WASHINGTON — The gunman who killed 12 people in a rampage last year at Washington’s Navy Yard convinced Veterans Affairs doctors before the shootings that he had no mental health issues despite disturbing problems and encounters with police during the same period, according to a review of his confidential medical files.
Just weeks before the shootings, a doctor searching for the source of the gunman’s insomnia noted that the patient worked for the Defense Department but wrote hauntingly “no problem there.”
The AP obtained more than 100 pages of treatment and disability claims evaluation records for Aaron Alexis, spanning more than two years.
They show Alexis complaining of minor physical ailments, including foot and knee injuries, slight hearing loss and later insomnia, but resolutely denying any mental health issues.
He denied suffering from stress or depression or having suicidal or homicidal thoughts when the VA’s medical team asked him about it three weeks before the shootings, even though he privately wrote during the same period that he was being afflicted by ultra-low frequency radio waves for months.
The dichotomy between Alexis’ apparently even-keeled interactions with his doctors and the torment he was experiencing outside the hospitals is the center of debate about whether the Veterans Affairs Department could have better recognized the need to intervene with mental health care before the shootings.
Congress and the Pentagon are investigating the shootings. Some lawmakers have said Alexis fell through the cracks at the VA, but they have stopped short of specifying what government doctors should have done differently.
Sidney Matthew, a lawyer representing the family of one of the shooting victims, told the AP it’s possible that Alexis was evasive with his doctors but expressed skepticism that physicians adequately questioned Alexis about why he wasn’t sleeping.
