A DECORATED combat veteran, Staff Sgt. Dwight L. Smith Jr. seemed the perfect soldier. Until, that is, he visited his family in Delaware last Christmas and, as he later told the police, "clicked on."Inexplicably one morning, while driving his bright red Hummer on a public street, he ran down a 65-year-old woman, Marsha Lee, as she walked her dog, according to police accounts. Then, as a witness watched, he got out and threw Ms. Lee, injured and screaming, into the back seat and drove off.
Ms. Lee's body, naked except for socks, was found discarded in a wooded area half a mile away. Her head had been bashed in with a heavy, sharp object, perhaps a rock. The police later established that she had been raped.
Police officers searched frantically for the Hummer, and that evening they arrested Sergeant Smith as he drove such a vehicle, still spattered with blood. A police affidavit says that Sergeant Smith admitted to the slaying that night, explaining that he had decided that he "wanted to kill someone."
Ms. Lee was much loved in the community, for she had devoted herself nearly full time to local causes like an animal shelter and a home for the elderly. Her funeral was one of the biggest anyone can remember in Delaware, and the town has honored her by giving her street a second name: Marsha Lee Way. Her husband, Scottie Lee, declined to speak to me at the request of prosecutors. But family friends see this as straightforward: a case of a young man committing an act of pure evil.
Sergeant Smith, now 25, is in prison, and a trial is still more than a year off, but this may emerge as the pre-eminent American case exploring whether soldiers' brain injuries and trauma overseas can lead to crimes committed later. The basic question is whether Ms. Lee, as she walked her dog on a quiet street here, became an indirect casualty of our foreign wars.
About half a million American soldiers have suffered from brain-rattling concussions in Afghanistan or Iraq, and one result is an epidemic of traumatic brain injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder. We're seeing many more suicides among recent veterans than among earlier generations, probably because of repeated, extended deployments in combat, coupled with an increase in improvised explosive devices and concussions.
We still aren't doing nearly enough to provide timely mental health services for these soldiers and veterans. The administration and members of Congress talk a good game about honoring young men and women who went to war, but they don't allocate the resources necessary to care of them. A result is certainly disability and suicides. Could it also include brutal crimes like this one?
"I know my child," said Sergeant Smith's father, Dwight Sr., a 49-year-old manager in the Philadelphia schools. "This isn't my kid. He was a goofy kid. This isn't the same man that I sent over."
The father was sitting morosely in his dimly lit dining room, the curtains all drawn. In the corner of the room was the purple heart that Dwight Jr. earned in Afghanistan, and in the living room just beyond was his wedding photo and a military portrait. It's impossible to reconcile that beaming young man in the photos with the one who murdered and raped Ms. Lee.
"This is a tragedy for two families," Mr. Smith added. "I just don't think my son was ready to come back in regular society."
Mr. Smith thinks that his son's mind became poisoned by war, and Dwight Jr. seems to think that as well. I couldn't get access to him in prison, but in a recent handwritten letter to his father (which is posted with the online version of this column), he wrote:
"I am going to be honest with you dad. I have killed a lot of men and children. Some that didn't even do anything for me to kill them. Also some that begged for mercy. I have a problem. I think I got addicted to killing people. I could kill someone go to sleep wake up and forget that it ever happened. It got normal for me to be that way. I never wanted to be this way. I just took my job way to serious. I took things to the extreme. Anyone can tell you that I changed. It is like being a completely different person."
If Sergeant Smith did indeed randomly kill civilians in Iraq or Afghanistan, I could find no record of that. What is clearer is that he was exposed to concussions while in combat, apparently at least two of them. One occurred when he was in Iraq and his Humvee was thrown into the air in an explosion. He was not visibly injured.
Then, in March 2011, a mortar shell landed near him in Afghanistan and blew him 15 feet in the air, shattering a ceramic plate in his body armor, according to his public defender, Bradley V. Manning. Sergeant Smith was hospitalized, flown back to the United States, and given a diagnosis of a traumatic brain injury with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Jasmin Smith, a 29-year-old German woman who is now his wife, and was then his girlfriend, recalls seeing him in the hospital shortly after his return.
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