By William Wan
The Washington Post; Friday, May 14, 2010; A01

From behind his desk and wire-rimmed glasses, Monsignor Steven Rohlfs surveyed the class of 24 men. For almost six years, he had led them on the long, difficult path to priesthood, and now, as they stood on the cusp of reaching that goal, he worried.

He knew his seminarians would be entering an institution under fire over clergy sex abuse cases around the world. And he had seen the devastation a single bad priest could cause.

He had often told them about the job he’d held before becoming the seminary’s rector — the one that sent him to bed many nights a broken man. For seven years, he had investigated priests accused of sex abuse in Illinois.

And it was a darkness he was determined to keep out of their lives.

So, as Rohlfs began his last class with them at his rural seminary in Western Maryland, the 59-year-old monsignor raced through his notes, cramming in a long list of last-minute advice. In quick succession, he reviewed everything from the nitty-gritty of administering the holy sacraments to the common pitfalls of first-year priests.

At the end of the hour-long lecture, he paused and looked up from his notes.

He had come to know and love each of the students graduating from his class: the aspiring park ranger, the former Starbucks manager, the Air Force veteran, the newcomer from Nigeria. Many of them had confided their deepest doubts to him.

And in return, Rohlfs had shared the lessons he’d learned from 34 years as a priest. From the outside world, he warned them, they would encounter suspicion and, at times, outright disdain. From within, they would encounter something even more sinister: temptation.

“If you remember nothing else from today, I would boil down all this advice to one thing,” he said as the class came to an end. “Fall in love with the Lord, and it will change everything. Fall out of love with Him, and it will change everything.”
Sacrifices and suspicion

This year, 440 men will be ordained in the United States. They will enter the Catholic Church at a time of need, amid a decades-long shortage of priests. Two dozen of them will come from Mount St. Mary’s in Emmitsburg, a town so rural it only recently acquired a second stoplight.

Six years ago, when most of this year’s class arrived, the church was reeling from hundreds of abuse cases emerging across the United States. Now, just as they were preparing to leave for ordination, the church was once again mired in scandal.

They’d already experienced some of the far-reaching consequences of the sex abuse crisis. Getting into seminary had required a battery of psychological tests, long interviews and background checks.

“In the last six years alone, I’ve been fingerprinted four times,” said Mick Kelly, a 32-year-old former philosophy student who will be ordained next month in the Arlington Diocese. “That’s more than some criminals out there get.”

After he entered the seminary, one of Kelly’s friends asked him: “How can you join an institution as corrupt as the Catholic Church?”

When he began wearing a clerical black robe and white collar four years ago, he noticed the stares he’d get from people. Some would look away.

“You try not to be defensive, to explain as best you can,” he said. “It hurts. The world sees these abuse cases and judges the church as a whole, all its priests and all its work by the action of these few people. But it’s not the priesthood I grew up with. The one I know and love.”

For some seminarians, the abuse crisis only made them want to be priests more.

“It invoked that almost boyhood drive to be a hero,” said Matt Rolling, 27, a soft-spoken student from Nebraska. “You want to help the church restore its name. You want to be an example of what the priesthood really represents.”

To be a priest, Rolling said, means sacrifice. For him, answering God’s call meant abandoning all his careful plans — a career as a forest ranger, the girlfriend he’d been dating for three years at the University of Nebraska, the prospect of marriage and children.

Even now, he said, there are times when he feels a desire for a wife and family. And, of course, there is the issue of sex.

“It’s not like when you become a deacon or priest, the hormones somehow shut off,” he said. “There are temptations. There are doubts. How do you deal with that? You try to realize that temptation comes from the devil and salvation comes from God. You pray for that salvation. You build up the spiritual strength to look past the distraction. . . . When I see a girl, I try to think, ‘If this were my daughter, how would I feel if someone looked at her that way, if someone mistreated her?’ You try to move into that role of a father, which is what you’re supposed to be, in a sense, as a priest.”

Embracing celibacy at Mount St. Mary’s is complicated by the fact that the seminary is housed on the same campus as a college, with a student body that includes plenty of young women.

Strolling through a lush garden dedicated to the Virgin Mary, Dave Wells, one of Rolling’s close friends, put it this way: “I don’t want to sound like it’s the only thing we think about, but, yes, it can be tough.”

Midway through the conversation, two girls in tight running clothes jogged by. Wells’s eyes, however, remained fixed on a statue of Mary.

“It’s good practice for us,” he said later, “because in the parishes, we’ll be surrounded and ministering to women, too. You may as well get used to it now.”

Not everyone, however, can. About 15 percent of the seminarians leave without finishing. In the past year alone, Wells has attended two weddings for former seminarians in his class.

“Some of us are called to be fathers in the natural sense,” he said. “Some are called in the spiritual sense.”
Loving God

Such open talk of sex and the official dissection of temptations are things that have changed in the wake of the abuse scandals. Since Rohlfs arrived at Mount St. Mary’s five years ago, he has made extensive teaching on celibacy a priority. Seminarians spend an entire year examining its history, theological roots and practical challenges. And they pore over reports on the abuse scandals, looking for clues.

It is a deliberately open approach for a man who, when asked to talk about the problem of abusive priests, takes off his glasses and rubs his face. A weariness creeps into Rohlfs’ voice.

From 1998 to 2005, he was responsible for investigating accused priests as vicar general of the Peoria diocese. He was the one who had to hear the heart-wrenching accounts from abuse victims, who had to delve into the private lives of more than a dozen accused priests and confront them with his findings.

“It was the most painful time of my life,” he said. “I had known a lot of these same priests growing up. But even worse was meeting the victims. You don’t know what to say to them. The pain they’ve felt. There’s nothing you can say that will change that.”

He likened himself to a garbage man and woke up depressed every morning. It got so bad that he eventually made a new vow — to watch a half-hour sitcom every night before he fell asleep just to make himself laugh. “I Love Lucy.” “Everybody Loves Raymond.” “Frasier.”

Most of the priests he investigated had come from an era when celibacy was not taught at seminaries in a pragmatic, thorough way. Another thing the fallen priests had in common, he said, was that not one had kept up his daily prayers.

So at Mount St. Mary’s, he has urged seminarians to pray at least one hour every day. If they don’t, he demands to know what they could possibly be doing that’s more important than talking to God?

But not even prayer can substitute for love. That’s what stuck out most to Rohlfs in the wreckage of the fallen priests’ lives. “We can teach them everything we know, but, in the end, duty cannot do it,” he said. “It must be love — loving God more than you love sin.”
The crucial lesson

In his last class with them, Rohlfs watched as his seminarians dutifully wrote down this last piece of advice on love. But did they understand how crucial it was, he wondered. Would they remember?

The Class of 2010 is the first he has overseen from start to finish, and he confessed that he felt at times like a nervous parent on the first day of kindergarten — eager to see his children succeed but, having seen the dangers in this world, scared of what they will encounter.

Sitting in his office last week — with the year officially over and his seminarians packing up — Rohlfs couldn’t help picking through all the lessons he had given during the past six years. He asked himself whether he should have done anything different, whether he had missed something important.

He had taught them everything he knew, he said at last with a sigh. Now it was up to God.

By William Wan
The Washington Post; Monday, November 23, 2009; B01

The calls come in at all hours: patients reporting broken bones, violent coughs, deep depression.

Prue Lewis listens as they explain their symptoms. Then Lewis — a thin, frail-looking woman from Columbia Heights — simply says, “I’ll go to work right away.” She hangs up, organizes her thoughts and begins treating her clients’ ailments the best way she knows how: She prays.

This is health care in the world of Christian Science, where the sick eschew conventional medicine and turn to God for healing. Christian Scientists call it “spiritual health care,” and it is a practice they are battling to insert into the health-care legislation being hammered out in Congress.

Leaders of the Church of Christ, Scientist, are pushing a proposal that would help patients pay someone like Lewis for prayer by having insurers reimburse the $20 to $40 cost.

The provision was stripped from the bill the House passed this month, and church leaders are trying to get it inserted into the Senate version. And the church has powerful allies there, including Sens. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), who represents the state where the church is based, and Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), who said the provision would “ensure that health-care reform law does not discriminate against any religion.”

But opponents of spiritual care coverage — a coalition of separation-of-church-and-state advocates, pediatricians and children’s health activists — say such a provision would waste money, endanger lives and, in some cases, amount to government-funded prayer.

“I think if most Americans knew what’s being proposed on this issue, they would be shocked,” said Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

As the health-care debate enters its final stages, the clash over spiritual care has become essentially a referendum about whether the government recognizes prayer as a legitimate and viable health-care option.

Lewis, 66, works out of a small rented space in Northwest Washington, but her real office is her cellphone. She sleeps with the phone tucked under her pillow at night.

She doesn’t see most of the patients she treats. That isn’t necessary, she said, for her prayers to be effective.

Each prayer is a cerebral search for resolution to the patient’s problem. And the answer often comes in the form of an idea or feeling: “God is here,” “God is life,” “We are created in God’s perfect image.”

Such thoughts, she said, drive out the fear causing the sickness: fear of pain, death, hopelessness. And as she and her patients reconnect with God, healing comes naturally.

Her faith in prayer comes from experience. About 10 years ago, she said, before she retired from her job as a federal environmental negotiator, she was cured of what she thinks was breast cancer.

“I noticed a lump in my breast and felt the pain,” she said.

But after weeks of prayer, the lump, pain and fear all went away. “It just proved to me how much this does work,” she said, “and I felt a calling to devote my life to helping others.”

She set out to become one of the church’s 1,400 trained practitioners. She completed a two-week intensive course and collected testimonials of healing from people she had worked with, including a man who was injured in a fall and a woman with persistent anxiety. Four years ago, she was listed in the church’s registry.
A child’s death

The belief that God is capable of miraculous healing exists in all branches of Christianity and most other major religions. Some research has shown a link between prayer and improved health; other studies have not.

But Christian Scientists have made healing through prayer a central tenet in their 1,200 churches. The denomination’s two main texts are the Bible and “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” written by Mary Baker Eddy, who founded the church in 1879.

In her book, Eddy lays out an alternative system of health care, one with prayer practitioners and nursing facilities where attendants bandage and comfort but do not provide drugs or perform procedures as basic as setting bones.

Church leaders say this system should be recognized and protected in the health-care legislation, but their efforts to prohibit discrimination against “religious or spiritual health care” has some critics seething.

“You can’t just think away cancer,” said Gaylor, of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

There are also constitutional objections over using tax money for religious purposes, said Sean Faircloth of the Secular Coalition for America.

But some of the most impassioned arguments have come from such people as Rita Swan, a former Christian Scientist who said the prayer practices put children at risk.

“We live in a modern era with antibiotics, immunization, advanced diagnostic procedures. Why would you risk the life of your child when they could easily be saved?” Swan asked.

It is a question that has haunted Swan since the death of her son in 1977. Swan was a lifelong Christian Scientist. So when 15-month-old Matthew came down with a fever, she and her husband took him to church leaders.

“The practitioner prayed, and the fever went away,” she said. “At first, we thought that Christian Science had accomplished something strong and real, but then he just got worse.”

Soon, the toddler could not walk or sit up. Swan considered taking Matthew to a doctor, but church leaders told her that if she did, they couldn’t pray for him anymore. By the time she took him to the hospital, it was too late.

A week later, he died of bacterial meningitis, which doctors said could have been cured with antibiotics and today can be prevented with a vaccine.

Swan now attends a United Methodist church near Sioux City, Iowa, and spends her days fighting Christian Science, lobbying against the church on state child-protection laws and sending letters to congressional leaders on health-care reform.

“I feel I owe it to my son,” she said, “to do anything I can to save other children out there facing what he faced.”
A lobbying blitz

It’s been two decades since a Christian Scientist was prosecuted for the death of a child treated with prayer instead of medicine. The church doesn’t pressure people to avoid doctors, said spokesman Phil Davis, and prayer treatment is now seen as a substitute for or as a supplement to medical treatment.

“The issue here is insurance coverage and has nothing to do with child-protective laws,” Davis said.

The church has suggested that its health-care proposal might be amended to apply only to adults. The church is also considering language to avoid having government subsidies pay for prayer.

Its leaders point to government policies as precedent for their proposal. The Internal Revenue Service allows prayer treatments to be itemized on income tax forms as medical expenses. And a few federal insurance programs, such as those for military families, already reimburse for prayer.

“It’s not just what’s at stake for us as Christian Scientists,” Davis said. “You look at the spiraling cost of health care, and you look at the low cost and positive results of spiritual care. How could you leave that out?”

But to Swan, the provision amounts to the government endorsing prayer as an alternative to proven medical treatment. “God protects and God loves, but He also gave us the ability to heal ourselves through medicine,” she said. “Why would you just throw that away?”

Staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.

By Eli Saslow, Philip Rucker, William Wan and Mary Pat Flaherty
The Washington Post; Thursday, December 31, 2009; A01

Nidal Hasan was causing a ruckus in his one-bedroom apartment during the early hours of Nov. 5, banging against the thin walls long after midnight, packing boxes and shredding papers until he woke up the tenants next door.

Maybe that was a clue.

He picked up the phone at 2:37 a.m. and dialed a neighbor. Nobody answered. Hasan called again three hours later, this time leaving a message. “Nice knowing you, friend,” he said. “I’m moving on from here.”

Maybe that was a clue, too.

He left Apartment 9 early that morning and stopped next door to see a woman named Patricia Villa, whom he had known for less than a month. He gave her a bag of frozen vegetables, some broccoli, a clothing steamer and an air mattress, explaining that he was about to be deployed to a war zone. Then Hasan visited another neighbor, a devout Christian, who looked at him quizzically when he handed her a copy of the Koran and recommended passages for her to read. “In my religion,” Hasan told her, “we’ll do anything to be closer to God.”

Just before the break of dawn in Killeen, Tex., Hasan drove away from the Casa Del Norte apartment complex and stopped for his customary breakfast at a nearby 7-Eleven. The store’s owner, wary of him, had spent the past month pretending to be absent whenever Hasan entered. This time, Hasan approached the counter with coffee and hash browns at 6:22 a.m., wearing an Arab robe and a white kufi cap. Before fiddling in his pockets for change, buying his breakfast and driving away to work at Fort Hood, he smiled at another customer and issued what sounded like a warning.

“There’s going to be big action on post around 1:30,” he said, according to witnesses. “Be prepared.”

Clues — he left them everywhere. When viewed in retrospect, Hasan’s life becomes an apparent trail of evidence that leads to an inevitable end. At 1:34 p.m. on Nov. 5, he bowed his head in prayer during his regular shift at Fort Hood, opened his eyes and started shooting, witnesses said. The 39-year-old Army psychiatrist allegedly aimed for soldiers in uniform, firing more than 100 times with a semiautomatic pistol and a revolver. The terror lasted less than 10 minutes. Thirteen people died. Thirty were injured.

Now, more than seven weeks later, what is left of the Fort Hood tragedy is a community haunted by clues that somehow went unheeded. During a week in which the government has lamented missed signals in the case of an attempted bombing on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, there remain unresolved questions about how so many signals could have passed unnoticed before the Fort Hood shootings. While the Pentagon, the Army and the FBI work to complete investigations of Hasan with findings due next month, his former friends and colleagues sift backward through his biography and search for answers of their own.

This story, which attempts to fill in that biography, is based on interviews with 100 people who lived, worked or prayed with Hasan in Texas, the District, Virginia and Maryland — a group now united by its obsession with the same troubling questions.

How do you differentiate between pious and fanatical?

Between lonely and isolated?

Between eccentric and crazy?

And the one question the former friends and colleagues return to most: Could they have recognized the clues in time to stop him?

* * *

Where were the clues back in 2001, when a friend told his Silver Spring youth group to emulate Hasan as the role model for well-rounded success? Here was a devoted student — a summa cum laude graduate of Virginia Western Community College, an honors graduate of Virginia Tech — now well on his way to becoming a doctor. Here was a devoted Muslim who regularly drove to a mosque to pray five times each day, as is customary among the devout, and stuck around between prayers to raise money for the homeless and find temporary housing for new arrivals to Washington. Here was a devoted son who took time off from school and made space in his one-bedroom apartment to care for his mother, sick with cancer.

Hasan took a leave from medical school to spend the better part of two years in his suburban Washington apartment with his mother, Nora, until she died on May 30, 2001. She was 49, and other family members considered her Hasan’s closest confidante — a woman who discouraged her son from joining the military only to later introduce herself as the mother of an Army officer. Hasan hosted her funeral at Dar al-Hijrah, Northern Virginia’s biggest mosque, where more than 3,000 people sometimes attend evening prayer and stay afterward for brief funerals. Nora’s service, held after a crowded Thursday prayer, was Hasan’s last gift to his mother: Muslim belief dictates that the more people who pray for the deceased, the greater the rewards in heaven.

Nora’s death left Hasan bereft of his anchor, relatives said, and over the next several years he started to drift. He moved three times in three years, renting rooms in one transient apartment building after the next in the Maryland suburbs.

In the meantime, the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks had made him an occasional target as a Muslim in the Army — his car was twice vandalized with graffiti and dirty diapers at work — and he confided to fellow Muslims that he opposed the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and felt like “an outcast.” Even inside the mosque, Hasan’s haven, he was becoming a misfit as an aging bachelor in a religion that considers marriage not just a priority but a cultural duty.

His solution was to find a new anchor. Hasan began looking for a wife.

It seemed less a search than a full-time obsession. Hasan’s status as a doctor and a military officer made him a considerable catch, but his standards were exacting. He wanted a virgin of Arabic descent — a woman in her 20s who wore the hijab, understood the Koran and prayed five times a day. He enlisted matchmaking help from three imams, a neighbor in his Silver Spring high-rise apartment complex and the proprietor of a Maryland deli where Hasan liked to eat halal meat for dinner. He quizzed fellow Muslim men about their wives and asked family members to keep an eye out for prospects.

As the years wore on with little to show for the search, Hasan’s plight became a running joke among some at the Muslim Community Center in Silver Spring: Because of his age, fellow worshipers joked, Brother Nidal always got the first chance at any new woman who joined the mosque.

One day in 2006, as Hasan edged toward his late 30s, he attended a matchmaking event at the Islamic Society of the Washington Area. The annual gathering is a last-chance staple for hundreds of Muslims, some of whom travel from as far as India or Hawaii, to mingle over a breakfast buffet. But attending such an event was an uncharacteristic step for Hasan, who steadfastly avoided group parties with co-workers and who, his aunt Noel Hasan said, “did not make many friends easily and did not make friends fast.”

Hasan arrived at the Islamic Society’s beige house in Silver Spring, paid the $15 sign-up fee and completed his application. He wrote down his phone numbers, then changed his mind and crossed them out. He skipped several categories, filling out only the essential ones.

Height: 5′6.5″.

Weight: 190.

Nationality: Palestinian.

Personality and character: “Quiet, reserved until more familiar with person. Funny, caring, and personable.”

Priorities desired in a spouse: “Prays 5x/day at prescribed times. Wears hijab appropriately. Lives life according to Quran/Sunnah.”

After breakfast, Hasan and the other 150 singles in attendance formed a gigantic circle and took turns introducing themselves. Some were divorced, others were widowed, and a few had children. When his turn came, Hasan talked about his work as a doctor and his devotion to Islam. Several women showed interest, but Hasan didn’t reciprocate. Instead, as the singles filed out, Hasan visited privately with the matchmaker, Faizul Khan, and expressed disappointment. Not a single woman had interested him, he said.

Khan apologized and offered to let Hasan return in a few days to look through stacks of matchmaking applications from previous years. Maybe, Khan suggested, Hasan would find the pious woman of his dreams in the collection of 300 applications and accompanying head shots.

Maybe, Hasan agreed. But he never went back.

In the ensuing months, colleagues said, Hasan spent most of his time alone. He studied for long hours inside a wooden cubicle in the library of the Muslim Community Center, where the administrative assistant wondered whether he was lonely. He ate dinners by himself at his favorite deli, with an open laptop on the table and his head buried behind the monitor. Family members worried that he was becoming increasingly isolated — with no wife, no parents, no close friends — but Hasan reassured them. He had no time for company, he said. All of his energy was devoted to work.

* * *

Meanwhile, Hasan’s colleagues were beginning to worry, too. He proselytized to them in the hallways of Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he was a psychiatry resident, turning conversations about war and the Redskins into lectures about the Koran. He spoke openly about his opposition to the war in Iraq, repeatedly saying that he could not imagine deploying to fight against fellow Muslims. As the war dragged into 2007, Hasan told family members that he had unsuccessfully tried to get out of the Army by consulting with a lawyer and even offering to repay the cost of his education.

While working at an overloaded military hospital desperate for psychiatrists, Hasan sometimes saw only one or two patients per week — far fewer than most of his peers, many of whom privately regarded him as either a dud or a slacker. The patients Hasan did treat seemed to deeply unsettle him. He spoke to his aunt Noel Hasan about a patient who had mental problems and facial burns so severe that his skin had nearly melted. The sessions, the aunt quoted him as saying, were sometimes “traumatic.” At least once, Hasan counseled a patient about the healing virtues of Islam, prompting a reprimand from his supervisors.

But nothing raised alarm among Hasan’s colleagues at Walter Reed quite like his classroom presentations, which seemed to chart the evolution of his beliefs. In June 2007, he gave the culminating presentation of his medical residency to 25 colleagues and supervisors. He was allowed to talk about any subject, and Hasan stood at the front of the room and gave a 50-slide introduction to Islam.

Slide 11: “It’s getting harder and harder for Muslims in the service to morally justify being in a military that seems constantly engaged against fellow Muslims.”

Slide 12: “(4.93) And whoever kills a believer intentionally, his punishment is hell.”

Slide 49: “God expects full loyalty.”

Slide 50: “Department of Defense should allow Muslim Soldiers the option of being released as ‘Conscientious objectors’ to increase troop morale and decrease adverse events.”

Hasan gave another presentation on the topic six months later, classmates said. This time, during his research, he e-mailed back and forth with Anwar al-Aulaqi, an al-Qaeda sympathizer living in Yemen (who also has been linked to the Nigerian man charged in the attempted Detroit plane bombing). Hasan also tested his material in front of fellow Muslims at the Silver Spring mosque. Other students in his public health class presented on topics such as water safety and mold. Hasan focused his work on the thesis that the war on terrorism was actually a war on Islam, several classmates said.

A few months later came a third presentation. This time, Hasan advanced his thesis by one degree: He spoke about the heroism of suicide bombers, classmates said.

Were these the clues of a developing extremist? Or just more cluelessness from a floundering student? Hasan’s classmates were divided. At least one student mentioned his concerns to a medical staff supervisor; another classmate, a devout Christian, privately explained to Hasan that the conflict in Iraq was not about “warring with religion,” prompting Hasan to shake his head and walk away.

One classmate thought Hasan was misunderstood: “I didn’t see him as a threat, I saw him as fervent.”

Another believed Hasan could pose a risk but kept quiet. “If you complain and someone higher up says you’re biased, that can be a career ender. That dogs you.”

By early 2009, what emerged were two conflicting narratives of Hasan’s life, which now had only his name in common. One, told by his classmates and colleagues, depicted an isolated man struggling in his career and tending toward radicalism. The other, documented in Hasan’s official record, continued to track an Army psychiatrist on the rise: Hasan completed his prestigious medical fellowship, earned a promotion to the rank of major despite his supervisors’ misgivings and was named co-chairman of a panel assembled by the American Psychiatric Association. Then, in July 2009, he was assigned to Fort Hood, where he would evaluate and prepare soldiers for war, and prepare to go to war himself.

* * *

Hasan told friends in Maryland that he wished he could avoid moving to Texas, and he never acted like he planned to stay long. Fort Hood staffers typically help officers locate nice places to live, but Hasan found his new home in the classified ads of the Killeen Daily Herald. He paid $325 per month for a one-bedroom unit in a shabby apartment complex on the seedy side of downtown. The welcome sign at the 27-unit Casa Del Norte apartment building was patched together with duct tape, and low-hanging electrical wires lined the nearby streets. Police were dispatched to the building about once a week.

Hasan usually left his apartment for prayer before dawn and returned late in the evening, wearing a white robe and clutching a copy of the Koran. His route home took him past a group of neighbors who liked to drink beer at the picnic table in the courtyard, and they sometimes laughed at his outfits. One neighbor, John Van de Walker, scraped a key across the passenger side of Hasan’s car and ripped off a bumper sticker that read “Allah is Love.” Van de Walker was charged with criminal mischief and fined, but Hasan told neighbors that he would forgive Van de Walker as a gesture during the holy month of Ramadan.

Shortly after moving to Killeen, Hasan made two purchases that would soon be seen as clues. He went to Guns Galore, a windowless white cinder-block shop on a country highway, and bought a high-powered semiautomatic pistol. He also ordered business cards that listed his professional specialties — “Behavioral Health — Mental Health — Life Skills” — without mentioning his involvement in the Army. The cards included an abbreviation after Hasan’s name: “SoA,” standing for “Slave of Allah” or “Soldier of Allah.” It was an unusually forceful assertion, one considered odd even by the most pious Muslims.

During business hours at Fort Hood, Hasan worked at the Resilience and Restoration Center, writing psychological profiles of soldiers entering and exiting war. Nobody could study Hasan as closely. Regulars at a Killeen mosque knew him only as devoted and quiet; neighbors in his apartment building referred to him not by name but by his apartment number, calling him “Number 9.” He ate dinner night after night at Golden Corral with an 18-year-old named Duane Reasoner, a recent Muslim convert who had left a trail of anti-American postings on jihadist Web sites, but they sat in a corner booth and kept their conversations at a low volume, witnesses said.

Nearly everyone in Killeen who interacted with Hasan considered him a mystery, and his actions became more confounding as October turned to November.

Why was an Army psychiatrist, instead of helping soldiers, obsessing over charging them with war crimes?

Why was a conservative Muslim going to the Starz strip club on the nights of Oct. 28 and 29, spending seven hours each night sitting alone at a round table near the stage, handing out Bud Lights and generous tips to each dancer and then buying a series of fully nude private lap dances that cost $50 each?

Why was an Army officer eschewing the shooting range at Fort Hood to drive 35 miles into the central Texas flatlands on Nov. 3 and take his target practice at Stan’s Outdoor Shooting Range, where bullets sometimes ricocheted off square targets and hit cars?

Why, on the morning of Nov. 5, were witnesses seeing Hasan hand out copies of the Koran, give away his groceries, issue a warning at 7-Eleven, report to work, stand on a table, shout “Allahu Akbar” and wave two guns inside the Soldier Readiness Processing Center?

Then Hasan allegedly opened fire, and suddenly the questions became clues, and the clues began to make horrifying sense.

Staff writers Anne Hull, Kafia Hosh and Dana Priest, research director Lucy Shackelford and staff researchers Meg Smith and Julie Tate contributed to this report.

By William Wan
The Washington Post; Wednesday, September 30, 2009; A01

The youth choir belted out “O Happy Day” as folks trickled in through the church doors. Few noticed the accountant sitting in the back pew, his eyes flickering over each latecomer.

In one hand, he held a Bible. In the other, tucked inside his coat pocket, he gripped a .38 caliber revolver.

He had come to People’s Community Baptist Church in Silver Spring looking for his estranged wife. And once she arrived and began arguing with him outside, the Bible would be forgotten. The gun would be raised. And in a matter of seconds, the congregation’s sense of sanctuary would be shattered.

What happened that Sunday morning at People’s Church was just one in a string of fatal shootings at houses of worship across the country. The most high-profile incidents — a Kansas abortion doctor gunned down in May, an Illinois pastor shot mid-sermon in March, a Tennessee church attacked during a children’s play in 2008 — have begun to alter the way many churches operate.

Sanctuaries that once left their doors open all day now employ armed guards, off-duty police officers, surveillance cameras and even undercover plainclothes guards who mingle with the congregation.

A small cottage industry of faith-specialized security firms has sprung up almost overnight, offering nervous churches, synagogues and mosques vulnerability assessments, security systems and emergency planning. Many were already on alert for the kind of crimes that have plagued religious institutions for years: churches being burned, synagogues and mosques being desecrated.

People’s Church, in fact, had a security plan in place for its 3,000-member congregation that included off-duty officers hired for traffic and protection. But none of it stopped Kevin Kelly from firing five bullets into Patricia Simmons Kelly’s chest Feb. 22.

And now, like other places of worship shaken by violence, its members are grappling with deep wounds — psychological and spiritual — that have lingered long after the police cars and ambulances pulled away.
‘Will I Be Able to Save Her?’

Nathaniel Fuller sees the shooting today as clearly as he did seven months ago.

At the time, it seemed like fate that Fuller, a doctor with emergency room experience, had arrived late to church. From across the parking lot, he saw Patricia Kelly talking to her husband, who had just moved out of their home in Rockville.

Tight finances had strained their marriage of nine years, court testimony would later reveal, and Kevin Kelly, 53, suspected there was another man, something Patricia’s family adamantly denies.

All of it led to their argument in the parking lot — and then gunshots.

In the seconds that followed, an off-duty police officer subdued Kevin while Fuller ran to help Patricia. He heard her take what sounded like three shallow, fading breaths. As he began performing CPR, the doctor silently asked God: “Will this be the difference? Will I be able to save her?”

Months later — long after the ambulance rushed her to a hospital, long after the 52-year-old legal secretary was pronounced dead — Fuller found himself constantly replaying this scene in his head. He had lost patients before, but this was different.

He had known this woman, exchanged greetings with her at services for years before her blood came to be smeared on his hands, mouth and suit.

Plagued by the vision, Fuller asked God to restore peace at his church and in his heart. But just as peace seemed within grasp, Kelly’s trial and conviction this month and his approaching sentencing this week have stirred everything back up.

The doctor still doesn’t understand why God let Patricia die, why He had placed Fuller so nearby if not to save her.

“I’ve prayed and asked,” Fuller said. “I haven’t received an answer yet. I don’t know if I ever will.”
‘We Lost Our Innocence’

Although no federal agency or law enforcement group keeps track of killings at houses of worship, some people recording cases on their own believe that there has been a disturbing uptick in recent years.

One of those keeping count is Carl Chinn, who started compiling a database of such attacks shortly after a gunman burst into the Christian organization Focus on the Family where he was working in 1996 and took hostages. Eleven years later, Chinn was working security for the New Life Church in Colorado when another gunman appeared and killed two people.

By Chinn’s count, fatal attacks at houses of worship have grown from a handful a decade ago to at least 32 last year — a number that includes people killed inside the buildings as well as homicides that take place on church steps and in parking lots. But he acknowledges that it’s become easier to track police reports and news stories online in recent years, which could partly account for the perceived increase.

Randy McAlister, a police sergeant in Minnesota doing similar research at Concordia University, also thinks church violence is increasing and likens it to school shootings a decade ago: on its way to becoming a persistent phenomenon.

One reason might be that in an increasingly high-alert world, churches remain an easy target. In cases of domestic violence, such as the incident at People’s Church, perpetrators know that once a week, their victim will show up at a specific time, perhaps even park in a certain spot or sit in a certain section.

Compounding the problem is the prominent role many houses of worship occupy in today’s volatile culture wars.

“You see the language being thrown around . . . people demonizing each other,” said the Rev. Chris Buice, whose liberal Unitarian church in Knoxville, Tenn., was attacked by a right-wing gunman last year. The shooter walked into the sanctuary in the middle of a production of “Annie” and pulled a 12-gauge shotgun out of a guitar case, killing two people and injuring seven.

But many cases remain enigmas.

The killings at New Life Church in 2007, for example, were carried out by a gunman with no direct ties to the church. Matthew Murray killed two people and wounded three before a church security guard shot him. He then turned the gun on himself.

“I don’t know if we’ll ever know why Matthew Murray attacked us,” the Rev. Brady Boyd said.

The gunman’s impact, however, remains. Even now, two years later, parishioners arriving for Sunday worship pass police cars stationed at the entrance.

“We’ve begun to heal. We’ve even grown,” Boyd said. “But in some ways, New Life is never going to be the same. We lost our innocence.”
‘God Has Called Us to Love’

In the days that followed Patricia Kelly’s shooting, People’s Church also struggled with trauma. Its leaders convened a meeting with counselors and psychologists that more than 150 members attended. A prayer team walked through the church with anointing oil, asking God to break the spirit of fear.

At the next Sunday service, the Rev. Haywood Robinson III spoke about how Christians are tested and the importance of faith in such trying times. He also preached forgiveness for the shooter, telling the congregation he had offered to meet and pray with Kevin Kelly.

“There’s probably people here who hate him for what he did,” Robinson said. “But God has called us to love and forgive.”

Some weren’t ready for that, including Lefern Brooks, one of Patricia’s closest friends. She had taken in Patricia’s only child, Iesha Jennings, 17, in the days after the shooting.

For a while, Brooks simply stopped attending People’s Church.

“I just couldn’t go near the place,” she said. She couldn’t help looking for bloodstains or chalk outlines — any outward sign of the trauma she still felt inside.

So for two months, she and her daughter Chelsea, 16, tried other churches, but in the end, they found themselves returning to People’s. “As painful as it was, it was also the place where we had experienced the most outpouring of love and support,” she said.

Brooks was the only church member who sat through all three days of Kelly’s trial this month. She spent most of it studying Kelly’s face for any shred of remorse. She found none.

And now that Kelly has been convicted of first-degree murder, Brooks has to prepare a statement to the judge for his sentencing Friday. She has prayed and struggled over what to say about this man and how his actions have affected her faith, her church and the daughter of her closest friend.

“I’ve been trying to work it all out,” she said. “I’ve prayed that I could forgive this man. But I’ll be honest; I haven’t yet. I don’t know how long it will take before I can.”