A Case of Fratricide: Who Killed Pat Tillman?

July 19, 2006 — -- Early in the evening of April 22, 2004, a heavily armored vehicle in the trailing half of a split platoon came under attack from enemy fire in the rugged mountainous terrain of southeastern Afghanistan.

Soldiers in a Humvee opened fire in retaliation, but instead shot at fellow Rangers positioned ahead, killing Spc. Pat Tillman and an Afghan soldier standing 10 feet off Tillman's left shoulder.

The former NFL safety -- the Army's most-celebrated volunteer -- took three bullets to the forehead.

Three days removed from the ambush and the ensuing firefight, it wasn't the memory of the rounds of gunshots raining clouds of rock and dust down the towering canyon walls that troubled Spc. Ryan Mansfield.

It was the madness of making sense of it all.

Two years after Tillman's death, the Defense Department Inspector General's Office nears the completion of yet another investigation into the death and many very important questions remain unanswered.

Sitting in a crammed tent at Camp Salerno, the Army's Forward Operating Base in the province of Khowst, Afghanistan, Mansfield witnessed the raw emotion and friction in the unit as the soldiers agonized over the tragic outcome of the mission.

An Army chaplain pulled up a seat, so did an Army psychiatrist as squad leaders and high-ranking officers joined the 30 or so young Rangers still fresh from their first firefight.

The soldiers in the Black Sheep platoon didn't need a tidy, bureaucratic Army inquiry to tell them what they already knew: Tillman had been killed in a case of fratricide, otherwise known as friendly fire, by someone among them at the meeting.

By then, they knew that.

Like Mansfield, though, many of them were struggling with how it had happened. With why it had happened. With the awful enormity of it all.

"It was emotional," said Mansfield, then 20 years old and a gunner in the vehicle that had been just in front of Tillman's, in an interview with ESPN.com.

"Some people had things they said that other people didn't want to hear. It was just pretty personal. People in the second serial [the trailing half of the platoon] had a different perspective of what happened than people in the first."

The perspectives on the circumstances are still very much at odds, and the story is still very much alive.

For reasons that remain under investigation, the Pentagon elected for almost five weeks after the killing not to disclose the fact Tillman had been gunned down by members of his own platoon.

Yet some in Tillman's unit knew the night it happened. ESPN.com found that word of the fratricide had filtered through the ranks within a day or two of Tillman's death.

Army brass calling the shots from Camp Salerno also understood what had to be, for them, the discomfiting news about the elite group of soldiers expected to live and fight by a Ranger Creed that reads, in part, "I will never leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy, and under no circumstances will I ever embarrass my country."

According to one of the documents obtained by ESPN.com, an Army official flown in to join the platoon the day after the shooting as part of the April 25, 2004, debriefing process told Army investigators, "I think at that point people already knew that it was a fratricide."

He said, "So when I say 'people' -- [I mean] leadership, OK."

In the meeting three days after Tillman's death, however, chaos and unanswered questions dominated the warm night air as Mansfield and the rest of the unit tried to understand how a Ranger had killed the war's most-famous soldier.

As the meeting progressed, the young men took turns pitching their piece of the big picture. Words like "bad judgment" and "panic" were tossed about. Gossip and suspicion flowed freely.

Because of the gruesome damage done to Tillman's head by the gunfire, popular theory first focused on a soldier who'd manned a .50-caliber machine gun as the likely shooter, but Army documents showed that investigators later dismissed that idea.

That soldier left the Army when his enlistment ended and declined several interview requests by ESPN.com.

A few of the Rangers piped up, according to two soldiers in attendance that evening, to suggest Tillman had been overly aggressive when he took his position low on the desolate ridge.

In one of the Army documents, an officer assigned to observe the reaction of the Rangers during the debriefing session later told investigators, "A lot of them felt like his [Tillman's] actions that day had put himself and [Spc. Bryan O'Neal] and the Afghan soldier in peril that was unnecessary."

O'Neal, an 18-year-old soldier who had been positioned on the ridge just a few yards from Tillman during the firefight, sat quietly through most of the meeting.

Eventually, though, his few, riveting words brought a hush over the assembled platoon.

Another soldier at the session, Spc. Pedro Arreola, told ESPN.com that O'Neal, fighting back tears and shaking with emotion, said: "The only reason I am standing here is because Pat Tillman saved my life."

That night, O'Neal didn't detail for his fellow Rangers exactly how Tillman had saved him.

Later, according to a transcript of his interview with an Army investigator, O'Neal said he'd been out in the open and under intense fire while Tillman had what O'Neal described as "pretty good cover."

Tillman, O'Neal told the investigator, "wasn't really too much in danger," although the Afghan Military Forces soldier already lay off to the side, dead.

"I was watching them as they were shooting at me," O'Neal told the investigator, speaking about his fellow Rangers, "and I was watching the rounds when they were -- and Pat could look around -- and I was noticing that most of their fire seemed to be directed towards me. And he moved out from behind his cover to throw some smoke. … All I remember was him telling me, 'Hey, don't worry, I've got something that can help us.' And he popped a smoke [grenade], I guess, and that's when he got shot -- one of the few times he got shot."

The official Army autopsy report obtained by ESPN.com shows that, besides the three bullets in his forehead, Tillman had shrapnel in his left forearm and wrist.

Asked by ESPN.com to review the autopsy's findings, renowned forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden suggested the three bullets that struck Tillman in the head came in rapid succession, and most likely were from the weapon of a single shooter.

Documents from the Army's investigations indicate the wounds likely came from American 5.56-mm or 7.62-mm rounds.

"The first bullet that struck him in the head, he was dead," Baden told ESPN.com. "Then he was struck by two additional bullets, because of the rapid fire of the weapon that was used. He also may have been shot by other weapons in the arm and vest. This would indicate that. … More than one person was firing at him."

The previous investigations under Army regulation 15-6, which establishes procedures for such inquiries, concluded that a trio of young Rangers was following the initial fire of their squad leader, Sgt. Greg Baker, as the soldiers were trained to do.

None of those official inquiries identified who squeezed the trigger on the fatal shots.

Baden, though, suspects that enough ballistics evidence remained for the Army to have pinpointed the shooter, even though key evidence such as Tillman's uniform and body armor was destroyed within three days of his death.

Baden also said X-rays could have been used to identify the path the bullets took through Tillman's head, but the results were not included in the autopsy report, neither was mention of a hole in Tillman's leg discovered by a soldier who helped carry the body down the hillside.

"They should be able to figure out where the bullets came from, from the trajectory analysis, and whose weapon they came from, from microscopic ballistic comparison," said Baden, chief forensic pathologist for the New York State Police and a frequent consultant in high-profile murder cases. "The person who fired probably knows who he is. I think the supervisors know who the shooter or shooters were, but they're not releasing it."

According to the Army officer who directed the first official inquiry, the Army might have more of a clue about the shooter's identity than it has let on. Asked whether ballistics work was done to identify who fired the fatal shots, Lt. Col. Ralph Kauzlarich told ESPN.com, "I think, yeah, they did. And I think they know [who fired]. But I never found out."

Mansfield and other Rangers who attended the post-incident meeting said -- both in interviews with ESPN.com and in documents from the Army investigations -- they were advised by debriefers that night that the unit as a whole bore the responsibility for Tillman's death and they should avoid placing blame on any one person.