Aaron Alexis, 34, the man killed by police officers and identified as the gunman in the deadly rampage at the Washington Navy Yard on Monday, served his country as a Navy reservist, had an abiding interest in Buddhism and Thai culture, and had problems with the law, records and interviews show. In 2004, according to a Seattle police report, Mr. Alexis walked out of his grandmother’s home one morning, pulled a .45-caliber pistol from his waistband and fired three rounds at a construction worker’s car, two at the rear tires and one into the air. A construction manager told the police he thought Mr. Alexis was frustrated with the parking situation outside the work site. But Mr. Alexis told the police that he had had an anger-fueled blackout and could not remember firing the weapon until about an hour after the episode. He said he was in New York during the Sept. 11 attacks, and described to a detective “how those events had disturbed him,” according to the detective’s report. His father told investigators that Mr. Alexis had problems associated with post-traumatic stress disorder, and had been an “active participant” in rescue attempts on Sept. 11. Mr. Alexis’s father could not be reached for comment Monday. Anthony Little, Mr. Alexis’s brother-in-law, told reporters Monday in Brooklyn that it had been five years since his wife, Naomi Alexis, had spoken to her brother. “No one saw it coming, no one knew anything, so all of this is just shocking,” he said. Law enforcement officials said the motive behind the navy yard shooting remained unclear. Mr. Alexis was born in Queens in 1979 and was representative of the borough’s diversity. He was African-American, grew up in a part of Queens that was home to South Asians, Hispanics and Orthodox Jews, and embraced all things Thai while living in Fort Worth. He worked as a waiter at a Thai restaurant, studied the language and regularly chanted and meditated at Buddhist temples. From 2007 to 2011, Mr. Alexis was a full-time reservist in the Navy, serving as an aviation electricians’ mate and achieving the rank of petty officer third class. For much of that time, from February 2008 to January 2011, when he left the service, he was assigned to the Fleet Logistics Support Squadron 46, in Fort Worth, Navy officials said. His specialty was fixing electrical systems on airplanes. Navy Secretary Ray Mabus said on CNN that Mr. Alexis was in “the ready reserve,” meaning he did not have day-to-day contact with the Navy, but, if called upon, “he would be one of the ones mobilized.” Mr. Alexis was awarded the National Defense Service Medal and the Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, two standard military honors, but there were indications that he struggled in the Navy. During his time in the service, he exhibited “a pattern of misbehavior,” Navy officials said, though they declined to elaborate. Upon leaving, he became a Navy contractor. At the time of the shooting, Mr. Alexis worked for a company affiliated with Hewlett-Packard that serviced the Navy’s Internet system, Hewlett-Packard said in a statement. He had been living for weeks in a long-term-stay hotel with colleagues to work on the Navy Yard project, according to a government official. In 2010, Mr. Alexis was arrested in Fort Worth for discharging a firearm. At the time, Mr. Alexis had been living in an apartment complex called Orion at Oak Hill. His upstairs neighbor called the police after she heard a pop, saw dust fly and noticed holes in her floor and ceiling. She told the police that Mr. Alexis had confronted her in the parking lot about making too much noise, and she felt threatened by him, according to the Fort Worth police report. Mr. Alexis later told an officer that he had been cleaning his gun while cooking, and that the gun had accidentally discharged. The officer asked him why he did not call the police or check on the resident above him, and he replied that he did not think the bullet went through because he could not see any light through the hole, according to the report. The officer noted that the gun was taken apart and covered in oil. James Rotter, the father of the woman in the apartment, said the shot came through close to where his daughter had been sitting. She moved out after the episode, and a lawyer advised the family not to press charges. “How could you prove he did it on purpose when he claimed he was cleaning his gun?” Mr. Rotter said. In recent years, Mr. Alexis dated a Thai woman and began showing up regularly at Wat Busayadhammavanara, a Buddhist Temple in White Settlement, Tex., a Fort Worth suburb. He had Thai friends, adored Thai food and said he always felt drawn to the culture, said Pat Pundisto, a member of the temple answering the phone there on Monday. He was a regular at Sunday services, intoning Buddhist chants and staying to meditate afterward. On celebrations like the Thai New Year in April, he helped out, serving guests dressed in ceremonial Thai garb the temple provided. At the temple, he met Nutpisit Suthamtewakul, who went on to open the Happy Bowl Thai restaurant in White Settlement in 2011, said the restaurant owner’s cousin, Naree Wilton, 51, in a phone interview. Mr. Alexis helped out at the restaurant in exchange for food and a room in Mr. Suthamtewakul’s house. There, he played computer games “at the nighttime and all day,” Ms. Wilton said, on one of three computers he kept in his room, driving up the house’s electricity bills. After he got a job fixing computers, the family asked him to help out with utility bills. He rarely paid and borrowed money often, Ms. Wilton said, complaining that his computer company was withholding pay. Reporting was contributed by Joseph Goldstein, Erica Goode, Nate Schweber and Vivian Yee from New York; Sarah Maslin Nir from Washington; and Lauren D’Avolio from Fort Worth.
Posted on: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 11:07:38 +0000
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