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Signs of Mental Illness Seen in Navy Gunman for Decade Signs of Mental Illness Seen in Navy Gunman for Decade
(about 5 hours later)
WASHINGTON — The former Navy reservist who killed 12 people in a shooting rampage at the Washington Navy Yard on Monday had exhibited signs of mental illness dating back more than a decade, including a recent episode in which he complained about hearing voices and of people sending “vibrations to his body” to prevent him from sleeping, law enforcement officials said Tuesday. WASHINGTON — A month before a murderous rampage at the Washington Navy Yard, Aaron Alexis called the police in Rhode Island to complain that he had changed hotels three times because he was being pursued by people keeping him awake by sending vibrations through the walls.
Only a month ago, the gunman, Aaron Alexis, 34, was suffering from hallucinations so severe that he called the Newport Police Department in Rhode Island where he told officers he was on business. When officers came to his hotel room early on Aug. 7, Mr. Alexis told them that a person he had argued with at an airport in Virginia “has sent three people to follow him and keep him awake by talking to him and sending vibrations into his body” via a microwave machine, according to a Newport, R.I., police report. Mr. Alexis said he had heard “voices speaking to him through the wall, flooring and ceiling,” the report said.
When officers came to his hotel room on Aug. 7 at 6 a.m., Mr. Alexis told them that he had gotten into an argument with someone at an airport in Virginia. He said the person he had argued with “had sent three people to follow him and to keep him awake by talking to him and sending vibrations to his body” via a microwave machine, according to a police report. Mr. Alexis identified himself to the police as a Navy contractor, and he sought treatment from the Veterans Affairs Department for psychiatric issues, according to a senior law enforcement official. But it did not raise a red flag that might have prevented him from entering the military base in Washington where 12 people were killed on Monday.
Mr. Alexis had moved to three different hotels in a single night to elude strange voices and people he believed were sending the microwave vibrations. At a hotel at a nearby naval base, Mr. Alexis told the police that he had heard “voices speaking to him through the wall, flooring and ceiling,” said Lt. William Fitzgerald of the Newport police. The episode in Rhode Island adds to a growing list of questions about how Mr. Alexis, who had a history of infractions as a Navy reservist, mental health problems and run-ins with the police over gun violence, gained and kept a security clearance from the Defense Department that gave him access to military bases, including the Navy Yard, where officials say he opened fire before being shot to death by the police.
Mr. Alexis told officers that he “had never felt anything like this before,” and that “he was worried these people were going to harm him,” Lt. Fitzgerald said. Time and again, Mr. Alexis’s behavior fell below a level that would have brought a serious response, like a less-than-honorable discharge from the military or involuntary commitment to a mental institution, experts and officials said.
“He said he never had a history of mental illness,” Lt. Fitzgerald said. But the sheer number of episodes raise questions about the government’s system for vetting people for security clearances, including the thousands of contractors who help run the nation’s military and security system work. Though the cases are different, the access granted Mr. Alexis, a former Navy reservist who as an independent contractor serviced Navy computers, raises questions similar to those raised about another outside government contractor, Edward J. Snowden, who leaked national intelligence secrets.
The police told Mr. Alexis to stay away from the individuals he believed were following him. “These two incidents combined suggest to me a very flawed system for granting security clearances,” said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, who called for a Congressional investigation into the granting of security clearances to government contractors. “Who knows how many other Snowdens and Aaron Alexises are out there?”
“No further action was required,” Lt. Fitzgerald said in a telephone interview Tuesday reading from the police report. On Tuesday, President Obama ordered the White House budget office to conduct a governmentwide review of policies for security clearances for contractors and employees in federal agencies. In an interview with Noticias Telemundo, the president said the nation did not have a “firm enough background check system.” He also he called once again for Congress to enact legislation to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill.
Still such incidents seemed to be part of a pattern. One official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the continuing investigation, said that Mr. Alexis had been exhibiting symptoms of mental illness since at least his early 20s, before he joined the naval reserve and then went on to be a military contractor. The official said Mr. Alexis has been described by people who knew him as paranoid and delusional. It is not clear whether Mr. Alexis sought medical treatment. “I do get concerned that this becomes a ritual that we go through every three, four months, where we have these horrific mass shooting,” he said.
On Monday, Mr. Alexis entered the navy yard, a secure military facility near the Capitol, killing at least 12 people before he was fatally shot by the authorities. The police say Mr. Alexis, 34, acted alone. Senior Pentagon officials also said that Secretary Chuck Hagel intends to review physical security and access at all Defense Department installations around the world.
President Obama on Tuesday directed the Office of Management and Budget to “examine security standards for employees and contractors across federal agencies,” said Jay Carney, the White House press secretary. “This is clearly a matter the president believes — and has believed — merits review,” Mr. Carney said. Many planets aligned to place Mr. Alexis, 34, at the start of the workday in the Navy Yard with a Remington pump-action shotgun, firing down from a balcony and killing the employees, all civilians, the police said.
On Tuesday, the police in Washington said it had taken two minutes for officers armed with AR-15s to arrive at the navy yard once they received the first of many 911 emergency calls, but that some officers had mistakenly gone to other buildings inside the property because callers had given various locations for the gunman. As an honorably discharged veteran, he cleared a basic hurdle to receive a Defense Department security pass. Despite his being investigated by police departments in Seattle and Fort Worth, Tex., for firing a gun in anger, no charges were filed that would have shown up in his F.B.I. fingerprint file. Despite mental health issues — he twice went to Veterans Affairs hospitals last month seeking treatment for insomnia — he was never committed and so was legally able to buy in Virginia the weapon the police said he used in the shootings.
Chief Cathy Lanier of the Washington Police said that law enforcement officers from various agencies exchanged fire with Mr. Alexis. She said the shooting lasted more than 30 minutes. “The system didn’t pick up the red flags because the red flags in this case had not been fed into the system,” said one Pentagon official. “Perhaps we need to look at the ‘filters,’ and whether some sorts of behaviors and incidents, even if they do not rise to the level of punishment, should nonetheless be part of the files for review.”
The authorities said that while they originally believed that Mr. Alexis had been armed with an AR-15, they now believed he entered the navy yard with only a shotgun and may have obtained a pistol once inside. The shotgun had been bought legally in Virginia, said Valerie Parlave, assistant director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Washington office. Law enforcement officials on Tuesday provided new details about the shooting. They said that in addition to the shotgun Mr. Alexis was carrying, he used a .45-caliber handgun that he may have picked up once inside the Navy base.
Navy officials said that although he had shown a “pattern of misbehavior,” which included insubordination and unauthorized absences, Mr. Alexis was given an honorable discharge from the military in January 2011 after he had applied for an early discharge under the Navy’s “early enlisted transition program.” The Washington police chief, Cathy Lanier, said that officers armed with AR-15s were at the scene within two minutes of the first 911 call. But some reported to the wrong building because callers had misidentified the building. Chief Lanier said the entire shooting episode lasted at least 30 minutes.
Those issues had led the Navy to consider forcing Mr. Alexis out of the service with a less than honorable discharge, a law enforcement official said Tuesday. The gunman was identified by an F.B.I. agent holding a machine to the fingers of the dead body. Within seconds, it identified Mr. Alexis from fingerprints on file because of his military service.
Investigators searching for a motive for the rampage that shut down a portion of Washington on Monday said people had begun noticing Mr. Alexis’s potential mental health problems around the time of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001. Mr. Alexis’s father has told the authorities that his son had been among the first responders at the World Trade Center and that he believed that Mr. Alexis suffered from post-traumatic stress and had difficulty controlling his anger. It was not known whether he was involved in any rescue effort. But he was a part-time clerical worker nearby at the Borough of Manhattan Community College from February 2001 until February 2003, according to college records. In the search for more information — and especially the unanswered question of motive — federal and local authorities have interviewed hundreds of people and are poring through the contents of Mr. Alexis’s Yahoo e-mail account.
Mr. Alexis had been arrested at least three times during the past decade by civilian authorities, twice for weapons violations. Mr. Alexis had shown a “pattern of misbehavior” during his four years as a reservist, according to Navy officials. That pattern caused some of his commanders to consider giving him a general discharge — one level below honorable, which could have derailed his security clearance.
Mr. Alexis, according to a Seattle police report, had been arrested for shooting the right and left rear tires of another man’s vehicle with a .45-caliber pistol before firing a shot into the air. Mr. Alexis described the incident to detectives as an anger-fueled “blackout,” according to the report. Instead, Mr. Alexis received an honorable discharge from the military in January 2011, after he had applied for an early discharged under the Navy’s “early enlisted transition program.” A major reason, officials said, was that his misbehavior in the Navy was not violent. It included insubordination, traffic violations and being absent without leave — two days he spend in jail after a fight in a bar in DeKalb County, Ga.
Mr. Alexis had also been arrested in Fort Worth in 2010 for discharging a firearm after an upstairs neighbor said he had confronted her in the parking lot about making too much noise, according to a Fort Worth police report. Mr. Alexis was also twice investigated by other police departments in shooting episodes — once for firing through his ceiling in Fort Worth, Tex., and another time for shooting out a car’s tires in Seattle, during what he described as an anger-fueled blackout.
In 2008, he had been arrested outside Atlanta for disorderly conduct related to a dispute inside a nightclub, according to a police report from DeKalb County. No weapon was involved in that incident, according to the police. Mr. Alexis, who worked for an independent contractor called the Experts, worked on half a dozen military bases from North Carolina to Rhode Island this year, said the company’s chief executive, Thomas E. Hoshko. If he had known of the police reports about Mr. Alexis that have surfaced in the news, “we would have never looked at him,” Mr. Hoshko said.
The mass shooting Monday led the authorities to lock down part of the nation’s capital shortly after the chaos at the Washington Navy Yard began around 8 a.m. Civilian employees described a scene of confusion as shots erupted through the hallways of the Naval Sea Systems Command headquarters, on the banks of the Anacostia River a few miles from the White House and about a half-mile from the Capitol. In any event, it was the responsibility of the Defense Department to grant Mr. Alexis his security credential allowing him onto bases, known as a Common Access Card. Pentagon officials said the Navy was responsible for his clearance, using a check of FBI records and another database with the Office of Personnel Management.
“I heard three gunshots, pow, pow, pow, straight in a row,” said Patricia Ward, a logistics management specialist from Woodbridge, Va., who was in the cafeteria on the first floor when the shooting started. “About three seconds later, there were four more gunshots, and all of the people in the cafeteria were panicking, trying to figure out which way we were going to run out.” Mr. Alexis’s father told the police after the Seattle shooting in 2004 that his son suffered post-traumatic stress symptoms after volunteering in the rescue after the t attack on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.
Police officers who swarmed the military facility exchanged fire with Mr. Alexis, who had been a naval reservist in Fort Worth. Police officers killed Mr. Alexis, law enforcement officials said, but not before a dozen people were killed and several others, including a city police officer, were wounded and taken to local hospitals. Colleagues who worked with Mr. Alexis at that time in a computer support center at Manhattan Borough Community College, near ground zero, did not recall him volunteering or mentioning Sept. 11 .
Officials said Mr. Alexis drove a rental car to the base and entered using his access as a contractor and shot an officer and one other person outside Building 197, the Sea Systems Command headquarters. Inside, Mr. Alexis made his way to a floor overlooking an atrium and took aim at employees eating breakfast below. One co-worker, Barry R. Williams, said Mr. Alexis had held onto grudges. “Some small thing would happen, something so small I couldn’t even remember the details, but two, three weeks later he’d still be bringing it up, be upset about it,” Mr. Williams said.
“He was shooting down from above the people,” one law enforcement official said. “That is where he does most of his damage.” In Fort Worth, where Mr. Alexis lived in recent years when he was not traveling for work, he told a friend, Melinda Downs, that he had post-traumatic stress disorder, and that it caused him to be withdrawn and suffer from insomnia.He once went three days without sleep, said Ms. Downs, the owner of a barber shop.
Pentagon officials confirmed that the Defense Department Inspector General’s office had been conducting an audit of access procedures and safety at the Navy Yard. The audit, first reported by Time Magazine, is due to be released in the next several weeks. After the police in Newport responded to Mr. Alexis’ call for help on Aug. 7, a sergeant who reviewed the report, Frank C. Rosa Jr., contacted the Newport naval base police and faxed a copy of Mr. Alexis’s wild statements. It is unclear whether the account made it up the chain of command.
Senior Pentagon officials said Tuesday that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel intended to order a review of physical security and access at all Defense Department installations around the world. On Aug. 23, Mr. Alexis went to Veterans Affairs Hospitals in Providence, where he had been working as a contractor, complaining of insomnia but did not say that he was hearing voices, according to a senior federal official. Mr. Alexis said he could not sleep for more than a few hours. Doctors there prescribed him the antidepressant pill commonly prescribed for insomnia, Trazodone, the official said.
At the same time, the Navy secretary, Ray Mabus, ordered a review of security at all Navy and Marine Corps installations, and the procedures by which personnel and visitors gain access. Five days later, Mr. Alexis went to a Veterans Affairs hospital in Washington, where he had traveled to work on a job at the Navy Yard. Mr. Alexis, who had not been given many Trazodone pills in Providence, said to the medical personnel in Washington that he was still having trouble sleeping and the doctors prescribed him more Trazodone, said the official.
The names of the 12 victims were also released Tuesday: Michael Arnold, 59; Martin Bodrog, 54; Arthur Daniels, 51; Sylvia Frasier, 53; Kathy Gaarde, 62; John Roger Johnson, 73; Mary Francis Knight, 51; Frank Kohler, 50; Kenneth Bernard Proctor, 46; Vishnu Pandit, 61; Gerald L. Read, 58; and Richard Michael Ridgell, 52. In that meeting, Mr. Alexis told the medical personnel that he was not using drugs, did not have suicidal thoughts, was not depressed or particularly anxious, and was not having nightmares, the official said.
All of the victims were believed to be civilians or contractors. No active-duty military personnel were killed, said Chief Cathy L. Lanier of Washington.

Reporting was contributed by Manny Fernandez from Fort Worth, Sarah Maslin Nir and Michael S. Schmidt from Washington, Kirk Johnson from Seattle, and Erica Goode, Timothy Williams, Ariel Kaminer and Nate Schweber from New York.

Eight people were also injured, including Officer Scott Williams of the Washington police, who underwent several hours of surgery for gunshot wounds to his legs.
Officials have asked the public for help in determining a motive by posting pictures of Mr. Alexis on the F.B.I. Web site. The agency is treating the shooting as a criminal investigation, not one related to terrorism.
Navy officials said Mr. Alexis had worked as a contractor in information technology. A spokesman for Hewlett-Packard said Mr. Alexis had been an employee of a company called The Experts, a subcontractor on an HP Enterprise Services contract.
On Tuesday, Thomas E. Hoshko, the chief executive officer of The Experts, said that Mr. Alexis’s work had involved helping update the Navy Marine Corps intranet system for the military and that the company had not been aware of Mr. Alexis’s arrest history.
Mr. Alexis had started working for the company in September 2007 and had at that point possessed a secret clearance from the Department of Defense, Mr. Hoshko said.
“His colleagues and everybody that worked with him (said) this never came to the surface,” Mr. Hoshko said, referring to indications of violent behavior.
Mr. Alexis left the company to attend school in January 2013, Mr. Hoshko said, but returned to The Experts in July, when he again passed a drug test, a background check and had received a secret clearance from the Defense Department.
“He told colleagues of his that school didn’t pay and he wanted to go back to work,” said Mr. Hoshko. “We were never aware of any instances or we would have never — when he finished his last contract in January — we would have never looked at him as a candidate to start in July.”
In the past few months, Mr. Alexis had been based in Washington while working at Naval facilities in Maryland, North Carolina, Rhode Island and Virginia. He had worked most recently in Arlington, Va., Mr. Hoshko said.

Reporting was contributed by Abby Goodnough, Emmarie Huetteman, Thom Shanker and and Michael S. Schmidt from Washington, and William K. Rashbaum from New York.