Report details days before fatal Utah shootout
ADAM ASHTON
Staff writer
Published November 20, 2011
Soldiers who fought alongside Spc. Brandon Barrett for a year in Afghanistan had no clue where they could find him two months after they came home to Joint Base Lewis-McChord in the summer of 2010.
They knew he had disappeared after he was disciplined for driving drunk just after they returned from their combat tour in June.
He told them that he had 450 rounds of ammunition for his semiautomatic rifle. They could find him by watching the news, he told them by text message.
Barrett, 28, was “about to show the world why they shouldn’t (expletive) with a soldier back from a deployment,” he told one platoonmate in a conversation over MySpace.
His ominous text messages set off alarms at Lewis-McChord. The base contacted Barrett’s family members in Tucson, Ariz., though not as soon as it should have. His platoonmates stayed in touch with him, urging him to cool down and come back to Washington. Officers warned law enforcement agencies near the base and issued a warrant seven days later.
But their efforts came far too late. Barrett died in a shootout with Salt Lake City police nine days after he sent those foreboding messages to his comrades at Lewis-McChord.
He was traveling around the Southwest, and he said he had no intent to return to his home base. He suited up in his combat gear the day of this death and appeared intent on getting himself killed, according to an Army investigation obtained by The News Tribune.
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