COLORADO SPRINGS — A former Fort Carson soldier was sentenced to 10 years in prison Monday for his involvement in the death of a fellow soldier and the brutal robbery of a Colorado Springs woman.
A tearful Kenneth Eastridge apologized in court to the family of Kevin Shields, who was shot to death on his 24th birthday, and to Erica Ham, who was robbed and stabbed on her way to work.
“I’m truly sorry for everything that happened,” he said. “I’m sorry that Erica has to live through” the pain he and his companions inflicted, and “I’m very sorry I played a role in taking Kevin away from his family.”
At that, Shields’ mother, Debra Shields, sobbed openly in the courtroom, interrupting Eastridge’s statement to the judge. She clutched photos of Kevin’s 4-year-old son, who still clings to the belief that his dad is in Iraq and will come home someday, and of the baby daughter born six months after Shields was murdered.
“This is the first time anyone has expressed any remorse whatsoever,” Debra Shields said afterward.
Eastridge, 24, was accused of joining fellow Iraq war veterans Bruce Bastien and Louis Bressler in a crime spree that left two other soldiers dead and Ham recovering from stab wounds to her left eyelid and lung.
Eastridge was in Iraq when the first soldier was murdered. But he admitted being with Bastien and Bressler when Kevin Shields was killed and Ham was assaulted.
Ham was walking to catch an early morning bus to her job as a nursing home housekeeper when a car struck her from behind on Oct. 30, 2007. She was then stabbed repeatedly and robbed. Police found her lying in a pool of blood with a cellphone at her ear. She had managed to dial 911 before passing out.
Shields was celebrating his 24th birthday with fellow soldiers before he was shot to death early on the morning of Dec. 1, 2007. Bastien, who has been sentenced to 60 years in prison, and Eastridge both implicated Bressler as the killer and agreed to testify against him.
Eastridge’s lawyer, Sheilagh Mc Ateer, urged the judge to accept a 10-year plea bargain. She described him as a soldier sent to two tours of war in Iraq despite serious head injuries — in one case being thrown 30 to 60 feet and knocked unconscious by an explosion — and left untreated when he began showing signs of a serious mental illness.
“The Army let him down,” she said. “They did nothing but release him into our community and make him a danger to our community.”
Judge Theresa Cisneros accepted the plea agreement but told Eastridge he was responsible for his criminal behavior.
“You can say it’s all the Army’s fault. I’m not buying that,” she said. “You control whether or not you get help.”
