Obama praises soldiers who stopped gunman
Source: CBC News
Posted: 11/07/09 10:03AM
Filed Under: Top News
U.S. President Barack Obama used his Saturday morning radio and internet address to pay tribute to people killed at a Texas military base, calling the shooting a "crime against our nation."
"It is an act of violence that would have been heartbreaking had it occurred anyplace in America," Obama said. "It is a crime that would have horrified us had its victims been Americans of any background. But it's all the more heartbreaking and all the more despicable because of the place where it occurred and the patriots who were its victims."
Thirteen people 12 soldiers and one civilian were killed and 30 wounded at Ford Hood on Thursday when a gunman opened fired in a room crowded with hundreds of soldiers.
The casualty toll could have been much higher had not two civilian police officers intervened, officials told reporters Friday.
Police officer Kimberly Munley was directing traffic on the base when she got the call. She was at the shooting scene in less than four minutes, said army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey.
Sgt. Munley is listed in stable condition after undergoing surgery Friday after being shot at least three times.
Another police officer, Senior Sgt. Mark Todd, saw Munley lying and the ground and also fired at the suspect, who was hiding at the side of the building where the massacre took place, a deployment processing centre.
It's not clear whose bullets hit the suspect.
The alleged gunman, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, was hit four times, including at least once in the torso, and remained on a ventilator in an army hospital on Saturday.
Hasan, a military mental health doctor, was slated to be deployed to Iraq but didn't want to go, according to a military official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
In his radio address, Obama praised those who stopped the suspect and those who tended to the injured for their "valour, selflessness and unity of purpose."
"We saw soldiers and civilians alike rushing to aid fallen comrades, tearing off bullet-riddled clothes to treat the injured, using blouses as tourniquets, taking down the shooter even as they bore wounds themselves," Obama said.
"We saw soldiers bringing to bear on our own soil the skills they had been trained to use abroad skills that been honed through years of determined effort for one purpose and one purpose only: to protect and defend the United States of America."
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