Camp Pendleton, Calif. – A Marine testified Thursday that he saw a roomful of frightened women and children moments before they were killed by his squad mates in Hadithah, Iraq, but said he did not see who killed them.
Lance Cpl. Humberto Mendoza testified as the first witness at the military hearing to determine whether Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich should face a court-martial on murder charges. He was charged with murdering 18 Iraqis in a bloody combat operation that left 24 Iraqi civilians dead, but at the outset of Thursday’s hearing, prosecutors withdrew one murder count.
Wuterich’s case remains the biggest to have emerged against any U.S. service member to have served in Iraq. It centers on whether Wuterich, who had never experienced combat before, acted within Marine rules of engagement when he shot men by a car and then led his squad in a string of house raids.
One of Wuterich’s defense attorneys, Lt. Col. Colby Vokey, said the government was no longer charging Wuterich with murdering an Iraqi man who died in the final house cleared by Marines, leaving him charged with 17 counts of murder.
Mendoza described the events of Nov. 19, 2005, as a fast-flowing series of engagements. After a Marine Humvee driver was killed in a roadside bomb, the troops raided several homes.
In the second house he helped raid, “When I opened the door, the first thing I see is women and kids laying down on a bed,” said Mendoza, who is from Venezuela and has a heavy accent. “I believe they were scared.”
Mendoza testified that he shot an unarmed Iraqi man who opened the front door to the home, and that he shot a different man in another house who he thought was reaching for a weapon.
Mendoza said the killings were within combat rules because the occupants of the homes had been declared hostile.
Wuterich, 27, of Meriden, Conn., told investigators in February 2006 that he believed he was taking small-arms fire from a house close to the explosion, so he told a four-man team to treat the building and its occupants as hostile.
“I told them to shoot first, ask questions later,” he told investigators.
