[Marxism] Casualty of war

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, January 14, 2005
Kin of Marine Who Shot Policemen Ask if He Is a Casualty of War
By DEAN E. MURPHY

CERES, Calif., Jan. 13 - A surveillance camera captured the gun battle in
this small central California farm town in terrifying detail.

A marine on weekend leave from Camp Pendleton on Sunday night instructed a
clerk in George's Liquor Store to call the police. When patrol cars
arrived, the marine pulled an assault rifle from beneath his poncho and
began firing. Both Sgt. Howard Stevenson and Officer Sam Ryno were hit.

"He walked over to where Sergeant Stevenson laid suffering from several
gunshot wounds and shot him in the back of the head," said Lt. Bill Heyne,
the lead investigator on the case for the Stanislaus County sheriff. "It
was an execution of that officer."

The marine, Lance Cpl. Andres Raya, 19, who spent seven months in Iraq last
year as a motor transportation operator, then walked to a muddy alley
around the corner, a place where he used to pick oranges as a student on
his way to Ceres High School. He slipped from one backyard to the next,
telling some residents they were "innocent civilians" and would not be harmed.

Before the evening ended, as police officers from across the region
responded to the shootings, more than 200 rounds had been fired, both
Sergeant Stevenson and Corporal Raya were dead, and "small town America,"
as the police and fire chief here (he has to do both jobs) called Ceres,
was desperately debating whether the young marine had deliberately gotten
himself killed to escape possible return to Iraq.

"It is going to take a great deal of work to sort out what happened,"
Lieutenant Heyne said.

Some here blame the violence on Corporal Raya's wartime experience, which
friends and relatives say was so traumatic that he cried during his home
leave at Christmas about having to report back to Camp Pendleton. They
suggest Corporal Raya, whose wish throughout high school was to be a marine
and then a Ceres firefighter, might have invited the confrontation with the
intention of erasing forever the awful images in his head.

But others say they see a vicious criminal who authorities say had a past
association with gangs. They see drugs or alcohol as the more likely spark
of his deadly rage, and they question how he was able to get the outlawed
assault rifle used in the shooting spree.

(clip)

Though Corporal Raya had no adult criminal record, Mr. Madrigal said the
marine had sparred with the police as recently as October when several
officers stopped him near Ceres High School during a home leave, and
Corporal Raya insisted the officers show him "more respect" now that he was
a marine.

It was about the same time, friends and relatives said, that Corporal Raya
began acting strangely. A cousin, Rebeca Raya, said he visited her in Texas
in October and was unable even to order food in a restaurant without
viewing the waiter fearfully. After they went to see the Michael Moore film
"Fahrenheit 9/11," Ms. Raya said, her cousin told her: "That is only some
of it. There are worse things to it."

Ms. Raya said she was so disturbed by his behavior that she called one of
her sisters in California. "I said, 'He is just not right,' " Ms. Raya
recalled. "I grew up with him. He wasn't the same person."

The police said Corporal Raya had several brushes with the law as a
juvenile, but those records are sealed. Officials at the Marine recruitment
station in neighboring Modesto, where Corporal Raya enlisted in July 2003,
said that it had taken him about eight months to pass a qualifying exam but
that a background check had raised no red flags.

Representative Dennis Cardoza, a Democrat who represents the area and who
was briefed by the authorities before attending a candlelight vigil for
Sergeant Stevenson on Wednesday night, said he was convinced that Corporal
Raya was not "a poor soldier who has post-traumatic syndrome."

He said, "We have to be very careful in this case not to make this out to
be something that it isn't."

On Thursday, family members gathered at the home of one of Corporal Raya's
relatives in a subdivision that a few years ago was planted with
strawberries. Final preparations were under way for the funeral. A poem the
young man wrote in eighth grade with the refrain, "I am a person with fears
and desires," was faxed to the funeral home.

"I pretend I can never die.

I feel my heart beating when I am scared.

I touch the clouds in my dreams.

I worry how will I die."

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/14/national/14marine.html

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