Colorado Springs — Anthony Marquez stood on a damaged leg in the drug dealer’s home, clutching a Glock .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol.
A year had passed since the Iraq veteran had been released from Walter Reed Army Medical Center. There, the president gave Marquez a Purple Heart for the shrapnel wounds that nearly left him dead.
Pumped up on powerful painkillers and antidepressants, Marquez entered the doorway of Johnathan Smith’s bedroom and demanded marijuana.
There was a struggle. Two shots rang out that night, Oct. 22, 2006.
One hollow-point bullet blasted through an entertainment center and struck an Xbox 360. The other hit Smith in the chest, ripping apart his heart.
Marquez scrambled out of the home in Widefield holding a blue box containing an ounce of Smith’s marijuana.
The next day, he surrendered to El Paso County sheriff’s deputies and was charged with first-degree murder. Smith, 19, had died.
Thousands of soldiers return from Iraq each year and fade into the fabric of society. But some, like Marquez, are re-acquainted with violence.
An estimated 140,000 veterans were in state and federal prisons in 2004, according to a report by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics. The bureau estimates veterans are half as likely as nonveterans to be in prison.
Among incarcerated veterans who served during wartime, those from the Vietnam era were the largest group of state inmates (36 percent), followed by 1990-91 Persian Gulf War vets (14 percent), and Afghanistan and Iraq vets (4 percent), the report shows.
No statistics exist on the number of Iraq vets who have returned and killed others, though it is believed to be few.
“These instances are rare,” said Lee Burkins, a Vietnam vet who lives in Montrose and is the author of “Soldier’s Heart: An Inquiry of War.”
“But you come back with this programming, that everything that occurs is a life-and-death situation. That’s how you react to it.”
Marquez has hope that he may get his freedom back, but he also has doubt. “I should have just died over there,” he said from the El Paso County Criminal Justice Center.
Had the shooting not occurred, Marquez would have been honorably discharged three days later. Instead, he went to jail Oct. 23, 2006, and is awaiting a Jan. 7 trial, where he will claim he acted in self-defense. He and his attorney declined to discuss details of the shooting because of the pending trial.
If convicted, he will never be free, a possibility his mother, a 19-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department, cannot consider without breaking down in tears.
“After everything he went through,” Teresa Hernandez sobs.
Growing up
Marquez grew up in Fontana, Calif., with an older sister, Tiffany, and a younger brother, Christopher – a Marine who earned a Bronze Star in Iraq for rescuing an injured warrior.
As a boy, Marquez had a passion for guns and sports, especially football. In 2003, he became a soldier. The Army offered a sense of adventure, a place where he could be physical. He did so well at boot camp in Fort Benning, Ga., that he finished tops in his platoon.
In the summer of 2004, Marquez suited up for Iraq. The months ahead would be hell for members of the 2nd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division from Fort Carson and for Marquez. They were involved in the assault on Fallujah and two raids in Ramadi, some of the most dangerous spots in Iraq.
Then, on June 21, 2005, in Ramadi, an improvised explosive device detonated under a Bradley fighting vehicle, between the driver’s compartment and Marquez, who was seated in the back.
Spec. Brian A. Vaughn, 23, died instantly; Marquez and three others scrambled out of the vehicle. Moments later, a second IED exploded nearby.
Spec. Marquez fell on his stomach. Spec. Christopher L. Hoskins landed on his side, shielding Marquez from the small-arms fire. Hoskins screamed as the bullets pelted him, and then, he went silent. Marquez took four bullets to his right thigh, ripping open his femoral artery. When the gunfire stopped, Marquez, barely audible, said, “I’m hit.”
He fought to stay conscious, but after 30 minutes, life seemed to be slipping away. As he faded into unconsciousness, he saw a dark, ugly place he thought was hell.
“I’m 21 years old. I’m bleeding out here,” he remembered thinking. “I’m never going to have a family or anything.”
Another soldier found Marquez and tied a telephone cord around the damaged limb. At a field hospital, doctors harvested a vein from his left leg and placed it in his right.
Scary phone call
A few hours later, the phone rang at his mother’s home. Her son had undergone several surgeries. A shunt had been inserted in his leg, which was littered with jagged metal. He would be flown to Walter Reed in Washington.
Hernandez took the long flight from Los Angeles to Washington and went directly to her son’s bedside. He looked so scared, so tired. The once happy-go-lucky kid had dark circles around his eyes.
Marquez did not sleep during the first two weeks at Walter Reed, but when he finally did, horrible images of Iraq flashed in his head.
“The nurses would come in, and I was having dreams of being injured or I would just wake up, like kind of having little attacks, waking up, being all scared and then realizing where I was and that I got hurt,” he said.
Over the Fourth of July weekend, President Bush arrived with words of encouragement and a medal.
“He was telling me what we did wasn’t in vain. My friends didn’t die for nothing. He said he was proud of what we did,” Marquez said.
During nearly three months at Walter Reed, he endured 17 surgeries. While Marquez progressed physically, he was still troubled by the horrors of war.
When a fellow soldier told him the bullets that shredded his leg probably came from American troops, “he broke down and started sobbing like a baby,” Hernandez said.
Her son also was deeply troubled by the killing of an Iraqi boy.
He remembers the car advancing toward a checkpoint. “I was the gunner on the Humvee. I told my sergeant I was going to give them a warning shot, and I shot some warning rounds. We didn’t know what it was, so I had to take the car out,” Marquez said. He killed the driver, an old man, and a child who was about 11.
Marquez slowly learned to walk. He worried about how his deformed leg, now about half its normal size, looked – the marks from the shrapnel and the long scar.
“No one is going to want me this way,” he told his mother. “Forget about me having kids or girlfriends.”
When Marquez hobbled away from the campus at Walter Reed on Sept. 13, 2005, doctors told him to keep taking two Percocets every four to six hours for the pain and Trazadone for his depression.
He headed to Fort Carson.
On his second day in Colorado, Marquez slipped and fell at a gas station. He shattered his right knee and tore the ligaments around it. He needed another surgery.
Doctors prescribed more medicine.
“I was getting 90 Percocets every three weeks at Fort Carson. They were giving me 90 morphine pills; they were giving me Fentanyl patches (for pain). They were giving me 90 Seroquels (an antipsychotic) whenever I wanted them. After three weeks, I’d be done (with the medication). I’d go get more,” Marquez said.
A war buddy, Chris Earl, 26, of Chicago, said the second injury was devastating for Marquez. “I think that threw him into a depression.”
He said Marquez became addicted to painkillers that made him “like a zombie.”
Back to California
Around Christmastime 2005, Marquez traveled to California, his first visit home since Iraq.
Marquez asked his mother to put away all the good memories, the certificates of achievement and the football photos. During the next month, he spent a lot of time alone in his bedroom.
After he left, Hernandez called her son’s commanding officer at Fort Carson to tell them her son was overmedicated and drinking too much.
“They ignored me,” she said. “In fact, three sergeants pulled him in and told him that his mommy had called, that I said he was going crazy … .”
By summer 2006, Marquez’s future seemed brighter. He was walking without crutches. He and his buddies went to a nightclub in downtown Colorado Springs. When he saw Angelica Garcia, the attraction was instant.
In no time, the wounded warrior was head over heels for a woman he thought would make him whole again.
“She just always wanted to have fun; we always went to do fun things together like Six Flags,” Marquez said. “I liked her because we’d walk in the mountains, and she would take off running. … I’d have to run to keep up.”
Angelica’s mother, Gina Griego, worried about Marquez’s guns. She didn’t want her grandson, now 5, to be around them. She was concerned about war videos on Marquez’s laptop computer.
“He showed me a couple of them where they blew off or shot people in the head; there were some with feet cut off,” Griego said. “He wanted to talk to everybody about that.”
A bad turn
The magic of the romance began to wear off. Marquez was introduced to Robert Rodriguez and his friend, Pedro Zayas. They had known each other only about two weeks. Even though there were no indications that Marquez had used illegal drugs to that point, he, Rodriguez and Zayas allegedly hatched a plan to rob Johnathan Smith of his marijuana, according to court records.
That day, a meeting was arranged. Marquez took the Glock; Rodriguez, a Ruger .357-caliber pistol; and Zayas, a Walther .22-caliber pistol. All the guns belonged to Marquez.
Rodriguez and Zayas stayed in the car, and Marquez went in and stood on his bum leg in the doorway of Johnathan Smith’s bedroom.
The only thing Marquez knew about Smith was that he sold marijuana.
Smith was born and reared in the Colorado Springs area. He knew his mother as Carol; he never knew his father, Charlie Biggs.
The couple passed Johnathan and two other children to Biggs’ parents, Gerald and Shirley Biggs, who gained custody of them.
“I wanted him and the other two children to stay together,” said Gerald Biggs, a 20-year Army veteran in the Korean and Vietnam wars.
The children moved into the bi- level home in Widefield that Biggs bought in 1968. Now 76, Biggs needs bottled oxygen to help him breathe, and he spends his time sitting.
He said Smith went to the New Horizons School, where he got straight A’s. Smith talked of college, perhaps becoming an engineer or a lawyer.
But court records show Smith was a drug dealer, something his family denies. Biggs was upstairs on that night a year ago when he heard loud pops. He thought Smith was pounding nails.
“Who knows what happened,” Griego said. “I really think (Marquez) flipped out … . I think he felt like he was in that combat arena again … like he was fighting for his life.”
Biggs doesn’t buy that argument. “I heard that when he got to jail he started crying: ‘I’m a veteran. I’m a veteran.’ But I’m a veteran too. John was my assistant. He helped me get out of bed, and he helped me get to the bathroom.”
Sitting in jail
While in the El Paso County jail, Marquez has not received physical or mental-health therapy. He no longer takes pain medication.
Rodriguez is serving 12 years at Buena Vista Correctional Facility after pleading guilty to attempted aggravated robbery. Zayas pleaded guilty to aggravated robbery and is to be sentenced to six years in the state’s Youth Offender System.
Earl said that besides Marquez, two other soldiers in his company came home and shot people. One victim died. Earl left the Army in June 2006 and has received 100 percent disability from Veterans Affairs for post- traumatic stress disorder.
At her home in California, Teresa Hernandez has put away the happy memories. The certificates Marquez earned are tucked in the drawer of a file cabinet, a few inches away from the photographs of her son in his hospital bed at Walter Reed, next to a folder that holds his Purple Heart.
Erin Emery: 719-522-1360 or eemery@denverpost.com
“(President Bush) was telling me what we did wasn’t in vain. My friends didn’t die for nothing. He said he was proud of what we did.”
Anthony Marquez, on his visit from the president while recovering at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in July 2005
