Army officials announced on Tuesday that 14 people in leadership at Fort Hood in Texas have been disciplined or terminated from their positions due to a climate of “permissive” sexual assault at the military base.
According to NBC News, a private investigation conducted by a five-member civilian review panel found that the fort’s chain of command was complicit in its rampant culture of sexual abuse. Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy appointed the panel in July after the disappearance and killing of Vanessa Guillén, who was reported missing on April 22, but her remains were discovered on June 30, CNN reported.
Days later, 20-year-old Spc. Aaron Robinson fatally shot himself as police went to arrest him in connection to Guillen’s death. Shortly after Robinson’s death, his girlfriend, Cecily Aguilar was arrested on federal charges of obscuring evidence and was accused of helping the man dispose of Guillén's dismembered body.
In addition to Guillén's disturbing killing, another soldier, Gregory Morales, was also found dead in June, according to Yahoo! News. In March, three soldiers in their early 20s had been killed on the base. Throughout 2020, 25 Fort Hood soldiers have died of suicide, homicide or accidents that would prove fatal.
In the Army report released this week, Maj. Gen. Scott L. Efflandt, the Fort Hood commander in charge at the time of Guillén’s death, was among the leadership taken down. High ranking officials Col. Ralph Overland and Command Sgt. Maj. Bradley Knapp were also relieved from their positions alongside Efflandt.
Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Broadwater and Command Sgt. Maj. Thomas C. Kenny were among those who were suspended. According to NBC News, the identities of those below battalion level commanders and leaders who were disciplined were not released.
Upon learning of her death, Army officials said they had no evidence or reports that Guillén was sexually assaulted, per NBC News. Later, the citizen review panel’s investigation found that the Army’s Sexual Harassment and Assault Response and Prevention program (SHARP) had not achieved its goal to curb sexual assault.
Of the 647 individual interviews conducted in the independent review, 503 were of female soldiers, the panel’s chairperson Chris Swecker said Tuesday.
"What we found was that there was a fear of retaliation, all forms of retaliation, stigmatism, ostracism, derailing a career and work assignments," Swecker said.
"One of the things that the soldiers at Fort Hood, what many of them needed was to be believed, and that's what we did. We listened to them," said Carrie Ricci, a panel member who worked at Fort Hood for three years. "If any of them see this, I want them to know we believe you."
A separate committee member, Queta Rodríguez, said the panel "made a very concerted effort" to interview women in the unit that Guillén belonged to, and uncovered a plethora of unreported sexual assault allegations.
After their interviews with female soldiers, the committee identified almost 100 credible accounts of sexual assault, but only 59 of them were documented, NBC reported. Similarly, the panel discovered 135 credible instances of sexual harassment, but only 72 of them were actually recorded through the proper channels.
"Some of the accounts of unreported sexual assault were extremely serious and had significant impact on the victim’s health and well-being," the report read.
Many of the soldiers who reported abuse experienced "a founded fear that the confidentiality of the reporting process would be compromised," according to Swecker.
He also said that there was "a lack of any appreciation for the results or the response,” because the system took so long to process their reports and people lost faith in the process.
Based on the independent review’s findings, the panel issued 70 recommendations to change the pervasive culture at Fort Hood. According to NBC News, Army officials agreed to all of the recommendations on Tuesday and announced the formation of a new unit focusing on handling the cases of missing people called, People First Task Force. The new task force and supporting policy aims to promote reform to the staffing and organization of the SHARP program at Fort Hood, according to the Army website.
"The problems that we saw are cultural and everybody is involved in culture, from the highest levels to the one-on-one interaction between the squad leader and his or her squad member," said panel member Jack White, who previously served as a law clerk at the U.S. Supreme Court after graduating from West Point.
According to the Associated Press, over the summer, McCarthy acknowledged that Fort Hood has some of the highest rates of homicide, sexual assault and harassment in the Army. In 2018, a report from the Defense Department found that sexual assault in the military was on the rise as compared to the previous two years, The New York Times reported.
At a press conference Tuesday, Gloria Guillén, expressed that she hopes that the report allows more truth to be revealed about the details of her daughter’s death.
"I still don't get it, why did she die? She was so young, innocent, why did those monsters do this to her? The truth needs to come out. The eyes of the world are on the #VanessaGuillen case,” Gloria said, as translated by a KHOU reporter.
