Light punishment for assault at Fort Lewis

The man accused of assaulting a female soldier at Fort Lewis slipped through the administrative crack because he was technically discharged from the military at the time of the crime.  He contacted the victim from Hawai’i.

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Last updated August 23, 2009 1:50 p.m. PT

Light punishment for assault at Fort Lewis

By SEAN ROBINSON
THE NEWS TRIBUNE

FORT LEWIS, Wash. — Taylor Mack woke up choking.

She retched blood, spat out a tooth, and squinted through a fog of swollen pain. Her face was broken. She didn’t know it yet.

Slow recognition. Empty apartment, fast-food bag on the bedside table … Fort Lewis.

The barracks. Here with Andre, the night before … and he had wanted to, but she said no … and then something flying at her face a foot, a fist? She couldn’t remember, and Andre was gone.

It was 2:30 a.m. on June 19, 2007. Mack, then 20, was about to stumble into a Catch-22: a legal snafu, excused by the gods of procedure, footnoted with official sympathy.

Mack made one mistake. She got herself assaulted on military property by a soldier who wasn’t a soldier anymore, a man who slipped between the layers of military and federal authority.

Her attacker, Andre John Roberts, 26, had just been discharged. Hours after admitting his crime, Roberts left the base, escorted by military personnel. Officially, he was a civilian, beyond military control. Unofficially, he was free.

More than two years later, Mack is still waiting for justice. Roberts’ whereabouts are unknown. He did not respond to voice mail messages.

Military officials, responding to inquiries from The News Tribune, now say the case was mishandled.

“Clearly this is not the best we can do,” Joseph Piek, Fort Lewis spokesman, said in a written statement. “Mistakes were made, and those mistakes resulted from a genuine misunderstanding by the military police of Roberts’ status at the time of the incident.”

Mack, a Lacey resident, doesn’t think much of that. For two years, she and her mother, Kim Johnson, have sought action on the case. They blame Roberts, but they also blame what they see as a tepid response from Fort Lewis officials.

“It’s been two years, and he’s never gotten in trouble for it,” Mack says. “All they’re trying to do is save themselves.”

“…a Caucasian female with blonde hair entered the CQ (charge of quarters) area. She was crying and hysterical with blood running down her face. Her face was swollen and she was missing a tooth. She was confused and disoriented and appeared to have been assaulted. I called 911 and requested police and medical assistance.” – Statement from military police report, 6-19-07

Before the night of the assault, Mack knew Andre Roberts a little. He was dating a friend of hers. He’d deployed to Iraq, returned in late 2006, and kept in touch. Young and far from his New Jersey roots, Roberts began spending more time at Mack’s mother’s house sleeping on the couch, going on family camping trips.

“It’s like I adopted this other child,” Kim Johnson recalled.

By summer 2007, Roberts was approaching his discharge date. Johnson recalls that he started getting “kind of clingy,” hinting that he might re-enlist if Mack would be his girlfriend.

Mack wasn’t interested. She already had a boyfriend. Her mother, leery of the needy talk, warned her to avoid Roberts.

On Monday, June 18, Roberts called Mack, seeking help with paperwork related to his discharge. Could Taylor just come to the post and look over the forms? She was smart about that stuff.

Mack said she would come after work.

She did not know that Roberts had been discharged almost three weeks earlier. By military standards, he was already a civilian, though he was still staying on the base with friends.

Records obtained by The News Tribune show Roberts was discharged May 31, 2007 but it wasn’t that simple. He had blown off his outprocessing, the paperwork aspect of leaving the Army.

“Because Roberts was not at his place of duty and did not perform his required outprocessing, he was discharged in absentia,” said Piek, the Fort Lewis spokesman.

Roberts was out, but not gone. He was flopping with friends in the barracks, bunking without authorization.

“It is believed that he was being permitted to stay at the unit barracks by friends, without the knowledge of the unit chain of command,” Piek said. “This is a violation of unit and Army policy regarding visitors to the barracks.”

The standard procedure for checking such violations is loose, officials said. Unit leaders conduct occasional barracks inspections, but they typically rely on soldiers to report violations.

When Mack arrived at Fort Lewis the evening of June 19, Roberts was already toasted.

“He’d been drinking before I got there,” she said. “They drink all the time. That’s all the guys seem to do in the barracks.”

As the evening wore on, he bought burgers and took her to an empty barracks apartment – a friend’s old room. Roberts had the key code. He and Mack could stay here, he said.

He wasn’t interested in discharge paperwork. He wanted to talk about something else – about their relationship, their future. He said he was in love.

“I’m like, I have a boyfriend – I’ll never leave my boyfriend for you,'” Mack remembered saying. “I think in the back of his mind he was hoping he could win me away, and that would never happen.”

Roberts wanted to lie on the bed with Mack. She wasn’t into it.

“That’s when the (expletive) hit the fan and he started kicking me in the back, and I’m like, Dude, don’t – seriously, stop,'” she remembered.

Mack stood. She told him she was leaving.

“That’s the last thing I remember,” she said. “Before standing up and spitting my teeth out of my mouth.”

“…Mack walked into the building bleeding from her face and mouth, stating she wasn’t sure what happened or where she was, but that she was (had been) with Roberts.” – Excerpt from military police report, 6-19-07

Roberts wasn’t around. Military police started searching for him. Mack had called her mother, who was driving up to the post. Police took statements, and sent Mack to Madigan Army Medical Center.

While they gathered statements and surveyed the bloody scene at the barracks apartment, Roberts walked into the charge of quarters area and turned himself in. It was 5 a.m., and he was still drunk. He blew a blood-alcohol level of 0.086 on a breath tester.

“Roberts was apprehended, transported to this station, where he was advised of his legal rights, which he waived, rendering a sworn written statement admitting to the offense.” – Statement from military police report, 6-19-07

After citing him, military police handed Roberts off to his old unit: the 542nd Maintenance Company. Standard procedure in such cases: Give the guy back to his commander until the legal stuff’s done.

“Thinking Mr. Roberts was still in the Army, the military police were planning to turn the case over to his chain of command for action as appropriate under the Uniform Code of Military Justice,” said Piek.

The unit took him, Fort Lewis records say, but confusion lingered.

“The noncommissioned officer who picked him up was not in Mr. Roberts’ former chain of supervision, was not familiar with his status, and also believed him to be in the Army,” Piek said.

Piek did not identify the soldier who picked up Roberts. He added that personnel with firsthand knowledge of the incident are no longer stationed at Fort Lewis or have left the Army.

How is unclear, but unit leaders soon realized Roberts was a civilian, already discharged, someone else’s problem.

Military officials did not alert the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department; there was no formal requirement to do so. They didn’t request a hold for the U.S. Marshals service, which they could have considered.

Instead, a few hours after he confessed to beating Taylor Mack bloody, they escorted him off the base and released him into Pierce County.

“He had already been a civilian since 31 May and was no longer under military control,” said Piek.

At the hospital, military police asked Mack and her mother to go over the incident again and supply a more detailed statement.

Both women were worn out. They wanted to go home and get some sleep. Johnson said she and her daughter would come back to Fort Lewis that evening.

When they arrived, military police said Roberts had been released.

Johnson couldn’t believe it.

“That was it,” she said. “We went to give our side and it was never ever brought up again.”

Johnson asked about the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department. Could that agency help? She remembers military police saying she could seek a restraining order against Roberts.

When she and Mack tried that a few days later, they got nowhere. The incident took place on federal property, they were told. This was a Fort Lewis issue.

Johnson wrote to her congressman, Adam Smith, and the state attorney general, Rob McKenna. Letters came back, advising her to talk to Army prosecutors. She tried that too, and hit dead ends.

“I contacted as many people as I possibly could,” she said. “Basically, it was kind of like we’ll get back with you, we’ll call you, and they never called back, and I would follow up.”

When she did get through, she ran into a new obstacle. Johnson wasn’t the victim – her daughter should do the talking, officials said.

Taylor Mack, still recovering from multiple surgeries to her face and jaw, didn’t feel like talking to anybody. Dismayed by Roberts’ release and the apparent lack of action, she believed the authorities weren’t interested.

On Sept. 14, 2007, Capt. Kenneth Tyndal, a federal prosecutor assigned to Fort Lewis, charged Roberts with assault.

Three months had passed since Roberts signed a statement admitting to the assault. The gap in time was standard for routine cases. “It’s not considered a delay,” said Emily Langlie, spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Seattle.

The charging statement was one sentence long, filling a single page: misdemeanor assault, the lowest level in the federal code, worth six months in jail at most.

Tyndal is deployed overseas, and could not be reached to discuss his decision.

There was a higher level of assault in the code a felony offense with a stiffer potential penalty, linked to attacks that caused “serious bodily injury.”

The original military police report provided nothing to support the tougher charge. It looked like a straight domestic case.

“All we see is what’s in the file,” said Emily Langlie, spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office. “The police report indicated one punch and a knocked-out tooth.”

The police report includes an area labeled “injury type,” with a series of checkmark boxes. “Minor injury” was checked, as was “tooth loss.”

Boxes labeled “broken bones,” “severe laceration,” and “unconsciousness” were left blank.

Taylor Mack had been beaten into unconsciousness and left in a barracks apartment. For weeks, she ate through a straw.

“He broke my jaw,” she says. “He broke my nose, broke my eye socket. I had a concussion. I had to get my teeth re-implanted. I couldn’t eat anything besides liquids for a month.”

Those injuries weren’t listed in the police report. There is no sign in records of the incident to show that police followed up on their initial assessment.

Langlie said the U.S. Attorney’s Office could consider revising the original charges if new information comes to light.

Fort Lewis officials say they’re not satisfied by their response to the incident, or the still unanswered questions surrounding Roberts’ departure from Fort Lewis.

Military police acted according to what they knew at the time, said Piek, the Fort Lewis spokesman.

“It’s important to note that, in the final analysis, what was supposed to happen did happen: Because he was a civilian at the time of the incident, Mr. Roberts’ case was referred to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and he was charged by the U.S. Attorney for his actions,” Piek added.

The charge was a paper move; the citation was sent to a forwarding address. No one actually looked for Roberts. He was never taken into custody. He didn’t show up for his arraignment in U.S. District Court in Tacoma.

That prompted another paper move. The court issued a warrant for Roberts’ arrest. It remains active one among hundreds of federal warrants in Western Washington.

Since 2007, Roberts has spoken to Mack a few times. He’s called via cellphone and sent messages from his MySpace Page, asking her to be his friend.

The page says he’s in Hawaii. His wireless phone number has a Maryland area code. Mack said Roberts has talked of re-enlisting in the military, but it’s unclear whether he has.

He’s told Mack he thought she was dead when he left her in the barracks apartment. She’s asked him why he attacked her. He never answers.

“Andre also has told me that Fort Lewis made him come back at some point, like before he left to go home, they made him come back and clean the room, clean all the blood and all that. He told me the room looked like a murder scene.”

The official response to her case still rankles.

“He almost killed me. He left me for dead in an abandoned room,” Mack said. “All he had to do is clean the room and then they sent him on his merry little way.

Source:  http://www.seattlepi.com/local/6420ap_wa_fort_lewis_assault.html