because they were being deployed to protect Muslims and Taliban leaders in Afghanistan. He called no witnesses, presented only scant evidence and made no closing argument.
On Aug. 23, 2013, the 13-member panel of senior officers found him guilty of all 42 counts. Five days later, they set his punishment at death. Hasan, dressed in Army fatigues, showed no reaction. Had the decision not been unanimous, he would have been sentenced to life in prison instead. The panel also stripped him of pay and other financial benefits, which he had continued to receive while in custody before conviction.
Hasan was then flown to the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he became one of six service members awaiting execution on the military's death row.
A Method Unused for Decades
What stood between Hasan's sentence and its execution was not the verdict, which was never seriously in doubt, but the method. The military has not put a service member to death since 1961, when Army Pvt. John A. Bennett was hanged for rape and attempted murder. The long pause reflects both the complexity of military appellate review and a broader national ambivalence about capital punishment that has only deepened in the years since.
The firing squad itself occupies a particular place in the American imagination, associated more with the battlefields of earlier centuries than the sterile execution chambers of the modern era. Its revival as a method of execution has been driven in part by the growing difficulty states have faced in obtaining the drugs used in lethal injections, and in part by a belief among some proponents that it is, paradoxically, more humane, a faster death than a botched intravenous injection.
For the families of the Fort Hood dead, the debate over method has always sat at an uncomfortable distance from the debate over meaning. The massacre was initially classified by the Obama administration as an act of workplace violence, a designation that denied victims the combat-related benefits and Purple Hearts many believed they were owed, and that survivors fought for years to overturn. The reclassification, when it finally came, was seen by many as a belated acknowledgment of what the evidence had shown from the first shot: that the attack was, in the language of the law, an act of terrorism.
The Politics of an Execution
Mr. Trump's decision now places that long history in the hands of a president who has made the death penalty a central theme of his law-and-order agenda, and who has shown little patience for the procedural delays that have defined military capital cases for two generations.
Defense Secretary Hegseth, whose recommendation preceded the president's approval, has been equally outspoken, arguing that the military justice system has failed the victims of Fort Hood through delay and indecision. The statement from Mr. Parnell framed the decision in the language of closure: nearly 17 years later, the pain of the victims and their families is still real.
Legal challenges remain likely. Death sentences in the military system are subject to layered appellate review, and any execution would require the president to set a date, a step that has historically been the point at which military capital cases have stalled. Whether this case breaks that pattern will depend on courts, on the military's own review process and on a president who has shown a willingness to test the boundaries of executive authority.
For now, though, the path is clear in a way it has not been for nearly two decades. At Fort Leavenworth, a paralyzed man in a cell waits for a decision that, for the first time since 2013, has the weight of a sitting president behind it. In Texas, at a post since renamed Fort Cavazos but still known to a generation of soldiers by its old name, the families of the dead wait, too.
Both have been waiting a long time.
