Forensic experts testify to victims’ suffering in US Fort Hood rampage

Forensic experts testified in graphic detail on Thursday how soldiers suffered when they were shot by an army psychiatrist who has admitted opening fire at a Texas military base in 2009 because he switched sides in what he considered a US war on Islam.

Major Nidal Hasan, an American Muslim who faces 13 charges of premeditated murder and 32 charges of premeditated attempted murder in the attack at Fort Hood, Texas, has told mental health evaluators that he wanted to become a martyr while carrying out “jihad”.

A pathologist, Lieutenant-Colonel Phillip Berran, told Hasan’s court-martial on Thursday that one soldier who tried to charge and stop Hasan was shot 12 times while another, Private First Class Aaron Nemelka, 19, the youngest military victim of the attack, suffered intensely as his organs filled with blood.

It was “not an immediately fatal wound,” Berran said.

Berran is one of several expert witnesses who have testified this week about crime scene evidence and autopsy analyses of roughly 10 of the 13 victims who were sprayed with bullets, some shot while they were on the floor or elsewhere. More than 70 people have testified so far.

Private Francheska Velez, then 21 years old and six weeks pregnant, died after a single bullet pierced her back, severed a major vein, “went through the heart” and ended in the right lung, said Dr. AbuBakr Marzouk, another pathologist.