FORT HOOD, Texas — From the first frantic 911 call that a shooter was rampaging through the Readiness Processing Center on this sprawling Army base, it took police officer Kimberly Munley just four minutes to get there.
But it was already bloody chaos.
Munley heard shots and saw a rush of scared people, some wounded by gunfire, scrambling to get away.
Figuring that the shooter must be between buildings for medical and psychiatric services, she rounded the corner and saw him chasing after an already-wounded soldier. She fired twice.
“He turned to her and charged, firing rapidly. She returned fire and fell to the ground to help protect herself,” said Chuck Medley, director of Fort Hood’s emergency services.
Munley and the gunman hit each other simultaneously; she took shots in both legs and the wrist. Altogether, she fired four shots into his torso with her Beretta 9mm, dropping him to the ground and ending the worst mass shooting a U.S. military base has ever seen.
“She eliminated the threat. She did what she was trained to do,” Medley said. “She, in my mind, saved countless lives.”
Medley, who talked with Munley early Friday as she recovered, identified the civilian officer as a hero. But she wasn’t the only one.
Firing into a room where hundreds of unarmed soldiers were lined up for vaccines and eye tests, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan had created a battle scene worse than most had witnessed in Iraq, killing 13 and wounding 30. Many stayed to help the wounded at a scene that most would have fled, falling back on their military and medical training, working furiously to save lives.
“There were many cases of soldiers and police officers yesterday putting their life on the line to save somebody else,” Medley said, fighting back tears. “And that’s what I saw.”
Sgt. Andrew Hagerman, a military police officer from Lewisville, Texas, who was on his rounds in the barracks area, was about a mile and a half away when the first crackle across the radio of “shots fired” came in.
He didn’t think much of it — probably someone throwing firecrackers off the roof again.
But “shock and awe” came, he said, when he heard, “Officer down.” With sirens blaring, he made it to the scene in three minutes.
Even so, a tremendous amount of damage had been done in a short amount of time. People were screaming. Some were on the ground, with soldiers hovering over them and ripping off their own shirts to stanch the bleeding. Some were being carried out of the two buildings where most of the carnage had occurred.
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