Anchorage Daily News

Before Army Sgt. 1st Class Randal Ruby was accused in Iraq of beating prisoners and of conspiring to plant rifles on dead civilians, he amassed a 10-year criminal record documenting assaults on his wife in Colorado and Washington state and a drunken high-speed police chase in Maine for which he remains wanted.

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Before Lance Cpl. Delano Holmes stabbed an Iraqi private to death with a bayonet, he was hospitalized after threatening suicide in high school; accused of assault, disorderly conduct and trespassing; and, in the months leading up to deployment, was twice linked to drug use.

Before Army Spc. Shane Carl Gonyon was convicted of stealing a pistol at Abu Ghraib prison, he was convicted twice on felony charges and arrested four times, once for allegedly giving a 13-year-old girl marijuana in exchange for oral sex. He enlisted weeks after his release from a federal prison in Oregon. During a yearlong examination, The Sacramento Bee studied the civilian and military backgrounds of hundreds of troops identified from recruiting documents and other military records, focusing on those who entered the services since the Iraq war began and those linked to in-service problems.

Though not a representative sample, the 250 military personnel analyzed most closely for this story included 120 with questionable backgrounds, including felonies and serious drug, alcohol or mental health problems.

Ruby, Holmes and Gonyon were among 70 with troubled pasts whom The Bee linked to incidents in Iraq. “These guys are out there carrying weapons, fighting on the streets with drugs in their pockets,” said Tressie Cox, whose son, Lee Robert, had a history of drug and mental problems before he was charged with selling drugs in Iraq. “Shame on my son, but shame on all you people out there who are policing this and allowing this to continue to happen.”

Those identified by The Bee are among the tens of thousands of military personnel recruited or retained as the armed services, entering the sixth year of the Iraq war, lowered educational, age and moral standards and granted a growing number of waivers to applicants whose backgrounds would otherwise have barred them from serving.

The percentage of Army recruits receiving so-called “moral conduct” waivers more than doubled, from 4.6 percent in 2003 to 11.2 percent in 2007. Others, The Bee found, were able to enlist because they had no official criminal record of arrests or convictions, their records were overlooked or prosecutors suspended charges in lieu of military service — akin to a now-defunct Vietnam-era practice in which judges gave defendants a choice between prison and the military.

“How in the hell can they legally possess a gun?” asked Montgomery County, Ala., Sheriff D.T. Marshall, when questioned about a soldier from his county.

SHIFTING STANDARDS

That soldier, Eli C. Gregory, was convicted in an attempted home invasion and of felony theft in Alabama, making him ineligible to legally possess a firearm there. Yet the military gave him a rifle and sent him to Iraq, where he was convicted by the Army of assault and battery on a fellow soldier and discharged. Gregory, who returned to Alabama after his court-martial, said during an interview that he still cannot legally possess a firearm in the United States.

The military defended its recruiting policies, including granting more waivers for past conduct. “Standards in our society have changed over the years; we are a reflection of those changes,” said Douglas Smith, spokesman for the Army Recruiting Command. “Considering offering a waiver to otherwise qualified recruits is the right thing to do for those Americans who want to answer the call to duty.”

Earlier this month, the Department of Defense announced a new system to categorize waivers by the severity of prior offenses to allow the services to analyze the link between waivers and future military behavior.

The Bee examination looked at only a fraction of the 1.4 million people in uniform — about 145,000 of them serving in Iraq — and was conducted largely without benefit of sophisticated criminal databases available to the military.

Still, The Bee linked dozens of soldiers and Marines with criminal records and other questionable backgrounds to misconduct in the military. In some cases, past misconduct appeared to foreshadow future behavior.

“Criminal history is the best predictor of future behavior,” said Shawn Bushway, a criminology professor at the University of Albany, N.Y., School of Criminal Justice. “Any time you lower your standards, you’re going to raise the risk. No question about it.”

INCIDENT IN SEWARD

Nine months before the death of the first of three Iraqis that Army sniper Michael A. Hensley was accused of murdering, members of a San Diego-area family witnessing his actions in Alaska were so concerned about what they saw that they videotaped him.

The family, sharing a third-floor hotel room in Seward, awakened to screams from the parking lot below and peered out to see Hensley threatening a woman inside a Jeep, pounding on the vehicle with his fists. “He obviously wasn’t stable, just from seeing him the 20 minutes I did,” said Alex Elling, who was 18 when he videotaped the incident.

Hensley “had bloody knuckles, and the windshield of the Jeep was broken,” a Seward Police Department report said. Hensley, who had previously served six months’ probation on a drunken-driving conviction in Georgia, pleaded no contest to the Alaska charges of disorderly conduct.

In Iraq, the military found Hensley guilty of planting an AK-47 on the body of an Iraqi he was accused of killing, but not guilty in any of the three killings.

‘PAYBACK COMING’

In the months surrounding his enlistment into the Army in 2000, Ricky Allen Burke was the subject of two court cases for unpaid debt, and, according to Monticello, Ky., Police Chief Ralph Miniard, he was involved in two vehicle accidents. His wife, who left him before their second anniversary, claimed in a domestic violence petition filed in March 2000 that he threatened to kill her, causing her to flee to a police station.

Two months later, court records say, Burke confronted his wife at a relative’s house. Police cited him for violating the domestic violence order.

A domestic violence conviction could have triggered a federal law precluding Burke from possessing a firearm. But seven days after he enlisted, the criminal case was continued, one of several continuances before it was dismissed in 2002.

Three years later in Iraq, Burke shot and killed a wounded insurgent he claimed had moved toward a weapon. But soldiers contradicted his story in statements to investigators.

“(Burke) said to me, ‘Let me shoot him. Let me shoot him. I got payback coming,’ ” Staff Sgt. Timothy Nein said, adding that he repeatedly ordered Burke not to fire since the insurgent was injured and Nein saw no weapon nearby.

Despite the testimony against him, Burke was found not guilty of the killing by a military court. In December, the National Guard quit granting felony waivers. The Guard’s chief recruiting officer, Col. Mike Jones, was quoted in the Army Times calling the previous policy “a risk,” but he later told The Bee an increased number of applicants made the policy no longer necessary.

Of the more than 120 soldiers and Marines with questionable pasts examined by The Bee, at least 18 had felony arrests or convictions or histories of mental illness. At least eight of the 18 later were connected to incidents in Iraq, and a ninth fatally shot himself while on guard duty in Kuwait.

The military refused to disclose who required waivers to enter the military, citing privacy, but The Bee found that waivers were not required of all convicted felons.

Gregory, the Alabama felon prohibited from possessing a firearm, said he was allowed to join without a waiver because he was convicted of stealing less than $500, so the Army didn’t technically consider the crime a felony. The Army confirmed that it does not require waivers for some felonies in which the crime loss is less than $500, but a spokesman noted that a felony waiver is required for larger amounts.

LYING TO ENLIST

Gonyon had four felony arrests and two convictions, but he had only to lie to avoid rejection. Shortly after he was discharged from the Air Force in Wyoming for drunken driving in 1998, Gonyon was arrested in Colorado on suspicion of pointing a .25-caliber semiautomatic pistol at a homeless man who had accused him of theft.

The next year, he admitted to stealing more than $10,000 in equipment from an Air Force base, and months later, he was accused of providing marijuana to a 13-year-old girl in exchange for oral sex, triggering a felony charge that resulted in a guilty plea to misdemeanor child endangering.

Nineteen days after he walked away from a federal prison, Gonyon applied for the Michigan National Guard, claiming he had worked at a wood supply company during the period when he actually was incarcerated. He was accepted the following month, in January 2003.

Since Gonyon had previously served in the military, a complete background check was not required by the Guard. That practice also ended earlier this year, after a guardsman with a past felony conviction shot and killed four civilians.

Gonyon wasn’t confronted about his criminal record until 2006, after an incident at Abu Ghraib prison, where he processed detainees. In late March or early April 2006, Gonyon stole a 7 mm pistol from a translator. He was caught trying to mail it to the United States.

“I deliberately concealed my arrest(s) and convictions,” Gonyon told a court-martial panel, which convicted him of theft and other charges.

Military officials didn’t publicly blame the war in Iraq, but some privately acknowledged it is why they accept individuals who previously would have been rejected.

Asked why someone like Delano Holmes was allowed to deploy to Iraq, Marine Capt. Brett Miner, a prosecutor at Holmes’ court-martial, said: “We’re kind of short on bodies.”

SUICIDE THREAT

Indianapolis police records show that on Jan. 13, 2002, when Holmes was 16, officers dispatched an ambulance to his high school after Holmes threatened to kill himself.

Fifteen months later, Holmes was arrested for disorderly conduct at an Indianapolis mall and banned from returning there for a year. He returned 10 minutes later and was arrested on a trespassing charge. Then, on April 14, 2004, a college student told police that Holmes had shoved him onto a bed and hit him in the forehead during a dispute over a vehicle.

Weeks later, Holmes left for boot camp in San Diego.

In the months leading up to his 2006 deployment to Iraq, civilian police found Holmes in a pickup containing marijuana residue and drug paraphernalia. In a separate incident, the military disciplined him for failing a drug test given to members of his unit preparing to deploy to Iraq.

Section 6210.5 of the Marine Corps Separation and Retirement Manual says Marines confirmed to have used illegal drugs “will be processed” for separation. A Marine Corps spokeswoman said the regulation does not give a time limit for completing that separation process, but she acknowledged that commanders had not even started the process for Holmes.

Three months after he deployed, Holmes was standing guard at an outpost in Fallujah when he pulled out a 13¼-inch bayonet and repeatedly stabbed Pvt. Munther Jasem Muhammed Hassin, whose Iraq army unit was serving alongside U.S. Marines. An autopsy found Hassin suffered 17 stab wounds, 26 cuts and a severed spine.

Holmes then fired Hassin’s AK-47 rifle to make it appear he had killed him in self-defense, the prosecutor told The Bee. Defense attorneys said the fight started when Hassin refused to put out a cigarette, which Holmes feared might alert insurgents.

A military panel at Camp Pendleton, Calif., found Holmes guilty of negligent homicide and making a false statement and sentenced him to 10 months in jail — in effect, time served.

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