Staff Sgt Robert Bales felt "inadequate as a soldier and as a man" when he left his remote post in Afghanistan in the middle of the night last year and attacked two mud-walled villages, gunning down men, screaming children and elderly women, a prosecutor told jurors.
Bales pleaded guilty in June to avoid the death penalty for killing 16 civilians and wounding six others, mostly women and children, in the March 11, 2012, assaults. In the sentencing hearing that began yesterday, the six jurors must decide whether he is sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole or without it.
An Army prosecutor, Lt Col Jay Morse, opened the government's case by reading a 32-page "stipulation of facts" an unbearably gruesome recitation of Bales' actions that night, describing how he executed a young girl who was screaming for him to stop beating her father, how he fired indiscriminately into rooms full of children and how he slaughtered 11 members of a single family, many of them still asleep on their blankets.
"The accused placed his weapon on 'burst' and murdered everyone in the room," Morse said.
Offering the most detailed single account yet of the attack, Morse recounted the killings compound-by-compound and room-by-room, describing at one point how a widow was left clutching bits of her husband's skull when the killer finally left.
Bales, a 39-year-old Ohio native and father of two from Lake Tapps, Wash., was serving his fourth combat deployment when he left the outpost at Camp Belambay in the pre-dawn darkness. He first attacked one village, returning to Belambay only when he realised he was low on ammunition, Morse said.
He then woke a fellow soldier, described his actions and said he was headed out to kill more. The other soldier didn't believe him and went back to sleep. Bales left again.
The massacre prompted such angry protests that the US temporarily halted combat operations in Afghanistan, and it was three weeks before Army investigators could reach the crime scene.
