November 5

This Day in History

Also on This Day

Lead Story
George Foreman becomes oldest heavyweight champ, 1994
American Revolution
Washington condemns Guy Fawkes festivities, 1775
Automotive
George Selden patents gas-powered car, 1895
Civil War
President Lincoln removes General McClellan, 1862
Cold War
Richard Nixon elected president, 1968
Crime
Army major kills 13 people in Fort Hood shooting spree, 2009
Disaster
Philippines struggles with severe flooding, 1991
General Interest
Mughal victory assures Akbar's ascension, 1556
King James learns of gunpowder plot, 1605
Wilson wins landslide victory, 1912
An American Nobel Prize in Literature, 1930
Jewish extremist assassinated in New York, 1990
Hollywood
Writers strike stalls production of TV shows, movies, 2007
Literary
Willa Cather starts writing for the Nebraska State Journal, 1893
Music
Samuel Barber's Adagio For Strings receives its world premiere on NBC radio, 1938
Old West
300 Santee Sioux sentenced to hang in Minnesota, 1862
Presidential
George W. Bush marries Laura Welch in Midland, Texas, 1977
Sports
George Foreman becomes oldest heavyweight champ in history, 1994
Vietnam War
Nixon wins presidential election, 1968
U.S. combat deaths down, 1970
World War I
Battle of Tanga ends in defeat for British colonial troops, 1914
World War II
FDR re-elected president, 1940

Crime

Nov 5, 2009:

Army major kills 13 people in Fort Hood shooting spree

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On this day in 2009, 13 people are killed and 32 others are wounded when a U.S. Army officer goes on a shooting rampage at Fort Hood in central Texas. The bloody assault was allegedly carried out by Major Nidal Hasan, an Army psychiatrist.

Early in the afternoon of November 5, 39-year-old Hasan, armed with two pistols, allegedly shouted “Allahu Akbar” (Arabic for “God is great”) and then opened fire at a crowd inside a Fort Hood processing center where soldiers who were about to be deployed overseas or were returning from deployment received medical screenings. The massacre, which left 12 service members and one Department of Defense employee dead, lasted approximately 10 minutes before Hasan was shot by civilian police and taken into custody.
 
The Virginia-born Hasan was the son of Palestinian immigrants who ran a Roanoke restaurant and convenience store and entered active military duty following his 1995 graduation from Virginia Tech University. In 2003, he completed his psychiatry training at the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland, and went on to work at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, D.C., treating soldiers returning from war with post-traumatic stress disorder. In May 2009, he was promoted to the rank of major in the Army, and that July, was transferred to Fort Hood. Located near the city of Killeen, Fort Hood, which includes 340 square miles of facilities and homes, is the largest active-duty U.S. military post. At the time of the shootings, more than 50,000 military personnel lived and worked there, along with thousands more family members and civilian personnel.

The motivation for the massacre at Fort Hood remains unclear. At the time of the shootings, Hasan was facing deployment to a combat zone in Afghanistan or Iraq, about which he apparently had voiced reluctance. Additionally, several years prior to the attack, he told relatives he wanted to leave the Army, where he believed he was harassed for being a Muslim. In the aftermath of the shootings, reviews by the Pentagon and a U.S. Senate panel found Hasan’s superiors had continued to promote him despite the fact that concerns had been raised over his behavior, which suggested he had become a radical and potentially violent Islamic extremist. Among other things, he reportedly publicly defended Osama bin Laden and said America’s war on terror was really a war against Islam. Prior to the Fort Hood rampage, government authorities reportedly also learned Hasan had repeated communication with Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical cleric and proponent of violent jihad against America; however, this information about Hasan was apparently not reported to the Army.

Hasan, who is paralyzed from the waist down as a result of shots fired at him by police attempting to stop his rampage, remains in a Texas jail awaiting trial.

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This Week in History, Nov 5 - Nov 11

Nov 05, 2009
Army major kills 13 people in Fort Hood shooting spree
Nov 06, 1982
A woman ices her husband with anti-freeze
Nov 07, 1983
A family is brutally murdered
Nov 08, 1974
Ted Bundy botches an abduction attempt
Nov 09, 1971
A Sunday school teacher murders his family and goes undercover for 18 years
Nov 10, 1997
Judge reduces sentence in nanny murder case
Nov 11, 1988
Police make a grisly discovery in Dorothea Puente's lawn

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