Finalist: The Washington Post, by Staff
For its alert, in-depth coverage of the mass shooting at the Washington Navy Yard, employing a mix of platforms to tell a developing story with accuracy and sensitivity.
Nominated Work
September 16, 2013
September 17, 2013
The victims: 12 killed, 8 hurt in gun attack at Southeast D.C. military base
The suspect: Alleged shooter dies in gun battle, is ID’d as contractor, ex-reservist
The scene: Chaos on base is followed by hours of caution, fear in surrounding area
By Ashley Halsey III, Peter Hermann and Clarence Williams
A gunman killed a dozen people as the workday began at the Washington Navy Yard on Monday, creating an improbable moment of horror at a military facility with armed guards at every gate and leaving investigators seeking clues about what spurred the attack.
The FBI identified the shooter as Aaron Alexis, 34, of Fort Worth, who in 2011 received a general discharge from the Navy Reserve, a designation that usually signals a problem in his record. Alexis was arrested but not charged in a gun incident in Seattle in 2004 but still had a security clearance with a military contractor that allowed him access to the Navy Yard, officials said.
The suspect died when the mayhem ended in a gun battle with police. Late Monday night, authorities began releasing the names of those killed in the rampage, but some family members were still awaiting word about loved ones. The dead ranged in age from 46 to 73 years old.
The shootings constituted the worst loss of life in a single incident in the region since the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the Pentagon killed 184 people.
“This is yet another heartbreak for our city,” said Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.).
Alexis left Texas about a year ago, and authorities made a public appeal Monday for help in tracing his movements since then. They said they believe he entered the Navy Yard with a valid badge and had been in the Washington region for about four months, working as an hourly employee with a defense contractor.
“We don’t know what the motive is,” said D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D). The mayor said there was no reason to suspect terrorism. Other officials said they do not know whether Alexis’s discharge played a role in the shootings but said that is one line of inquiry.
The shooting began about 8:15 a.m., when the echo of gunfire behind the walled security of a military base stunned people arriving to begin their workweek. The sprawling base on the Anacostia River has 16,000 military and civilian employees .
“I didn’t believe it,” said Alley Gibson, 28, who works in Building 197, were the shootings took place. “At first I was in shock. Nothing like this ever happens — especially not on a base. It’s just not normal. It’s wild — it’s like a movie.”
As people scattered for cover, they turned to text messages and office televisions in an effort to determine what was going on.
“We were sort of in the dark,” said John Norquist, 52, a Fairfax lawyer who served as a civilian adviser in Afghanistan last year. “We were trained in active shooter scenarios.”
The full weight of Washington’s vast anti-terrorism network converged on Southeast Washington within minutes of the first shots as local and federal law enforcement teamed to sweep the Navy Yard and the surrounding neighborhood.
The shootings threw the nation’s capital into turmoil, with police fearful that two other gunmen might be on the loose. By late Monday, D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier said investigators were confident that Alexis was the only gunman.
Throughout the day, people were warned to remain in their homes and those at offices on the naval base and in the surrounding neighborhood were told to stay put.
Flights were briefly halted at Reagan National Airport. Schools near the base were locked down. The Senate adjourned early, and people were not allowed to enter or leave much of the Capitol complex. The ripple of snarled traffic spread beyond closed streets in Southeast Washington to infect travel elsewhere.
“This has been a dark day,” said House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio).
The Washington Nationals, whose ballpark is close to the base, were told to stay away from their stadium during the search. A critical game against the division-leading Atlanta Braves was postponed until Tuesday. The official Major League Baseball description of the game was stark: “Postponed: Tragedy.”
Investigators said Alexis shot a security guard at Building 197, most likely with a shotgun he bought in Lorton in Fairfax County. He took the guard’s handgun before moving methodically through the interior, they said.
He shot 15 people, 12 fatally, and injured five others before he died, investigators said.
Authorities on Monday night released the names of seven of those who were killed: Michael Arnold, 59; Sylvia Frasier, 53; Kathy Gaarde, 62; John Roger Johnson, 73; Frank Kohler, 50; Vishnu Pandit, 61; and Kenneth Bernard Proctor, 46. The Washington Post confirmed the identity of an eighth person, Arthur Daniels, 51.
Among those injured was a D.C. police officer who was shot twice in the leg. The officer, Scott Williams, a 23-year veteran, and the other injured victims all are expected to survive.
“There’s no question he would have kept shooting,” said Lanier, who declined to say how many shots were fired from start to finish. Police said Alexis also had an assault rifle inside the building, but it was unclear whether he had brought it with him.
It took a series of shootouts to bring Alexis down, officials said. Active shooter teams engaged him several times before at least two officers — one from D.C. police and one from U.S. Park Police — fatally wounded the suspect, they said.
Perplexing to those as the event unfolded around them, and puzzling to investigators in the aftermath: How did a man with a shotgun pass through one of three gates where Marine and Navy security personnel screen all visitors?
“I don’t think we know that,” said Valerie Parlave, the assistant FBI director in charge of the D.C. field office. “The investigation is still very active.”
Several former military officers who work in the building said that there are armed guards at the main entrance and that employees must scan an access card. But two people who work there said those with properly coded cards can enter through a side door from a garage, bypassing the security guards.
Alexis had been working much of this year as a computer contractor for a company called The Experts and appeared to have a government-contractor access card that would have allowed him into the Navy Yard and other military installations, according to company chief executive Thomas Hoshko.
Alexis had a security clearance that was updated in July, approved by military security service personnel.
“There had to be a thorough investigation,” Hoshko said. “There is nothing that came up in all the searches.”
The FBI took charge of the case later in the day, with President Obama promising a “seamless” investigation that coordinated D.C. police and the myriad law enforcement agencies that responded to the incident.
“This is a safe city, and we should go about our business,” Norton said. “The facility itself is one of the most secure facilities in the District.”
But for those inside the Navy Yard when the shooting occurred, it was a day of terror and uncertainty.
“It’s unbelievable that someone could get a rifle in there,” said David Stevens, a Navy contractor who was on the third floor of Building 197 when the shooting began.
He ran to the edge of a glass atrium that overlooks all the floors and glanced up. He could not see anything but heard a “second deluge” of shots — perhaps six.
One floor below Stevens, another contractor, Paul Desbiens, said the first thing he heard was the fire alarm, which went off around 8:30 a.m. He realized something more serious was going on as he and others encountered police at the building’s entrance.
“They didn’t say what was going on,” Desbiens said. “They just said, ‘Run!’ ”
Vice Adm. Bill French, the head of all Navy installations, said late Monday that about 2,000 civilians remained at the Navy Yard and that it could take until 11 p.m. or later to finish processing them off the base.
Removal of the employees was painfully slow because the FBI was still interviewing every person leaving the base, out of concern that a second suspect might still be at large.
SWAT teams were still finding people hiding in places on the base, where they had remained hunkered down since early morning. One city official said that shortly before 7 p.m., officers found an employee hiding in a locker, where he had been for nearly 11 hours.
Navy Undersecretary Juan Garcia said the Navy Yard would reopen Tuesday for essential personnel only. Most employees would be encouraged to telecommute. Garcia said it was unclear when the base would reopen in its entirety.
It was the second mass shooting in recent years inside the secure confines of a military base, coming after Army Maj. Nidal Hasan killed 13 people and injured more than 30 in 2009 at Fort Hood in Texas.
The Navy Yard shooting marks the seventh time in the past decade that a gunman has killed 10 or more people in a single incident. The most notable incidents were the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting in which 32 died; the Aurora, Colo., movie theater shooting last year in which 12 were killed; the Newtown, Conn., school shooting last year in which 26 were killed; and the 2009 Fort Hood rampage.
Correction: The headline on a previous version of this article misstated the number of casualties. This version has been corrected.
September 17, 2013
By Ian Shapira
All day and into the night, they waited for news. Inside a three-bedroom home in Prince George’s County, Sylvia Frasier’s parents and siblings gathered, hoping to hear something about her fate.
The family had not been able to reach Sylvia, a 53-year-old network security administrator with the Naval Sea Systems Command, since they’d heard about the mass shooting at the Washington Navy Yard on Monday morning.
The Frasiers prayed and watched the live TV coverage. They clutched their iPhones and clasped one another’s hands every time a cellphone rang or beeped with a text message. Their minister came over, and everyone sat on the couches and sang from the Bible.
By 7 p.m., there still had been no word on the whereabouts of Sylvia, who lived in Charles County and was the second-youngest of James and Eloise Frasier’s seven children.
“My heart is beating so fast,” said Wendy Edmonds, 52, the youngest of the siblings and a college professor. “Dad knows something’s wrong since all the children are coming over. It’s the middle of the day. We’re supposed to be at work, not here at their home.”
The shooting at the Navy Yard left at least 12 dead, in addition to the suspected gunman, 34-year-old Aaron Alexis. It also left more than one Washington area family in a terrible limbo.
Another Navy Yard worker who remained unaccounted for Monday night was Mary Knight, an information technology specialist who also taught at Northern Virginia Community College, according to her professional profile. A call to Knight’s family in North Carolina was returned by a family representative, Theodore Hisey.
The family hadn’t heard from Knight since Sunday, Hisey said. They hadn’t been able to reach her Monday, and their calls to the Navy and hospitals had produced no information. She normally would have been in the building where the shooting occurred, he said.
Hisey described the ordeal as “very upsetting” to Knight’s family.
At the Frasier family home in Lanham, where Bibles adorn the bookshelves and crosses hang from the walls, Edmonds and her parents burned with questions: Is Sylvia alive? Injured? They were relying on news conferences, evening news reports, and phone calls and texts from other siblings searching the Navy Yard and designated parking lots for Sylvia.
The family was especially frustrated because they had spent all day calling the phone lines advertised for families of potential victims. But each time Edmonds or other relatives called, no one answered. Or the voice mail went to an automated recording for military support services.
“I have called that number too many times,” Edmonds said. “Six, seven, eight times.”
Because Sylvia is unmarried, the family expected James and Eloise, both in their 80s, to be contacted by the Navy or some other government agency.
Edmonds said she learned about the shooting about 9:15 a.m. from a sister who had seen news reports.
Edmonds texted Sylvia: “Are you okay?” she asked at 9:26 a.m.
No response.
The Frasier children began e-mailing one another.
“I have not heard from Sylvia, and she probably can’t call right now. Let’s keep her and everyone that works there in prayer!!!” wrote her sister, Maria Moore, a benefits analyst for a government contractor.
Several hours passed. By 7 p.m., most of the family had gathered at the parents’ home, where the Frasier children had grown up. At 7:10, Edmonds’s phone rang, and she grabbed it.
“Hello?” Then she hung up, shaking her head. It was a call to confirm her father’s upcoming doctor’s appointment.
At 7:30, the family’s minister, David Harrington, stopped by and led the family in prayer. They turned the TV volume down while they implored God for help, but kept the set on in case there was news.
Edmonds’s phone rang again. It was the third-oldest sibling, Lindlee Frasier, calling from the District.
“Okay, Sylvia’s in the hospital. She’s injured. The FBI talked to me,” Lindlee told Edmonds. Authorities said they were trying to figure out which hospital she’d been taken to and how badly she was hurt.
Edmonds worried that Sylvia might be more than injured. She tried to prepare her family for the worst.
“No matter how we feel, no matter what information we get from the FBI, we have got to forgive,” she said. “We have to forgive. We can’t become bitter.”
Moore shook her head. Investigators and reporters had chased down so much information on the suspect, but nothing on the victims.
“They found out who the shooter was real quick,” Moore said.
Finally, shortly before 10 p.m., Lindlee and a brother arrived at their parents’ home with news they couldn’t bring themselves to deliver by phone: Sylvia was dead.
“He killed my sister!” Edmonds cried.
Steve Hendrix contributed to this report.
September 17, 2013
September 17, 2013
September 17, 2013
By Theresa Vargas, Steve Hendrix and Marc Fisher
WASHINGTON – Aaron Alexis lived for a time in a bungalow in the woods near a Buddhist temple in Fort Worth, Texas, where he occasionally joined Thai immigrants in meditation. Aaron Alexis died Monday in a gun battle with police in a building at the Washington Navy Yard after he killed at least 12 people.
In between, the man named as the shooter in Monday’s mass murder at Navy Yard Building 197 was discharged from the Navy Reserve, arrested for shooting a bullet into his downstairs neighbor’s apartment and then asked to leave his Fort Worth apartment.
A Navy official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Alexis was discharged in January 2011 for “a pattern of misconduct” and that the 2010 gun incident in Texas played a role in his departure.
Another Navy official said Alexis was given a “general discharge,” a classification often used to designate a blemished record of performance. In some cases, a general discharge can make it difficult to land a civilian job.
Alexis, 34, arrived in Washington about four months ago, friends said. He had worked recently for a defense contractor called The Experts, which is a subcontractor on an HP Enterprise Services contract to work on the Navy Marine Corps’s Intranet network, according to Hewlett-Packard spokesman Michael Thacker. Officials at The Experts did not immediately reply to phone messages. It was unclear if Alexis was still employed by that subcontractor, or if his work had brought him to the Navy Yard.
Investigators Monday night were examining how Alexis got into the Navy Yard, and whether he had or used the identification card of a former Navy petty officer that was found near Alexis’s body after police killed him.
Those who knew Alexis in recent years describe him as a “sweet and intelligent guy” (a regular customer at the Thai restaurant where he worked as a waiter), as “a good boy” (his landlord), but also as someone who was “very aggressive,” someone who seemed like he might one day kill himself (a lay worker at the Buddhist temple where Alexis worshipped.)
In 2004, Alexis was arrested in Seattle after he fired three shots from a Glock pistol into the tires of a Honda Accord that two construction workers had parked in a driveway adjacent to Alexis’ s house. Alexis’s father told Seattle detectives then that his son “had experienced anger management problems that the family believed was associated with PTSD,” or post-traumatic stress disorder, according to the police report. The father said that Alexis “was an active participant in rescue attempts of Sept. 11, 2001.”
Alexis’s own explanation for his behavior that day: the construction workers had “mocked” and “disrespected” him and then he had had “a black-out fueled by anger.”
Alexis was not charged in the Seattle incident.
More recently, Alexis struck those who crossed his path as a man of sharp contrasts. He studied the Thai language, visited Thailand for a month, was studying for an online degree in aeronautical engineering and seemed to enjoy conversing with customers, according to friends, customers and fellow worshippers. But some of those same people said that Alexis had an aggressive streak, one that caused them to keep their distance and avoid personal questions.
Alexis grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., with his mother Sarah and father Anthony Alexis, according to his aunt Helen Weeks. “We haven’t seen him for years,” Weeks said in a phone interview. “I know he was in the military. He served abroad. I think he was doing some kind of computer work.”
Alexis spent nearly four years in the Navy as a full-time reservist from May 2007 until he was discharged in January 2011, according to a summary of personnel records released by the Navy. A Navy official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Alexis was discharged from the service in January 2011 for “misconduct,” and that the 2010 firearms incident in Texas played a role in his departure.
He achieved his final rank of Aviation Electrician’s Mate 3rd Class in December 2009.
Navy Secretary Ray Mabus said Alexis worked as a defense contractor after his discharge. A deleted LinkedIn page under Alexis’s name listed SinglePoint Technologies, a Richmond, Va., firm, as his employer; the company did not return a call seeking comment.
Alexis spent the bulk of his service time – from 2008 to 2011 – assigned to the Fleet Logistics Support Squadron 46 at Naval Air Station Fort Worth in Texas, from 2008 until he left the service in 2011, records show. He was awarded the Global War on Terrorism Service Medal and the National Defense Service Medal – two awards of minor distinction.
In Fort Worth, Alexis lived for a time in a gated townhouse community called Orion at Oak Hill. In September, 2010, police were called to Apartment 2023 after Alexis’s downstairs neighbor complained that Alexis had fired a bullet through his floor and into her ceiling below.
The woman told police that she had had occasion to call them about Alexis several times for being too loud, but that nothing had been done. The woman said Alexis had confronted her a few days earlier in the complex’s parking lot, where he complained that she had been making too much noise. The woman told police that “she is terrified of Aaron and feels that this was done intentionally,” the police report said.
Police made three attempts to contact Alexis by knocking on his door, but he didn’t respond. Only after police called in firefighters to force entry into his apartment did Alexis emerge. Alexis then told police that he had been cleaning his gun while he was cooking and his hands had become greasy and the weapon discharged by accident, according to the police report.
“He told me that he began to take the gun apart when his hands slipped and pulled the trigger, discharging a round into the ceiling,” the officer wrote.
Alexis was arrested for improper discharge of a firearm, but a spokesman for the county district attorney’s office said no charges were brought in the matter. Alexis’s mugshot from that arrest shows a clean-shaven man with soft eyes and an impassive expression.
A couple of weeks later, the apartment complex began eviction proceedings against Alexis, according to county court records.
Soon after that, Srisan Somsak, a Thai immigrant in Fort Worth, met Alexis at the Wat Busayadhammavanaram Meditation Center, where Alexis had occasionally shown up for meditation starting in summer of 2010. Alexis said he needed a place to stay and Somsak offered to rent him the two-bedroom white bungalow behind the center – if he promised not to smoke or drink.
Alexis rented the place for $600 a month, lived up to those promises and never missed a payment, said Somsak, 57.
“He’s a good boy,” said Somsak, who spoke English with a heavy accent. “Everybody would say, ‘He’s a good boy' here. Not only me. He’s a good boy.”
Alexis occasionally meditated at the temple and helped out there when needed, said Somsak, who was pleased to find that his tenant studied the Thai language and visited Thailand.
On Monday, as word spread about the shooting, the temple filled with members eager to share their recollections of Alexis. “They don’t believed it that he could kill 12 people like that,” Somsak said. “I think probably somebody tried to put him down. I don’t know. “Did somebody try to discriminate against him? That’s the only way. That’s what I keep thinking.”
Somsak asked Alexis only once about why he had left his job at the naval base. It was a brief conversation.
“I asked him, ‘Why you quit the job with the government?” Somsak said. “He said, ‘Somebody doesn’t like me.’”
Somsak left it there because “I don’t want to go too deep with him.”
Alexis visited the center about twice a week and was known as a quiet, if tightly wound, participant, according to a temple staff member.
“He would help people if they came in carrying heavy things,” said J. Sirun, an assistant to the monks. “From the outside, he was a quiet person. But on the inside, I think he was very aggressive. He did not like to be close with anybody, like a soldier who has been at war.”
Sirun said he avoided Alexis, who preferred to keep to himself. But Alexis was no longer; he had many Thai friends and spoke Thai “very well,” Sirun said. “He understood about 75 percent of the language.”
During that period, Alexis worked as a waiter and delivery man for the Happy Bowl Thai restaurant in White Settlement, Texas, according to customers and workers there. Customers saw him studying Thai at a table there during his off hours.
Alexis stopped showing up at the Buddhist center early in 2011, Sirun said.
“I didn’t think he could be this violent,” Sirun said. “I would not have been surprised to hear he had committed suicide. But I didn’t think he could commit murder.”
Relatives contacted by reporters were stunned to hear that he was involved in the Washington shootings. “I’d be shocked if it was him, but I don’t know,” said Weeks, his aunt, her voice trailing off.
Even as he worked for the defense contractor, Alexis was pursuing a bachelor’s degree in aeronautics as an online student at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. The university, in Daytona Beach, Fla., said Alexis enrolled in July 2012, via the school’s Fort Worth campus. He remained a student in good standing, said Melanie Hanns, Director of University Communications.
“He was enrolled for this semester,” she said.
FBI Assistant Director Valerie Parlave asked the public to call 800-CALL-FBI with details about Alexis: “No piece of information is too small.”
September 18, 2013
By Ashley Halsey III, Aaron C. Davis and Michael Laris
Aaron Alexis arrived at the Navy Yard with his backpack slung over his shoulder, drawing no particular attention as he flashed his ID card and joined the stream of workers passing by the armed guards posted at the brick-and-wrought-iron gates.
He entered Building 197, tucked in one corner of the complex and overlooking the Anacostia River, on a cloudy and unseasonably chilly Monday morning without attracting undue notice, making his way toward his cubicle.
He slipped into a fourth-floor men’s room and then — about 8:15 a.m. — everyone’s day changed.
As investigators piece together the critical details of a mass shooting that traumatized a military facility just south of Capitol Hill, bits of preliminary information — from law enforcement officials and others — provide pieces of the puzzle.
From the backpack, Alexis pulled a Remington 870 shotgun. He purchased it Saturday, along with a couple dozen shells, from a gun shop in Lorton, where he took some time to fire a few practice rounds on the shop’s range. He emerged from the men’s room Monday prepared to use it.
8:23 a.m.: D.C. police received the first report of gunshots from 1333 Isaac Hull Ave. — the address of the Naval Sea Systems Command, known on the base as Building 197.
Who got shot in the next 30-plus minutes was indiscriminate, just a matter of happenstance.
Capt. Mark Vandroff — a 1989 U.S. Naval Academy graduate — is a stickler for starting meetings on time. So Monday morning, the routine staff meeting began promptly at 8 a.m. in a third-floor conference room. It felt as if he had just begun handing out the week’s assignments and receiving reports.
“I heard the gunshots,” he said. “Someone screamed.” Someone yelled that there was a shooter. “Lock the doors! Lock the doors!”
The building has three main north-south hallways. Each opens onto an atrium. Sound carries from one floor to the next in ways it might not if it weren’t for the acoustics of the atrium. Then someone triggered the fire alarm.
Dozens of workers began to scramble.
“People were fleeing into offices,” Vandroff said. A few came into the conference room. They shut themselves in to “try to get another layer of protection” and barricaded the door with tables and chairs.
8:34 a.m.: An e-mail to Navy Yard personnel: “ALL HANDS on WNY. Shelter in place.”
Police teams that deal with ongoing shootings — four officers each, armed with AR-15 rifles — already were arriving at Building 197. Before it ended, there would be as many as seven teams involved in a fierce firefight.
The shots seemed to be coming from just south of where Vandroff and his colleagues were hiding.
By now, the police teams — joined by at least three naval security officers and U.S. Park Police — were moving in military fashion, stalking Alexis even as he stalked his victims on the fourth floor above Vandroff.
But the gunman had the advantage, familiar with the building’s layout and using the balcony wall for concealment as he fired the shotgun from the high ground into the atrium.
“He had the advantage, and no one knew where he was,” an official said. “He was moving. It was fish in a barrel.”
Gregory Dade heard a “pop-pop” from his second-floor office.
“We heard some rapid fire,” said Dade, who works for Hewlett-Packard and is a contractor at the Navy Yard.
Opening their door, he and a colleague bolted, only to hear another burst of fire just ahead of them.
“We could smell the sulfur type of smell. You could just see it and smell it,” he said. They ran back to their office and locked the door. “What would you do, continue down the hall not knowing?”
8:35 a.m.: D.C. fire and rescue, emergency radio: “We got a report on the fourth floor. A male with a shotgun, multiple shots fired, multiple people. We’re still waiting for the okay that the scene has been secured.”
A colleague sent Vandroff a BlackBerry note telling him he was hiding with friends in a closet-size office cubicle, safe for the moment. But he heard nothing from the office of his friend Mike Arnold. Others also were out of contact.
“We didn’t know if something bad — or not bad — happened to them,” said Vandroff, whose group oversees the construction of Arleigh Burke-class destroyers.
Just down the hall, Capt. Christopher Mercer could hear the screaming, and the shots getting closer as Alexis made his way to the third floor.
Alexis turned left instead of right, and that made all the difference. He paused at the threshold of Arnold’s office door. Arnold was one of the Navy’s preeminent shipbuilders, but he was enamored with planes, and an aviation calendar was spread out on the desk in front of him when Alexis entered.
Alexis said nothing and pulled the trigger, sending a shotgun blast into Arnold’s chest.
The split-second delay gave Mercer and the three staffers across the hallway time to slam the door shut and begin pulling furniture in front. As soon as they backed away from the door, a bullet splintered the wood at shoulder height.
Mercer and his three staffers all dove under his desk.
“He set up camp right in front of my office,” Mercer said. “He kept reloading and firing at cubicles. Later, when he came back, I could see his shadow through the glass pane in my door.”
Huddled under his desk, Mercer heard Alexis pacing through the labyrinth of cubicles. He stumbled upon one of Mercer’s aides, a woman in her 20s, squatting for cover by a filing cabinet. Holding the shotgun to her face, he pulled the trigger, but nothing happened.
Alexis was making his way down the hallway on the fourth floor, shooting as he went. Then, for reasons unclear, he descended to the building’s lobby.
8:43 a.m.: D.C. emergency radio: “Have confirmation of at least five people shot. They’re attempting to bring outside, so right now police confirmation five people shot. Could be others.”
The lobby gunfight was brief and bloody. Confronted by a guard, Alexis shot him dead, scooping up the officer’s 9mm handgun and abandoning his shotgun.
With the response teams flooding into the building — there would be seven different points at which they exchanged fire with Alexis over at least 30 minutes — he retreated back upstairs, stopping this time on the third floor, where Vandroff and his friends were barricaded.
A bullet pierced the conference room’s wall.
“There was one shot that was very close. There were bullet holes in the wall of the conference room where we were hiding,” said Vandroff, who lives in Bethesda.
8:44 a.m.: D.C. emergency radio: “MPD is advising that they’re unable to hear each other due to the fire alarms. . . . The shooter is still on the loose.”
For Alexis, it ended when he popped from behind a partition in a third-floor office, the stolen pistol in his hand, to be greeted by a deafening explosion of gunfire. Stuck several times in the head, he went down.
And there might have been silence once he fell dead, but for the drumbeat of military and medevac helicopters swarming above the Washington Navy Yard, the clatter of the building's fire alarm, the shrieking sirens from scores of squad cars and ambulances, and the guttural barked commands of armed men moving to secure the building.
By now the people who had seen glimpses of the mayhem had raised the possibility there were several shooters — with at least two identified as wearing military-type uniforms.
9:12 a.m.: D.C. emergency radio: “Medical group on the details, please be advised. Scene is not safe. We are denied entry. Scene is not safe.”
By now, even as they continued to comb the building and fan out through the Navy Yard and into the surrounding neighborhood, police had recovered the shotgun Alexis used.
After a time, police sweeping through Building 197 reached Vandroff’s conference room.
“They announced themselves. You heard ‘bang, bang, bang’ on the conference room door,” he said. “ ‘Police!’ ”
The officers knew they might find a gunman behind any closed door.
“Open the door! Show us your hands! Open the door! Show us your hands!”
They put everyone from the room in a line, with an officer in front and an officer in back, and led them out of the building toward the north, avoiding the carnage.
Mercer wasn’t as lucky. He looked back, and it seemed his office was destroyed.
Glass in frames on the wall was shattered. The floor was littered with shreds of the wallboard and paper.
Outside, there were two officers with flak jackets and rifles standing at the entrance to the office where they had heard the gunman.
Hundreds of shell casings covered the floor.
“You could barely walk on the floor,” Mercer said. There was another officer standing guard over a weapon.
But that wasn’t the worst. A few steps to the south, as they walked out of a passageway into the main north-south hallway, “we literally almost had to step over” a body, Mercer said.
10:13 a.m.: Police announced that three shooters were involved — one was dead, and the search was on for two others.
The police instructed the workers to run across Isaac Hull Avenue and into the basement of a parking garage — protection of a sort if more shots were fired.
“We now had cars and concrete around us,” Vandroff said.
Military medical workers in the basement consoled the terrified workers. Some needed to go to the bathroom, and police led them on relief runs. A worker recovering from knee surgery, injured in all the hustle to rush from the building, got ice. A woman nine months pregnant was rushed by ambulance to a local hospital as a precaution.
“We were all clearly stressed out,” Vandroff said.
Eventually, police would determine that Alexis acted alone.
Colleagues would approach Vandroff about his friend Arnold, whose office is just down from his.
“Mike got hit,” one told him.
He was among the 12 dead.
Sari Horwitz, Peter Hermann, Tom Jackman, Ann Marimow and Clarence Williams contributed to this report.
September 18, 2013
Correction: An earlier version of this story included an incorrect account of efforts by Alexis's employer, The Experts, to obtain a security clearance for him. The screening was not conducted by Lexis-Nexis but rather by the company to which it had sold its screening business. That firm confirmed with the Defense Department in June that Alexis's 2007 clearance remained valid and revealed no issues other than one minor traffic violation, according to The Experts. The story has been corrected.
By Sari Horwitz, Leslie Minora and Marc Fisher
Aaron Alexis’s friends in Fort Worth watched him begin to slip away last summer. He was depressed, sleepless, increasingly withdrawn. The guy who loved to throw back Heinekens with his buddies now wanted mainly to be left alone.
He told his friend Melinda Downs that he was seeing a counselor at the Department of Veterans Affairs, that at one point he hadn’t slept in three days. In July, Alexis’s best friend, the man who had shared his home with him, told police that Alexis had poured sugar into his gas tank to damage his car.
This summer, Alexis left Texas and headed north to work for a defense contractor. Since July, he’d been assigned to seven different military bases in four states and the District.
His employer, a tech company called The Experts, put him up at good hotels. He was in one of them, the Marriott in Newport, R.I., on Aug. 7 — 40 days before he would bring a shotgun into the Washington Navy Yard and kill 12 strangers — when just around dawn, he called the Newport police. According to the police report, he said he was hearing voices coming through the ceiling, voices of three people who had been sent to follow him and keep him awake, three people who were now using “some sort of microwave machine” to send vibrations into his body, preventing him from falling asleep. He needed help.
As a Navy reservist and a computer technician, Alexis moved around the country frequently. As a man who was losing touch with reality, he left a trail of police reports, arrest records and mental health consultations that in retrospect add up to a disturbing chronicle of rapidly mounting trouble.
Alexis had had plenty of trouble in the past — shooting out a stranger’s tires, damaging furniture in a nightclub, blasting a hole in his neighbor’s floor — but arrests in Seattle, Georgia and Fort Worth over the past decade had stemmed from what he and friends called anger management problems. Alexis told friends he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder from what he saw in New York at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
But it wasn’t until recent months that Alexis sought help. He had been treated at two VA hospitals since the Aug. 7 incident in Rhode Island, according to two law enforcement officials who declined to be named because they were not authorized to release information.
Had Alexis’s employer known anything about his problems, he would not have been hired, said Thomas Hoshko, chief executive of The Experts.
“Anything that suggest criminal problems or mental health issues, that would be a flag,” Hoshko said. “We would not have hired him.”
The Newport police report quotes Alexis as saying that he had heard the same voices speaking to him “through the walls, floor and ceiling” at the Marriott, a Residence Inn in Middletown, R.I., and at a Navy base where he’d been working. Alexis said he was worried that the people following him were going to hurt him. He also said he had never had “any sort of mental episode.”
The two officers who visited Room 405 at the Marriott told Alexis to “stay away from the individuals that are following him,” according to Officer Seth Moseley’s report.
Newport police Lt. William Fitzgerald said Tuesday that there was no cause for an arrest or to bring Alexis in for observation: “People make a complaint like that to us all the time.”
Later that day, Newport Sgt. Frank Rosa Jr. reviewed the incident report and called the local naval station police and faxed them the report. “They said they would follow up,” Fitzgerald said.
Lisa Rama, a public affairs officer at Naval Station Newport, said base officials were cooperating with the FBI. She declined to comment on whether military police followed up.
The Navy on Tuesday revised its account of Alexis’s departure in 2011. Although the service had originally sought to kick him out with a less-desirable general discharge after he’d been cited for misconduct at least eight times, the Navy instead granted Alexis an honorable discharge when he applied to leave.
The Navy cited Alexis for insubordination in 2008, disorderly conduct in 2009 and extended unauthorized absences between 2008 and 2010, according to a Navy official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the alleged gunman’s personnel record. Alexis was also cited for minor offenses such as a traffic ticket and showing up late.
In Fort Worth, he had settled into a Thai immigrant community where he occasionally meditated at a Buddhist temple and worked and lived with a family that owns Happy Bowl, a Thai restaurant.
The restaurateur, Nutpisit Suthamtewakul, said he and Alexis got along well until last December, when Suthamtewakul got married and Alexis, who had written the best man’s speech for the wedding, “started being quiet” and keeping to himself.
The restaurateur’s wife, Kristi Suthamtewakul, said her car wouldn’t start on July 5 because someone had put sugar in the gas tank. Her husband called the police.
“Our car was locked in the garage, and [Alexis] was the only one who had keys to the house,” Kristi said.
Throughout his adult life, Alexis had grievances and episodes of anger that stuck in the memories of those around him.
In New York, where Alexis grew up, his manager at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, where he worked as a part-time clerical assistant from 2001 to 2003, recalled him as someone who held grudges longer and harder than others might.
“Somebody would make a mistake that he thought was a bonehead idiotic mistake, but he’d go on and on about it for weeks,” said Barry Williams, Alexis’s boss in the administrative computing office. “He’s not one of those guys who when they do something like this, everyone says, ‘Oh, he’s so quiet and nice.’ He had an edge.”
On Sept. 11, 2001, Williams was walking to work just blocks from the World Trade Center when he heard a low-flying plane and then a crash. Williams cannot recall what Alexis did that day, but Alexis’s father told Seattle police after his son was arrested there in 2004 that Aaron had helped with the rescue operation and had been traumatized by the experience.
The Seattle arrest came after Alexis fired three shots from a Glock pistol into the tires of a Honda Accord that construction workers had parked near Alexis’s house. Alexis told police that he had had “a blackout fueled by anger.” He was not charged after paperwork in the case was apparently misplaced.
Four years later, Alexis was arrested and held for two nights after he damaged furniture at the Velvet Room, a nightclub in DeKalb County, Ga. After Alexis was ordered out of the club, he began cursing and “would not stop,” the police report said.
In 2010, he was arrested after firing a bullet through his upstairs neighbor’s floor in Fort Worth. Apartment managers then asked Alexis to leave.
None of those incidents was brought to the attention of The Experts, which hired Alexis in September 2012 to work at a base in Japan, said Hoshko, the chief executive.
“If there’s not full disclosure on this, how do they expect us to make good decisions about who to trust and hire?” Hoshko asked. The company said Alexis had worked since July at seven different military installations: in Little Creek, Va.; Newport; Stafford County, Va.; Bethesda; Cherry Point, N.C.; Arlington; and finally at the Navy Yard, where he began work a few days before Monday’s shootings.
Alexis obtained a secret-level security clearance in 2007, and it was updated this July. In that security review, approved by the Defense Security Service of the Department of Defense, a contractor was hired to run a background check. It’s not known if police reports about Alexis’s arrests surfaced in that check.
In New York on Tuesday, Alexis’s relatives remained behind the closed doors of a large red-tinted brownstone on Putnam Street in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.
Wendy Lopez, 36, who lived in an apartment just below where Alexis grew up in Flushing, Queens, remembered Aaron as the “kid with the basketball,” a polite neighbor and “typical teenager.”
Alexis arrived in Washington around Aug. 25, said Valerie Parlave, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Washington Field Office. He had been staying at local hotels since then, most recently at a Residence Inn in Southwest, beginning on Sept. 7.
On Saturday, Alexis traveled to Lorton in Fairfax County, to a gun shop called Sharpshooters, where he rented a rifle, fired it in the store’s shooting range, passed a background check and bought a Remington 870 shotgun and about two boxes of shells, according to the store’s lawyer, J. Michael Slocum.
Back in Fort Worth, Melinda Downs, owner of M&M Community Barbers, right next to the Thai restaurant where Alexis sometimes waited on tables, said her friend had called her twice in the past couple of weeks, from Rhode Island and from Washington.
She remembers how he used to come into her shop and spin around on the barber chairs. He was, she said, “the sweetest person I’ve ever known.”
“To know that a guy that you counseled and mentored, called friend, invited into your home, would do something so devastating,” she said, “you ask yourself, you go from denial, to reality, to fear, to blame, to ‘Is there something I could have done?’ ”
“I can’t fathom that he did this. It’s like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Who was this guy?”
Special correspondent Minora reported from Fort Worth. Marjorie Censer, David Fahrenthold, Tom Jackman, Carol D. Leonnig, Ann Marimow, Jerry Markon, Victoria St. Martin, Julie Tate, Theresa Vargas and Craig Whitlock in Washington, and Sally Jenkins, Rachel Weiner and Colum Lynch in New York contributed to this report.
September 18, 2013
By Carol D. Leonnig, Matea Gold and Tom Hamburger
The military’s beleaguered background-check system failed to block Navy Yard gunman Aaron Alexis from an all-access pass to a half-dozen military installations, despite a history of arrests for shooting episodes and disorderly conduct.
Alexis, a military contractor working on a computer project, used his secret-level clearance to gain entry to the Washington Navy Yard on Monday, where officials said he gunned down a dozen people before being killed by police.
The revelations about Alexis’s troubled past — and his ability to pass the government’s security-check system — prompted multiple examinations Tuesday into how background checks are conducted and how long a security clearance can last without review. The system was already under scrutiny after leaks of classified documents by fugitive National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.
President Obama directed his budget office to conduct a government-wide review of security standards for contractors and employees across federal agencies. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel also ordered a broad review into security and access to military installations worldwide.
More than 24 hours after the deadly rampage, there was still widespread confusion over how Alexis managed to escape scrutiny since being given access to classified materials and facilities five years ago. The private contractor that most recently employed him pointed the finger at the Defense Department, which defended its handling of the case.
Read eyewitness accounts from the Navy Yard shooting. VIEW GRAPHIC
Alexis was granted secret-level security clearance in March 2008, when he was working as a full-time Navy reservist, according to the Pentagon. He was discharged from the Navy in January 2011 after a series of run-ins with his military superiors and police.
In September 2012, a Hewlett-Packard subcontractor called The Experts hired Alexis and said it confirmed his security clearance with the Defense Department. Thomas Hoshko, the company’s chief executive, said he confirmed the status again in late June of this year, when Alexis returned to work for the firm after a brief hiatus.
A background check done by a private contractor at the time turned up only a minor traffic violation, according to Hoshko. “It came back clean,” he said.
Alexis worked as a subcontractor helping to update and replace computers for Navy and Marine Corps installations. Since July, the 34-year-old had worked at six different naval locations, including facilities in Arlington, Va., Cherry Point, N.C., and Stafford, Va. He worked at the Navy Yard for several days before the shooting.
It is unclear why the Defense Department approved Alexis’s security clearance after his 2004 arrest in Seattle for shooting out the tires of a car. Thomas Richards, a spokesman for the Office of Personnel Management, said the office conducted only one security review of Alexis, in 2007, and that it turned up his 2004 arrest in Seattle.
He maintained his clearance despite more recent brushes with the law and a pattern of misconduct that preceded his discharge from the Navy. Alexis was arrested on charges of disorderly conduct in DeKalb County, Ga., in 2008, and after he fired a shot into his apartment ceiling in Texas in 2010.
A Defense Department official said that lower-level clearances such as the one granted to Alexis are typically good for 10 years. Former military employees who become private-sector contractors can also maintain their clearance during that time.
The official said a person can keep a clearance “in the absence of unadjudicated derogatory information.”
The agency did not conduct a new background check either last year, when Alexis was first hired as a military contractor, or this summer, when Alexis was seeking a second stint with the contracting firm, people familiar with his hiring said. Instead, the company hired an approved background screening firm that confirmed with the Defense Department that Alexis’s security clearance remained valid.
A secret-level clearance requires far less-intensive digging than one for top-secret clearance, and involves only a check of the FBI database, military records and data from law enforcement agencies where an applicant has lived, worked or attended school during the past five years. It does not require interviews with family members, co-workers or employers.
Hoshko told The Washington Post that he would not have hired Alexis if he had known about his arrests.
“Anything that suggests criminal problems or mental-health issues, that would be a flag,” he said. “We would not have hired him.”
No one in the company was made aware of the past incidents, he said. “If there’s not full disclosure on this, how do they expect us to make good decisions about who to trust and hire?”
Hoshko said his company and other contracting firms rely on the military to approve the security clearances of their employees, and he fears that budget crunches have led to faster and less thorough checks. His company hired a private firm — in September 2012, when Alexis first came to The Experts, and in June 2013, when he returned for another stint — to conduct a criminal background check of Alexis. As part of the company’s standard procedure for hiring new employees and rehiring old ones, the company also verified with the Defense Department both times that Alexis’s security clearance remained in force and conducted new drug tests.
Congressional leaders on Tuesday called for investigations and hearings into how the military screens contractors for classified work and entry to its bases. Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) asked the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee to hold a hearing into contractor hiring practices at military installations, while Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) wrote to Navy Secretary Ray Mabus seeking answers about oversight of contractor access and flaws in security clearances.
A report released Tuesday by the Defense Department’s inspector general also found serious deficiencies in a Navy screening program for people who didn’t have standard credentials. The program does not apply to contractors such as Alexis, but congressional staffers say it indicates another serious deficiency in the screening system.
Auditors found 52 convicted felons who received routine, unescorted access to naval facilities through the program, known as the Navy Commercial Access Control System. The inspector general said the program, developed in 2010 to check the credentials of occasional contractors, created “a false sense of security” and should be abandoned immediately.
In one example, the report said an individual was given unescorted access to a base in 2011 for more than three months before it was discovered he had been convicted years earlier of “indecent liberties with a child,” a felony. Several other felonies also weren’t caught in the screening, including convictions for assault, theft and “throwing a missile at an occupied vehicle.”
Hoshko said he was disturbed to learn from The Post and other news outlets about police reports alleging that Alexis shot out a construction worker’s tires in Seattle in 2004 and fired a bullet into the ceiling of his Fort Worth apartment in 2010.
“If I can find this out just by doing a Google search, that is sad,” Hoshko said. “Anything that suggests criminal problems or mental-health issues, that would be a flag. We would not have hired him.”
Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) received staff briefings on the case Tuesday and has authored legislation that would provide more funding to ferret out screening flaws.
“Corners are obviously being cut,” Tester said. “We had Snowden earlier this year and now the Navy Yard tragedy. We have to fix this.”
Sen. Thomas R. Carper (D-Del.) chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said he plans to investigate “a number of things” in the coming weeks — especially how Alexis could have been employed by a federal contractor despite his arrest records and treatment for mental illness.
“What is the responsibility of our government and contractors to vet employees and from time to time reinvestigate those employees, if concerns arise about someone?” Carper asked. “What kind of clearance or clearances did this suspect possess? What kind of background check did he undergo in order to get his clearance? Were his clearances up to date? Is there some quality problem with the quality process of granting those clearances? And maybe a third one is what can we learn from this incident to help make this installation and other military installations and federal buildings safer, so that some good could come out of something that was awful.”
Hoshko, whose company is based in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., said he applauds Congress’s revived interest in the rigor of security clearances, the vast majority of which are handled by private firms.
“You have to more seriously look at the people’s backgrounds,” Hoshko said. “If he had a mental background, we would have wanted to know it. . . . The whole [security clearance process] needs to be reviewed top to bottom.”
Alexis began working for The Experts as an hourly computer technician in September 2012 at a U.S. military base in Japan and finished his work in Japan in January 2013.
“There were no incidents,” Hoshko said. “The guys liked him.”
He took a break, according to co-workers, because he wanted to go back to school.
He returned to work on The Experts’ subcontract in July. Alexis told one of his colleagues that he was returning to the contracting world “because school didn’t pay,” Hoshko said.
Marjorie Censer, Alice Crites, Ed O’Keefe and Craig Whitlock contributed to this report.
September 19, 2013
AGENCIES RELY ON SELF-REPORTING
Security clearance system to be reviewed
By Ernesto Londoño, Matea Gold and Carol D. Leonnig
Defense Department officials on Wednesday ordered a broad review of the procedures used to grant security clearances to employees and contractors, acknowledging that years of escalating warning signs about Navy Yard gunman Aaron Alexis went unheeded.
Top intelligence and military officials concede that issuing millions of people security clearances for up to 10 years without regular reviews is a serious safety risk.
Alexis, a former Navy reservist who struggled with mental-health problems and other issues, used his secret-level clearance Monday to gain access to the secure Navy Yard compound, where he fatally shot a dozen people before being killed by police.
“Obviously, something went wrong,” Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said as he announced the background-checks review, along with a separate assessment of security at U.S. military installations worldwide. “We will review everything, and from that review, we would hope that we will find some answers to how we do it better.”
The handling of mental-health issues is particularly problematic because investigators rely on law enforcement agencies, employers or the employee to report concerns. It’s an especially acute issue for veterans returning from combat in Iraq and Afghanistan with symptoms of post-traumatic stress.
The Department of Veterans Affairs said in a memorandum delivered to Congress on Wednesday that during two August visits to VA medical facilities, Alexis said was he was not depressed and was not considering harming himself or others. He told Rhode Island police earlier that month that he was hearing voices in his head, but Navy officials apparently did not do anything about it.
The Defense Department, which employs more than 3 million people, has come under criticism in recent years for not acting on warning signs that preceded a 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood, Tex., carried out by an Army psychiatrist, and the disclosure that same year of a trove of classified diplomatic cables by an Army specialist in Iraq.
In the District, U.S. Attorney Ronald C. Machen Jr.’s office is “ramping up efforts to investigate and prosecute individuals and companies that cut corners and falsify information in background checks,” according to a statement.
As part of the inquiry, federal investigators are reviewing how Alexis was granted a security clearance, a law enforcement official said.
With nearly 5 million federal workers holding secret or top-secret clearances, the government’s overburdened security clearance system struggles to keep track of those with classified access, according to current and former government officials. Agencies rely heavily on individuals or their supervisors to report disturbing behavior, tangles with law enforcement or mental-health concerns. They have few other ways to know if someone requires a second look.
An Army pilot program that began last year found that 20 percent of military and civilian personnel it scrutinized had serious issues that demanded a review of their security clearances. Some had been arrested or charged with crimes, made threatening comments about President Obama on social media, or expressed depressed or suicidal feelings. The program relied largely on law enforcement records and public Web sites.
In the past year, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the agency that oversees the government’s security clearance system, has been studying how to more regularly screen people who have passed background checks.
“We all realize the security clearance process is terribly broken,” said Charles Sowell, a former senior adviser to Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., who helped lead the effort. “The current system of checks are ineffective and unreliable.”
Gene Barlow, a spokesman for the ODNI’s Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive, acknowledged that the agency sees room for improvement.
“We do act on derogatory information that we receive, with regard to security clearances,” he said.
Anthony Roman, head of a New York risk-management and investigations firm, called the system “a house of cards.”
“It’s built with a weak foundation, and that would be a compliment,” he said.
Defense officials said Wednesday that they are developing a mechanism that would alert the Pentagon in a systematic way to troubling information about its employees from a range of sources, including local law enforcement databases.
A senior defense official said such a system would automatically “push” out relevant information about potentially dangerous employees.
“The problem we have is there is no consistent across-the-board mechanism for recording arrests around the country,” the official said during the briefing, which the Pentagon held on the condition that officials not be identified.
Mental-health issues generally come to the attention of investigators doing background checks only when people first apply for clearance and are asked to report any treatment they have received. Those who sought help for post-traumatic stress resulting from combat, or for marital or grief counseling, are exempted.
Once individuals are cleared for classified access, any mental-health problems they experience only rise to the attention of security officials if they are reported by law enforcement agencies, supervisors or the employee.
“The system is based upon trust,” said Mark Riley, a former Army officer who works as a lawyer representing people appealing security clearance denials. “The idea is that you’re granting clearance to the kind of people who are going to self-report. But too many people have clearances, including a lot of people who don’t have the self-discipline to report.”
Experts in the security clearance process noted that the program is not set up to ferret out people who struggle with mental illness. Many military officials also want to be careful not to dissuade those in need of help from seeking counseling.
“The system is not designed to diagnose mental-health problems or assess the potential for violent acts,” said Marc Frey, a former senior adviser at the Department of Homeland Security who worked on personnel security matters. “It’s designed to assess your trustworthiness for handling classified information. And just because you’re depressed doesn’t mean you’re going to sell secrets to the Iranians.”
Alexis, who appeared to struggle with paranoia in the weeks leading up to the Navy Yard rampage, was required as a contractor with a security clearance to report any mental-health episodes or criminal arrests.
In August, he sought treatment for insomnia at VA medical facilities in Providence, R.I., and Washington, officials said. The department is required to alert military security officials only if a veteran or active-duty member of the military reports an intention to hurt himself or others.
House Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Jeff Miller (R-Fla.) asked VA Secretary Eric K. Shinseki on Wednesday to turn over all records “touching in any way to Aaron Alexis” to the panel as soon as possible.
Several security-risk experts said there was a key moment when the system should have flagged Alexis: on Aug. 7, when police in Newport, R.I., alerted the Newport Naval Air Station that he was found hallucinating and in distress in a hotel room. The police said that Navy officials told them they would follow up, but that nothing indicates they did.
Experts said the report should have led the Navy to enter Alexis’s name into the military’s shared database of contractors and employees with security clearances.
“You have to applaud the Newport police for following up and alerting the Navy base,” Sowell said. “They could have just put it into the file in their records, but they went the extra mile. That is certainly information that should have made its way into the right hands in the Navy.”
On Wednesday, Hagel said the military will look at how that report should have been handled.
In addition to the internal review about security clearance procedures, which will be carried out by Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, Hagel said he will appoint an “independent panel” to examine security at military installations and screenings of people who have access to sensitive information.
“Where there are gaps, we will close them,” Hagel said. “Where there are inadequacies, we will address them. And where there are failures, we will correct them. We owe the victims, their families and all our people nothing less.”
Alice Crites, Ann E. Marimow, Julie Tate and Steve Vogel contributed to this report.
January 21, 2014
January 21, 2014
To the judges:
A vague but stunning tweet came from the D.C. police department: A person had been shot at the Navy Yard and there was an active shooter on site. The Navy Yard is a federal installation in the heart of the city. It was the middle of the morning rush. This event stood at the nexus of everything Washington Post readers care about.
The Post reacted with immediacy, depth, accuracy, sensitivity and enterprise with both the evolving narrative of what happened and the major themes that would come to dominate public debate. On social media, mobile, online and in print, The Post was first with the news that mattered and by far the most accurate as the story unfolded.
With a firm understanding of how people want their news, The Post provided a live blog that constantly was updated with the latest information – a wide range that included traffic and school lockdowns, the death toll, witness accounts and shooter information. Post journalists also gave their readers an online narrative that was freshened more than 45 times that day; photo galleries; interactive graphics; and additional stories. They also tweeted, sent e-mail alerts and gave their audience a stunning amount of news and information in every way imaginable.
That news – that Aaron Alexis, a man with a history of mental health problems and a security clearance, was able to get on base and kill 12 people before dying in a fierce gun battle with police – brought out the best in Post journalists.
In the hectic first hours of a story like this, an incredible amount of misinformation emerges. Other media outlets incorrectly reported the name of the shooter, the types of weapons used, where the shots came from and scores of other details. The Post, acting with the same urgency as its competition, never reported rumors as fact. Instead, because of years of good sourcing, detectives and agents at the scene took calls from Post reporters to set the record straight.
In addition, even on the day of the shooting, The Post recognized and reported the issues exposed by the shooting. The Post provided its readers with a first-day profile of the shooter as well as stories about problems with mental health treatment and contractor security clearances. Those stories held the military and the Veterans Administration accountable even in the early stages of the investigation.
Now, as the probe continues, Congress and other agencies are finding out what Post readers learned in the first hours after the shooting,
We are proud to offer our coverage for your consideration for a Pulitzer Prize for Local Breaking News Reporting.
Sincerely,
Martin Baron
Winners
Prize Winner in Breaking News Reporting in 2014:
Staff
For its exhaustive and empathetic coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings and the ensuing manhunt that enveloped the city, using photography and a range of digital tools to capture the full impact of the tragedy.
Breaking News Reporting
Finalists
Nominated as finalists in Breaking News Reporting in 2014:
Staff
For its compelling coverage of a fast-moving wildfire that claimed the lives of 19 firefighters and destroyed more than a hundred homes, using an array of journalistic tools to tell the story.
The Jury
The Jury
Carol Stark(Chair )
editor
Paul Cheung
director of interactive and digital news production
Susan Gage
director of local content
Martin Gottlieb
editor
Jennifer Orsi
deputy managing editor/metro and business
Winners in Breaking News Reporting
Staff
For its comprehensive coverage of the mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., that killed 12 and injured 58, using journalistic tools, from Twitter and Facebook to video and written reports, both to capture a breaking story and provide context.
Staff
For its enterprising coverage of a deadly tornado, using social media as well as traditional reporting to provide real-time updates, help locate missing people and produce in-depth print accounts even after power disruption forced the paper to publish at another plant 50 miles away.
No award
No award
Staff
For its comprehensive coverage, in print and online, of the shooting deaths of four police officers in a coffee house and the 40-hour manhunt for the suspect.
2014 Prize Winners
Donna Tartt
A beautifully written coming-of-age novel with exquisitely drawn characters that follows a grieving boy's entanglement with a small famous painting that has eluded destruction, a book that stimulates the mind and touches the heart.
Annie Baker
A thoughtful drama with well-crafted characters that focuses on three employees of a Massachusetts art-house movie theater, rendering lives rarely seen on the stage.
Alan Taylor
A meticulous and insightful account of why runaway slaves in the colonial era were drawn to the British side as potential liberators.
Megan Marshall
A richly researched book that tells the remarkable story of a 19th century author, journalist, critic and pioneering advocate of women's rights who died in a shipwreck.