Suspect in Afghanistan shootings identified

Reporting from Seattle —  The man suspected of shooting, stabbing and burning 16 sleeping villagers in a horrific attack that has sparked fury across Afghanistan was identified Friday as Staff Sgt. Robert Bales — a 38-year-old father of two whose life in the suburbs of Washington state was marked by Army potlucks, Sunday brunches with his in-laws and a Disney cruise with his wife and children.

“They seemed like a very normal family. He was always really gentle with his kids. He was full of life and seemed like a happy guy for the most part,” said family friend Kassie Holland as news rocketed through the blue-collar towns around Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Tacoma. Bales’ unit is based there when not on deployment in Iraq or Afghanistan.

“His daughter is such a daddy’s girl,” Holland said. “I never saw him angry…. I was just completely blown away when I heard about this.”

Bales was flown Friday from Kuwait to Ft. Leavenworth, Kan. Army officials said Friday night that Bales would be held in a special private cell, not one of the four-person bays in which most detainees reside. They said he would be allowed time outside the cell for hygiene and recreation.

His lawyer, Seattle attorney John Henry Browne, was hoping to meet with him next week. He’ll attempt to glean a picture of how Bales, whom Browne described as a “highly decorated” combat veteran with a clean service record, could have become the central suspect in one of the worst military crimes to emerge during the nation’s two conflicts of the last decade.

Military officials at Lewis-McChord have remained tight-lipped about the case and forbade other soldiers from talking about Bales. The sergeant’s wife, Karilyn, and their 4-year-old daughter and 3-year-old son have been brought to the heavily secured base out of fear of possible reprisals.

But a faint picture has begun to emerge of the couple’s life in the four-bedroom house they bought in 2005 in Lake Tapps, east of Tacoma. When not at work on the base, Bales often was seen there, playing outside with his children or preparing for jaunts on the family’s boat.

In a blog she kept for several years, Karilyn described a typical life of an Army wife, marking many of the milestones of her children’s lives while her husband was on the other side of the Earth — he called from Kuwait shortly after the birth of their first child in 2006, and managed to come home two days later.

“Bob … cannot stand to wait for anything. Patience is not one of his virtues, especially when it comes to surprises,” she wrote.

Her recollections of his months at home between his four combat tours are full of Army potlucks, dinners at friends’ homes, visits to the water park with the kids, and preparing Impossibly Easy Taco Pie for dinner. The family took a Disney cruise to the Bahamas in February 2009, stopping on the way back to visit family in Florida.

The story is not one of long-term suburban bliss. Court records examined by the Tacoma News Tribune suggest that Bales was charged with misdemeanor assault in 2002, before he married Karilyn, a case that was dismissed when he completed an anger management assessment. In 2008, court records show, Bales was spotted bloodied and running from the scene of a single-car rollover accident, the newspaper said.

In military publications, Bales is portrayed as calm and compassionate. He was part of the intense “Battle of Zarqa” near Najaf, Iraq, in 2007, when the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment moved in to recover a downed Apache helicopter, according to a detailed account in Lewis-McChord’s Northwest Guardian publication.

In two days of fighting, 250 Shiite militiamen were killed and 81 people were wounded — but not a single American was among them. After the battle, the Guardian reported, Bales was among the soldiers who realized that civilians had been caught up in the violence.

“Once we started clearing the town, we actually started carrying people back out,” said Bales, who by then was leading a platoon that was part of the 3rd Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division. “We’d go in, find some people that we could help, because there were a bunch of dead people we couldn’t, throw them on a litter and bring them out to the casualty collection point.”

Afterward, Bales went to work at infantry headquarters, and shared his recollections of the fight.

“I’ve never been more proud to be a part of this unit than that day,” he said, “for the simple fact that we discriminated between the bad guys and the noncombatants, and then afterward we ended up helping the people that three or four hours before were trying to kill us.

“I think that’s the real difference between being an American, as opposed to being a bad guy, someone who puts his family in harm’s way like that.”

Eventually, Bales suffered two serious injuries in Iraq, one a head injury that occurred when his vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb, another that required the removal of part of his foot.

By the time he deployed to Afghanistan on Dec. 3 — his first combat tour in Afghanistan after three in Iraq — he had already been assured that his war deployments were over, and he was hoping to become a military recruiter. But the new assignment came up quickly without notice, and on Feb. 1 Bales was sent to support a village security operation being conducted by special forces troops.

What happened there is the subject of an Army Criminal Investigation Division inquiry that could, Army officials have said, lead to the death penalty.

News reports, quoting unnamed U.S. officials, have suggested that domestic problems, alcohol and stress were probably factors in the March 11 nighttime attack.

Browne strongly denied that Bales was having any trouble in his marriage, but said it would be understandable to be under stress in a small military outpost in the midst of war in southern Afghanistan.

Compounding that, he said, was a serious injury sustained by one of Bales’ fellow soldiers the day before the shootings. “His leg was blown off, and my client was standing next to him,” he told the Associated Press.

Holland said that the last time she saw Bales, he and his wife had come in with the children for pizza at the restaurant where she works.

“It was good,” she said. “They came in for a family dinner, everybody happy.”

[email protected]

Times staff writers Stephen Ceasar, Dalina Castellanos and Rick Rojas in Los Angeles contributed to this report.