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Soldier used M4 to gun down peers

FORT STEWART, Ga. — A 1 a.m. counseling session at a small outpost in Iraq took a fatal turn Sept. 14, Army officials say, when the soldier being counseled opened fire with his M4 on a fellow team leader and their squad leader.

Both the team leader and squad leader died that night despite efforts to save them.

The incident took place at a joint security station in Jurf as Sakhr, a town about 15 miles southwest of Baghdad on the Euphrates River, where soldiers with A Company, 3rd Battalion, 7th Infantry, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, were on duty.

The two soldiers killed were identified as Staff Sgt. Darris J. Dawson, 24, of Pensacola, Fla., a squad leader, and Sgt. Wesley R. Durbin, 26, of Hurst, Texas, a fellow team leader.

The soldier who allegedly shot them was in Dawson’s squad. The Army refused to identify him pending the filing of charges.

“As best we can determine at this time, the staff sergeant and sergeant went in to talk to the individual, whose performance was lacking. As the counseling session developed, that’s when the shooting happened,” division Chief of Staff Col. Terry Ferrell told Army Times on Sept. 19.

The squad leader’s decision to hold the counseling session at 1 a.m., Ferrell said, may have been based on the soldier’s patrol rotation, and took place inside a guard house. The timing and location “very easily could have given [the shooter] ample opportunity to have a weapon that was loaded.”

Neither Dawson nor Durbin was wearing body armor, helmet or other protective gear during the counseling, and each was shot multiple times.

The alleged shooter was subdued by fellow soldiers and the two wounded soldiers were treated on the scene by the company’s medics.

All flight operations had been suspended that evening because of poor visibility, so the wounded were evacuated in ground vehicles to Forward Operating Base Iskandiriyah, located at a Soviet-era power plant about a 20-minute drive away on the other side of the river.

Durbin died shortly after the shooting, and Dawson was evacuated by ground on a 30-minute drive to the 86th Combat Support Hospital in the Green Zone in Baghdad, where he died despite efforts to save him.

The soldier who allegedly killed Dawson and Durbin was initially detained in Iraq, and when the weather cleared two days later, was flown to a detention facility in Kuwait.

The 4th BCT is under the command of the 10th Mountain Division, but since the brigade only has about three months left in Iraq, unit leaders agreed to transfer the case to 3rd ID headquarters. Commander Maj. Gen. Tony Cucolo is now the court-martial convening authority, Ferrell said.

charges cannot be preferred until the soldier is in 3rd ID’s headquarters jurisdiction. Ferrell said Sept. 19 the soldier’s name could be released within about a week.

Dawson’s stepmother, Maxine Mathis, said Sept. 18 that the family was told “through the grapevine” that the shooter had lost a grenade and her stepson ordered him to retrieve it.

“This young man misplaced a grenade, and they told him to find it,” Mathis said. “Evidently he got upset with that and locked and loaded and went berserk.” Mathis, who is married to Dawson’s father, Darryl Mathis, would not reveal her source. “I can’t say he died for his country, dying like that,” a weeping Mathis said from her home in Pensacola, Fla.

Asked about this report, Ferrell said, “I have not been informed of any grenade involved, but not knowing the details of the investigation I can neither confirm nor deny it.”

Cucolo called the deaths “a tragic and senseless loss of two professional soldiers ... who were also husbands and fathers.”

Mathis said her stepson joined the Army immediately after graduating from high school six years ago. He was serving his third combat tour in Iraq, and had re-enlisted not long before he was killed. He was the father of four young children.

Mathis said he told her, “Momma, I’m not so afraid of the enemy. I’m afraid of our young guys over there, because they’re so jumpy and so quick to shoot.”

Durbin’s family in Hurst — 25 miles from Dallas — has declined comment.

He was a 2001 graduate of Dallas Lutheran School, and first served in the Marine Corps before joining the Army two years ago, according to The Associated Press.

The slayings mark the third time during five years of operations in Iraq that such an incident has taken place.

The first and only one until now took place June 7, 2005, in Tikrit, 80 miles north of Baghdad when Capt. Phillip T. Esposito, 30, and 1st Lt. Louis E. Allen, 34, of the New York National Guard’s 42nd Infantry Division were killed in their headquarters by grenade blasts.

A supply sergeant who worked for them, Staff Sgt. Alberto B. Martinez, was charged with premeditated murder on June 15, 2005, and is currently awaiting court-martial at Fort Bragg, N.C.

The only other known case of a soldier attacking his own in theater took place on March 23, 2003, at Camp Pennsylvania on the border of Kuwait.

The attack was on the eve of the 101st Airborne Division’s march to Baghdad and was leveled against troops with 1st Brigade Combat Team.

In that event, Sgt. Hasan Karim Akbar tossed a grenade into a tent where soldiers were sleeping and then fired his rifle into the tent’s opening. Army Capt. Christopher Seifert and Air Force Maj. Gregory Stone were killed.

Fourteen other soldiers were wounded in the event, for which Akbar was tried in a court-martial at Fort Bragg, N.C. and sentenced to death.

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The Pensacola News Journal contributed to this report