Copperas
Cove – When Mrs. Frank Schreiber heard the two shotgun blasts, she
panicked, grabbed a phone, and rushed from her bedroom, only to see
her husband on the floor, fatally shot.
She
fled, and the gunman plugged her with a shot to her hand and her
shoulder.
And
then, the two robbers fled, retreating back into the darkness of the
nightmare whence they came.
Earlier,
she and her husband had returned from visiting a friend and got ready
for bed. Just before drifting off to sleep, someone began to knock on
the door – and didn't go away. She told her husband to go see about
the late night visitor.
 |
| Uniform crime statistics for Killeen show only two categories - larceny and auto theft - which do not exceed the Texas rate |
Mr.
Schreiber, a soldier stationed at Ft. Hood, knew one of his
attackers. Brandon Walker, a fellow soldier, had helped him repair
his home; he had also spent time in the home with he and his wife.
Ultimately, a disagreement about Walker's affections for a married
woman caused a falling out, according to court testimony. The couple
no longer kept company with the soldier.
Walker
was low on cash. He needed money. On the evening of January 14, 2010,
Walker picked up an acquaintance from his unit at the fort.
Travis
Brazil and he had previously discussed raiding the Schreiber home to
rob the couple of their guns and a coveted 42-inch flat screen
television.
Schreiber
had mentioned he would like to sell a certain pistol he owned. On the
way, Walker and Brazil went by another soldier's home to borrow a
shotgun.
The
pair drove by the house to determine that the Schreibers were at
home, then headed for a local Wal-Mart where surveillance cameras
made video and still photos of both men as Walker withdrew $300 in
cash which he intended to flash at Schreiber as he faked his way into
the man's home to see about buying the gun.
Schreiber
told him he no longer had the gun. He had sold it for a mere $40.
That's
when Walker set the plan in motion. He asked to use the bathroom.
Once inside, alone in the john, he phoned Brazil, who was waiting in
the car with the shotgun. It was the signal that it was time for him
to come through the front door, which he had left open.
All
the while, Walker continued to talk to Mr. Schreiber to keep him
distracted.
Brazil
shot Mr. Schreiber twice, left him for dead, and when Mrs. Schreiber
confronted the pair, they fled after Brazil wounded her with two
additional blasts from the gun.
Walker
told investigators all these things in exchange for the promise of a
reduced sentence if he would give witness statements and testify
against the trigger man, Brazil, who was subsequently convicted by a
Coryell County jury for capital murder and automatically sentenced to
life in the penitentiary.
The
conviction will stand.
The
Tenth District Court of Appeals at Waco recently turned down Brazil's
appeal when Associate Justice Rex Davis ruled that witness testimony
and the video pictures of Brazil, as well as his own admissions given
in statements to investigators, was by established legal precedent
adequate identification for jurors to convict him of shooting the
Schreibers in a robbery carried out by home invasion.
Soldier
on soldier violence – often compelled by a need for quick cash with
which to score drugs – is a growing problem at the nation's
military installations, where incidents such as the mass shooting of
13 murder victims by Army psychiatrist Abdul Nidal Hasan and the
threatened jihadist antipersonal bombing designs of Jason Abdo are in
stark contrast to the plain, vanilla robbery, rape, and assault
intentions of soldiers motivated by the more mundane desire to
relieve a fellow soldier of his possessions, cash, GI life insurance death benefits – or in the case
of rape victims, their simple human dignity.
There
are profound reasons for that. In the next installment of this
series, a retired Command Sergeant Major who has turned his
professional attentions to work as a bond agent and bounty hunter
gives a candid and stark interview about conditions that are screwing
up his Army.
Once
in charge of an estimated 1,200 soldiers as the right hand enlisted
man serving the Commanding Major General, he holds forth on the
trends he has seen make the integrity and morale of a once proud
fighting force take a nose dive into depravity.
Quite
simply, his Army has turned into a nightmarish caricature of itself
due to drugs - both prescription and illicit - and the effects of an
extended war on two fronts.
It's
a world in which soldiers have endured as many as 5 deployments
during a single career punctuated by the drab and disheartening
prospect of returning to the world and living a life at a stateside
post where anything goes. (click here for a previous report about a murder for hire conspiracy that ended in the conviction for capital murder of three co-conspirators)
Anything.
It's
also a world where the civil authorities lie in wait to file serious
charges against soldiers for even the most picayunish of offenses,
charges which usually predicate a bad paper discharge and a life
marred by an inability to break free of the cycle of criminal
complications that usually go with that devastating event.
NEXT:
'Our military is broken...'
No comments:
Post a Comment