Fort Bragg police amassed a 3-inch-thick homicide file to prove Sgt. Forest Nelson killed his girlfriend, and two military prosecutors said they would take him to trial.
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| Post / Helen H. Richardson |
| Ann Croom, above center, Tabitha’s mother, is flanked by daughter Christina, left, holding her son Elijah, and Ginger Bullard, Tabitha’s friend, holding another of Tabitha’s nephews, Justin. They’re seated behind a portrait of Tabitha. |
A witness saw Nelson’s car backed up to Tabitha Croom’s apartment door the night she disappeared. And hikers found her body 500 feet behind his barracks, among other evidence in the case.
But last year, as the North Carolina Army base faced intense public scrutiny over a cluster of domestic-violence murders, Nelson’s commanders shut down the investigation.
“We all thought he was going to trial,” said Ann Croom, Tabitha’s mother. “I will never understand how they could do that. Never.”
The military investigative file obtained by The Denver Post does not explain why Nelson’s commander shelved the case, using his discretionary power under military law. The documents indicate Nelson faced administrative punishment, noting that “disciplinary action is pending.”
The Army reopened the murder investigation last summer after The Post raised questions about the case and uncovered evidence of violence in Nelson’s previous marriage.
The Croom homicide and other domestic-violence incidents, a nine-month Post investigation found, reveal a secretive justice system tightly controlled by commanders that routinely fails to prosecute domestic-violence offenders and creates obstacles for victims, sometimes leaving them unprotected.
Some end up dead.
The military often mishandles cases of domestic violence, as well as sexual assault, according to a review of thousands of military documents and interviews with dozens of victims.
Among the newspaper’s findings:
- Batterers in the military are rarely prosecuted. In the Army, twice as many accused domestic-violence offenders faced job-related discipline in the past decade as faced criminal prosecution in a court-martial. In 16 murder cases, administrative actions were taken against the accused, but the Army provided no details. The other service branches did not disclose any data. In a report this year, a congressionally formed task force said the Department of Defense was too lenient with abusers and added: “Offenders must be held accountable for all criminal conduct.” Often, offenders are allowed to leave military service with an honorable discharge.
- The military has been slow to respond to congressional mandates and other calls for improved investigations. In 1988, Congress told defense officials to report crimes to the FBI. Today, the military has yet to finish the computer system designed to comply with the mandate. Congress told the Department of Defense to respond by June 30 to a task force’s recommendations on improving military handling of domestic violence, but Pentagon officials have yet to comply.
- The military leaves victims vulnerable. Many military bases lack advocates to help safeguard women who have been beaten or are in danger. Commanders must react faster to threats of violence, in part by ensuring that abusers are kept apart from victims, military consultants say. In 10 cases reviewed by The Post, an advocate was not provided, and in some instances commanders who knew of assaults or threats downplayed concerns.
- Some soldiers go on to kill their partners after their threats were known to commanders or after they were given light punishments for previous assaults. A month before Navy sailor David DeArmond killed his wife and mother-in-law in 2002, his spouse sought a restraining order, citing a death threat. Commanders received a copy of the restraining order but did not provide her a victim advocate or restrict DeArmond to the base. Commanders also contend they did not know that DeArmond choked his first wife during a Navy stint in San Diego. The couple later divorced.
Top Department of Defense officials refused repeated requests by The Post to discuss their handling of domestic-violence issues. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s office released a statement to The Post saying defense officials are cracking down on domestic violence.
“We are working with the services to ensure that commanders take domestic violence seriously and take appropriate action, including court-martial proceedings when appropriate,” the statement said.
“DOD wants to stop domestic violence because it’s the right thing to do,” David Lloyd, head of the military’s Family Advocacy Program, said in a symposium presentation last year. “We are as concerned about this national problem as anyone else.”
Domestic abuse is pervasive in the military. Between 1997 and 2001, more than 10,000 cases of spouse abuse a year have been substantiated in the armed forces. Of those cases, 114 were homicides of adults, according to military records.
The military defines domestic violence as acts of physical, sexual and emotional abuse. For statistical purposes, however, the military often does not count intimate partners such as girlfriends as domestic-abuse victims, contrary to the civilian world.
The rate of reported spouse abuse in the military declined from 1997 to 2001 – from 22 per thousand active-duty personnel to 16.5 per thousand. But memos show that Pentagon officials believed in 2001 that the decline was caused in part by fears that reporting the crimes could hurt careers, and that commanders were not reporting all incidents.
Few studies have compared military domestic-abuse trends with the civilian world. One study performed for the Army in the early 1990s suggested that the prevalence of the crimes could be twice as high as in the civilian world. Other studies have concluded rates are similar. A 1999 study found that the Army showed a higher rate of cases with severe injuries.
A series of spousal killings at Fort Campbell in Kentucky during the late 1990s, as well as concerns raised by The Miles Foundation and other advocacy groups, led Congress in 2000 to create the Defense Task Force on Domestic Violence to examine how the military handles abuse cases.
The 24-member task force, with civilian and military members, concluded this year that the system needed an overhaul to hold batterers accountable, protect victims and train commanders.
According to the Defense Department statement to The Post, military officials agree with most of the recommendations and are in the final stages of reviewing them.
If the military does change its approach, it will be overcoming a historical tendency to downplay the severity of domestic-abuse problems, said Deborah Tucker, co-chair of the now-defunct task force whose recommendations are being considered.
“Philosophically, domestic violence has been viewed by the military as a case of family dysfunction, not through a lens of criminal behavior.”
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While civilian prosecutors in the past two decades have cracked down on abusers, the military emphasizes counseling and instructs commanders to consider the effect of punishments on careers of the accused.
Often, offenders are given administrative punishments. Or no discipline at all.
“It’s a sad commentary on the military justice system that we still do not treat domestic violence like other serious crimes,” said Casey Gwinn, a San Diego prosecutor and member of the domestic-violence task force. “When was the last time somebody robbed a bank and expected only counseling?”
The task force found the system severely flawed, preventing true accountability for offenders whose violence typically persists, leaving victims on their own.
“Commanding officers must ensure that the institution, not the victim, is responsible for holding the offender accountable,” the task force report said.
Civilian prosecutors place a high priority on convicting abusers, said Denver District Attorney Bill Ritter, who chairs the board of the American Prosecutors Research Institute. Two decades ago, domestic violence was too often considered a family matter, he said.
“Now there is a focus nationally on the scourge of domestic violence,” Ritter said. “Prosecution is part of it.”
Batterers are rarely prosecuted in the military, but the exact picture is obscured by flawed record-keeping and the fact that commanders have failed to report punishments of their service members to a central office, documents show.
In 2000, 12,068 cases of spouse abuse were reported to the military’s Family Advocacy Program, which handles abuse cases, according to a Defense Department memorandum submitted to Congress.
Of the 1,492 cases investigated by military police, the memo shows, only 26 led to courts-martial. The outcomes of 983 incidents were not reported by command officials. The memo also states that databases designed to track such crimes were incomplete.
Separate data the Army provided to The Post this summer show that more than 800 soldiers faced administrative penalties during the past decade, more than twice the 400 who went to court-martial. Specific punishments were not disclosed. The outcomes in 320 cases were blank.
In the most severe domestic-violence cases – murder – 16 accused offenders were handled administratively, the records show. An equal number faced court-martial proceedings.
The outcomes for 14 homicide cases were blank.
Defense Department task force members were frustrated when they encountered similarly incomplete data early in their review, said Tucker, the panel’s co-chair.
“We were stymied by a lack of information,” Tucker said. “Information came back to us blank or blacked out. This said to me that (military officials) really don’t want to know how bad the problem is.”
The Pentagon says its solution to the poor tracking of crime – called the Data Incident Based Reporting System – should be fully operational next year.
After touring several military installations, task force members discovered that offenders in the military typically escaped prosecution.
On a visit to the Spangdahlem Air Base in Germany, records given to the task force showed that most airmen who abused their spouses or girlfriends in 2000 and 2001 avoided incarceration.
Five airmen received light punishments for choking their wives or girlfriends, records indicated. Their punishments included reprimands, extra duty and fines.
“Case after case, the victim said nothing was done,” Tucker said of the military in general. “Then, when we look at the records at the base, it showed indeed little or nothing was done.”
Instead of taking abusers to court for severe assaults, they found, commanders relied on counseling and anger-management classes.
Members sat in on domestic-violence case-review committees, used to screen cases and recommend clinical treatments for batterers.
“One of them had blood and guts everywhere, and they were talking about it like it was a minor dispute,” Gwinn, the San Diego prosecutor, said of a meeting at Camp Lejeune, N.C. “The social worker said, ‘Put (the husband and wife) in counseling.’ Our jaws dropped.”
Commanders’ decisions are inconsistent, Gwinn said.
“We deal with some who say, ‘This guy is wastewater. We bilge out our wastewater.’ Others say, ‘Just because he can’t get along with his wife doesn’t mean he can’t be a good Marine.’ … The most sophisticated batterers today avoid accountability in the military. They’re really sorry. They go to counseling. They want to save their career.”
James Coleman, a Marine assigned to Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, was sent to counseling before he went on to smother his girlfriend and prop her corpse on the couch for a week. He later smothered her infant son and put the boy’s body in the freezer.
On Sept. 15, 2002, Coleman pushed and choked his pregnant girlfriend, 19-year-old Jessica Hine, at their off-base apartment, records show. Tampa police arrested him on a felony charge of battering a pregnant woman, which was later reduced to a misdemeanor because Hine would not cooperate.
Base officials weren’t concerned about the violence, Coleman said in a telephone interview with The Post. “They were mad at me for bringing negative publicity.”
A supervisor sent him to a Mental Health Skills class.
“I told him I didn’t really need it because I wasn’t starting anything,” Coleman said. “He told me it would be in my best interests to ework things out.”
Central Command spokesman Maj. Pete Mitchell said that after Coleman’s arrest, “he came to his command and said, ‘She said this under duress. She didn’t mean it. My service record reflects I’ve done nothing to warrant this.”‘
Mitchell said the commanders decided to let civilian authorities handle the matter. But Coleman became violent again.
On Oct. 28, 2002, Hine told police Coleman choked her. As civilian prosecutors reviewed the case, Hine returned home to Coleman. On Nov. 15, she told police he beat and kicked her. Officers drove her to a domestic-violence shelter, where she stayed briefly before again going home.
Mitchell said that if police were involved, “his chain of command would have known about it.” He said Coleman’s supervisor was no longer at Central Command and could not be reached for comment.
Coleman said he continued with counseling twice a week for about two months while the fights with Hine escalated.
Finally, Coleman said, “things got worse until the last one, when she died.”
On Dec. 7, 2002, Coleman later told police, he and Hine argued over the stereo being too loud. He hit her. With the baby in her arms, she repeatedly tried to climb out the bedroom window or run out the front door, but he pulled her back each time.
Finally, he choked her to death, then left her for a week on a couch, at times sitting next to her to watch football on TV.
Finally, Coleman placed Hine’s body in a brown suitcase with the head and feet sticking out both sides, and dumped it in a wooded area.
For a week he fed the baby sporadically until finally the child was “not looking good,” he told police, so Coleman smothered him. He wrapped the body in a white sheet with red roses before placing him in a Staples cardboard box and putting the box in the freezer.
On Dec. 26, Hine’s body was found. Police questioned Coleman, and he confessed. Now in jail, he faces two charges of murder.
The rules – the Uniform Code of Military Justice – that give commanders wide discretion in handling cases such as Coleman’s ignited a battle among the members of the domestic-violence task force.
“We had these horrendous arguments,” said member Peter McDonald, a retired Kentucky judge. “We would say, ‘But you don’t do anything to them.’ (Military committee members) would say, ‘Yes, we do.”‘
The military camp argued that proposing changes to the code, which Congress wrote and can modify, would be too politically charged to result in any change. The UCMJ has been modified but not revamped since it took effect half a century ago.
The task force decided not to tackle changes in the UCMJ.
The heart of the panel’s findings was to encourage the military to aggressively investigate and prosecute crimes by setting up domestic-violence intervention teams. Team members would ensure that victims had advocates to aid them and create safety plans immediately.
They also argued that military officials should conduct fatality reviews after domestic-violence homicides to pinpoint failings of the system. The reviews, increasingly common in civilian communities, would critique how police, commanders and social services, among other agencies, respond to domestic-violence incidents.
Otherwise, “domestic-violence policies and case-management practices … may inadvertently contribute to the death of a victim or offender,” said the task force report.
A year after the recommendation, Fort Bragg suffered five domestic homicides. Tucker said task force members saw it as a perfect opportunity to perform a fatality review.
“One of our members dashed into the office of the secretary of defense and said, ‘Let us do this,”‘ Tucker said. “But the secretary had already assembled a team.”
Not a fatality-review team, however. It was an Army panel that focused on the soldiers’ post-combat stress.
“In the crisp, bright light, Fort Bragg might have shown the benefits of a complete investigation” into the system, Tucker said.
At the same time, Fort Bragg investigators were looking into another slaying, the details of which stayed hidden.
No one can know whether Tabitha Croom’s life could have been saved had Fort Bragg done a better job of handling domestic-violence cases. But, experts say, the case shows how batterers, like burning fuses, can give off visible smoke trails before an explosion.
From the thick wilderness around Fort Bragg to Croom’s small apartment in Fayetteville, N.C., the trail of evidence in her 1999 death always seemed to lead investigators back to her boyfriend, Sgt. Forest Nelson, documents and interviews show.
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“Investigation established probable cause to believe Sgt. Nelson committed the offense of murder,” reads the cover of the evidence file obtained by The Post.
Yet after two years of building a case with the help of civilian law-enforcement agencies, the investigation was “terminated” in November 2002. The report noted that “the offense was committed by a person who is no longer subject to the UCMJ.” Fort Bragg officials declined to comment because of the reopened investigation.
“There was enough evidence to take him to trial,” one investigator close to the case told The Post. “The bottom line is that his chain of command decided to let him go.”
Nelson, who now lives in the Washington, D.C., area, ended his tour of duty with the Army in February 2002, records show. He did not respond to an interview request.
For several years, Nelson served in the 9th Psychological Operations Battalion, responsible for propaganda missions. Its motto: “Win the Mind, Win the Day.”
But he never won over Croom’s friends and family, interviews and records show. From the beginning, the relationship between the Fayetteville native and the older, cigar-smoking Nelson struck Croom’s friends as odd.
Croom, a part-time exotic dancer, was gregarious and always smiling; Nelson was silent and circumspect. He never seemed to fit in with her crowd, her friends said. When Croom began talking about how he slapped and pushed her and made ominous statements, friends urged her to leave him, they told The Post.
“She told me he would say things, like, to scare her,” said Maria Davis, a friend of Croom’s since the ninth grade. “She said he told her he could kill somebody and nobody would find the body or anything. I told her she should break up with him, get rid of him, he wasn’t good for her.”
In April 1998, Croom filed a complaint with the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Department, stating that Nelson knocked over her TV set and threatened her and her family.
And in September 1999, she reported that Nelson pounded on her front door, yelling, records show. She declined to press charges in both incidents.
Croom tried to break off the relationship. She started dating other men, and Nelson, who also was seeing another woman, was growing fiercely jealous, records show.
Oct. 4, 1999, was the last day anyone saw the 22-year-old Croom alive.
Nelson was the last person known to have been with her. He picked her up that night from the Fayetteville Omni Theater, where she worked until 11:30. An usher told police he saw Croom walk to Nelson’s car and get in.
Around midnight, Croom’s next-door neighbor, Henry Moore, heard “rumbling or tussling” noises coming from her apartment, according to a police statement. He noticed Nelson’s car backed up to Croom’s apartment, with the trunk lid open. He later recalled seeing white sheets in the trunk.
The next day, Croom’s purse was found in a downtown Fayetteville trash bin. The sheriff’s department began a missing-person investigation, interviewing family and friends. They learned about Croom’s fears in recent months and sought to question Nelson.
Talking to detectives the next week, Nelson “showed no emotion” and denied any role in her disappearance, records show. The trunk to his car was open that night, he told police, because he was unloading laundry.
During the interview, Nelson kept his arms and hands underneath a table. But at one point, he raised his arms to make a gesture. That’s when investigators noticed “numerous scratches” covering them.
They snapped pictures, speculating they could be defensive wounds. Nelson said he had been nicked while on a 4-mile “terrain run” with a friend. But records show his friend had no similar scratches and did not see cuts on Nelson’s arm the day of the run. The friend said he did notice scratches the day after Croom disappeared.
When Nelson took a polygraph examination several days after Croom was reported missing, he denied involvement in her disappearance.
“The examinee was being deceptive when answering the relevant questions,” the examiner, David Soldano, wrote on Oct. 13, 1999.
In December 1999, hikers found Croom’s body covered in thorns in a wooded area 500 feet from Nelson’s barracks. The medical examiner ruled her death “strongly suspicious of homicide” and consistent with strangulation but could not establish a cause of death because the body was severely decomposed.
Because the body was found at Fort Bragg, military investigators took over the case with the consent of the local district attorney.
Police believed that Nelson’s arm scratches could have been caused by those thorns, records show, and the medical examiner agreed they were consistent with the theory. Lt. Col. William F. Lee authorized a search of Nelson’s Ford Escort. The search produced “head hairs microscopically similar” to Croom’s in his trunk, records show.
But by September 2001, records indicate that an investigator on the case believed that officials with jurisdiction over Nelson’s unit were backing off prosecution.
Fort Bragg Special Agent David Rodgers discussed the possibility of having Nelson reassigned to another unit, under a different command, where two other prosecutors supported sending him to trial.
“They stated they would seek to prosecute Sgt. Nelson if he were reassigned,” Rodgers wrote in a Sept. 25, 2001, report.
By late 2002, Croom’s family members said, Cumberland County sheriff’s investigators were telling them that Fort Bragg would probably court-martial Nelson.
They were stunned to find out earlier this year that he had left the military without facing prosecution.
Ann Croom and Maria Davis said they are dumbfounded and angry about the lack of justice in Tabitha’s death.
“He’s living his life, when Tabitha can’t,” Davis said.
Ann Croom was more upset when she learned from The Post that there is another violent chapter to Nelson’s story that military investigators missed.
In January 1992, seven years before Tabitha Croom died, Nelson’s wife at the time, Angela, walked into the emergency room at Cape Fear Valley Medical Center, a civilian hospital in Fayetteville, her abdomen bleeding from a gunshot wound, records show.
“We started arguing” after she told him she wanted a divorce, she told The Post. “He shot me one time in the abdomen. He had me to say it was just a struggle, so the military wouldn’t find out.”
That was the story she gave the hospital, medical records show. She divorced him. The military insurance program paid for much of her recovery, she said.
But she added that no criminal investigator interviewed her about the shooting – or about Tabitha Croom’s death.
In August, Fort Bragg told The Post that the investigation had been reopened in light of the new evidence.
In the U.S. military, a serviceman with a record of spouse abuse can be honorably discharged.
That happened in Colorado Springs, when Rockford Beassie, an Airman of the Year at Peterson Air Force Base in 1999, was released from the Air Force in January 2001.
His honorable discharge came three months after civilian police charged him with a misdemeanor for dragging his wife, Nicole, down a stairway by her feet, records show. Beassie pleaded guilty.
Such a discharge was warranted because his entire Air Force service record was considered, said Lt. Col. Albert Klein, the staff judge advocate for Peterson. Even though Beassie’s record included an administrative punishment for the Oct. 28, 2000, assault and his commanders knew Nicole claimed he abused her two other times, Peterson officials said, the Air Force considered him an asset.
“In our eyes, he was a pretty good guy,” Klein said. “We look at the entire service record.”
According to military rules governing discharges, commanders determine whether a member’s service “generally has met the standards of acceptable conduct and performance of duty for military personnel, or is otherwise so meritorious that any other characterization would be clearly inappropriate.”
Nicole Beassie said that in response to her two previous abuse allegations, officials sent Rockford Beassie to marriage counseling and gave him the option of attending anger-management classes.
His supervisor violated military protocol by failing to report one of the incidents to Beassie’s squadron commander, according to Peterson officials who reviewed the case. Nicole Beassie said her husband never attended the anger-management classes. He could not be reached for comment.
“The Air Force became my husband’s No. 1 enabler,” she said. “As long as his superiors did not think his abuse was a problem, neither did he.”
A Defense Department study showed that of abusers who left the military between 1988 and 1993, 75 percent to 84 percent received honorable discharges. For all military personnel who left the service in the study period, 90 percent received honorable discharges.
The study also found that 54 percent of abusers had been promoted in those years, compared with 65 percent for the overall military population surveyed.
Because Beassie received an honorable discharge so he could take a higher-paying civilian job, his wife and 3-year-old daughter could not qualify for a military insurance program called Transitional Compensation, Peterson officials said. That program is limited to spouses whose husbands are separated from the service for abusing them, according to the law.
Nicole Beassie said the base was trying to protect Beassie and its image by releasing him honorably.
The Beassies divorced in the summer of 2001. Nicole and their daughter have been left without military benefits to deal with mounting medical bills and living expenses.
Members of the Defense Department domestic-violence task force said the transitional compensation law needs to be more flexible, so commanders cannot create additional hardships for abuse victims.
Meanwhile, Nicole Beassie has appealed to Defense Department officials and U.S. Rep. Joel Hefley, R-Colo., to help her obtain the transitional compensation, saying that because she was abused, she’s entitled to the money. The military has rejected her appeals.
“It’s nice to know a criminal shares the same integrity as the good men and women who serve the United States honorably,” Nicole Beassie said.
Several military abuse cases in recent years have revealed that commanders knew of threats or violence by soldiers before they went on to kill their wives or girlfriends, raising questions about whether officials took strong steps to protect victims.
After a string of spousal killings at Fort Campbell in the late 1990s, CBS’s “60 Minutes” and other news organizations reported that commanders knew of threats in at least two cases but did not enforce orders restricting them to the installation.
Since then, there have been more deaths.
Often, commanders have failed to enforce protective orders, despite having the power to monitor perpetrators and restrict them to housing or order confinement. They also can require escorts and issue orders barring contact with a potential victim.
“It’s probably the second most frequent reason a victim gets in touch with us: the fact they have a restriction or a protective order and he has now left the base and assaulted her,” said Christine Hansen, executive director of the civilian Miles Foundation, which has assisted victims in more than 11,000 cases of military domestic abuse since its inception in 1987.
The scenario happened again at Fort Campbell in August 2000.
Sgt. Derrick McFowler, violating a state protective order as well as an order to stay on base, drove off the Fort Campbell grounds, found his wife, Silke Meyer, and killed her before fatally turning the gun on himself, local police said.
“He was supposed to be restricted to the barracks, but they’re not really restricted,” said Brian Prentice, a sheriff’s investigator in Clarksville, Tenn.
Fort Campbell authorities declined to comment about the case.
And the scenario repeated itself in June 2002.
It was a month after David DeArmond, a sailor based at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, flew into a rage while arguing with his wife, Zaleha.
He broke the dining room table. He trashed her Koran holy book. And he tried to flush their wedding album down the toilet.
“You are going to pay for everything you did to me,” he told her. “Die. Bitch.”
The death threat and violence were described by Zaleha in court papers she used to obtain a civilian restraining order for him to stay away from her.
A month later, DeArmond, who had been living in the barracks, entered their home on the base and bludgeoned Zaleha with an iron skillet, killing her. He then stabbed her mother to death. The next morning, he walked into the military police station and confessed.
Despite the death threat, DeArmond’s commanders had not provided Zaleha with a victim advocate to help her with a safety plan. And though DeArmond was separated from his wife, commanders had not restricted him to his barracks or provided for supervised movement.
“He was offered a room in the barracks as a result of comments that he made indicating that he had problems with his marriage,” said a written statement released by the base.
Pearl Harbor officials said in the statement that Zaleha’s safety was discussed the previous January as part of a “counseling process” but said regulations prohibit them from releasing more information.
Nancy Kreidman, a local legal adviser for domestic-violence victims whose agency helped Zaleha obtain the restraining order, said the base should have done more to protect her, such as supervising DeArmond’s barracks stay and providing her an advocate to follow up on safety concerns.
“The danger to her couldn’t have been any clearer,” Kreidman said.
Officials defended their response, noting in the statement that Zaleha DeArmond agreed to amend the restraining order prior to her death, allowing her husband visitation rights to see the children with her permission.
“There was not evidence to believe the threatening statement constituted intent to commit this crime,” the statement said.
Yet other warning signs were known to the military, such as DeArmond’s conviction in 1994 for choking his first wife. He received counseling through the Navy for the offense, Navy officials acknowledged. But they did not have his California record because policy does not require transfers of closed cases, they said.
In 1999, The Miles Foundation and 79 other victim-advocacy organizations asked the Pentagon and Congress to require that when service members move to a new base, any records of abuse are transferred with them.
Zaleha’s family said the military should have done more to safeguard her. They also were angered that the charge against DeArmond for killing his wife was reduced from murder to manslaughter in exchange for his guilty plea. The base commander also agreed to limit DeArmond’s prison time for both slayings to 30 years.
A panel of fellow sailors eventually sentenced DeArmond to 22 years. He will be eligible for parole in about eight.
“For him to get 22 years for killing two people?” said Zaleha’s brother, Kasti Ahmad, who lives in Singapore. “Is this justice?”
