Episode Transcript
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Californians. sutterhealth.org. Previously
0:23
on In the Dark. How
0:25
did the Marine seem? They
0:31
are angry and they want just to shoot.
0:37
They get his rifle and the bird
0:39
and start shooting at us. When we are under
0:41
the bird. He
0:44
put his rifle and start shooting to me and North. Maybe
0:47
a lot of this is imagination
0:49
and none of this was near as bad as
0:51
it seemed. I'm talking about what actually happened to
0:53
the civilians. Those
0:57
pictures today are still not
0:59
the same. Frankly,
1:07
I believe I gave the Marines the
1:09
benefit of the doubt, every opportunity that
1:12
I could. Yeah, I
1:14
mean, did you think that a war crime
1:16
had been committed? I
1:18
don't have any opinion on that. The
1:30
first investigation into what happened on November 19,
1:32
2005 in Haditha, the one conducted by
1:36
Colonel Watt, was brief and friendly and
1:38
not too detailed. But for
1:40
all of Watt's inclination to give the Marines the
1:42
benefit of the doubt, he did recommend another
1:45
investigation, a criminal one. And this
1:48
investigation was conducted by investigators who
1:50
were not so friendly, not so
1:52
willing to give the Marines the benefit of the doubt. This
1:56
investigation was conducted by NCIS.
6:00
told NCIS that was actually a
6:02
lie. The men were just
6:04
standing there, some of them with their hands up.
6:07
He said he'd lied about it after Wudirich
6:09
told him to. After
6:12
the shooting by the white car, the Marines moved
6:14
to the houses. And the
6:17
NCIS statements from the shooters about what
6:19
happened inside those houses were full of
6:21
startling admissions. Like how
6:23
when the Marines arrived at 11-year-old Safa's house,
6:26
they apparently rang the doorbell, and then Safa's
6:28
dad, Eunice, came to the door to answer
6:30
it. One of the
6:32
Marines, Humberto Mendoza, told NCIS that he
6:35
then shot Eunice right in the doorway,
6:38
shot a man for answering his own door. And
6:41
Mendoza also told investigators that he'd
6:43
shot another man in the house nearby because he
6:45
thought he was reaching for something, even
6:47
though he never saw a gun. I
6:51
read statement after statement from Marines describing
6:54
firing quickly inside the houses without
6:56
identifying who they were shooting at, even
6:58
though the rules of engagement said you had
7:00
to identify people, had to determine that they
7:02
were the enemy before shooting at them. One
7:06
Marine, Hector Salinas, described shooting a
7:08
figure in the hallway of six-year-old
7:10
Abdul-Rahman's house. That figure turned
7:12
out to be a grandmother. Another
7:15
Marine, Lance Corporal Justin Sherritt, told
7:18
investigators that he stood near the doorway
7:20
of Abdul-Rahman's living room and fired
7:22
blindly until he ran out of ammo. All
7:30
right, it is Friday and I
7:32
am on page 10,091. One
7:35
day in my apartment, I was sitting down for
7:37
my daily reading of the investigative file, making
7:40
my way through the thousands of pages we'd
7:42
received. So I'm diving in. It's
7:44
9.44 in the morning.
7:48
And I've made a lot of coffee to get me
7:50
through this because this is a particularly
7:52
dense batch of documents I know I
7:54
have in front of me today. And
7:56
then I came across something buried in all
7:58
these documents. A statement, actually
8:01
a series of statements that I'd never
8:03
seen before. This is a Tatum thing.
8:06
These statements were from a Marine who had
8:08
seemed to be relatively unremarkable. When
8:10
we talked to other Marines, almost no one could remember
8:12
anything about him. Lance Corporal
8:15
Steven Tatum. Tatum
8:17
had flown under the radar during the initial
8:19
investigation by Colonel Watt. His
8:21
statement to Watt was vague and unmemorable.
8:24
He'd admitted to being in the first two houses that
8:26
morning. The house where six-year-old Abdul-Rahman
8:28
lived with his family, and the next
8:31
house where 11-year-old Safa lived with her
8:33
family. But Tatum didn't mention
8:35
shooting at anyone inside the houses. It
8:37
was all incredibly vague. But
8:39
right away, when Tatum started talking to
8:41
NCIS investigators, he admitted that he'd
8:44
been one of the shooters. He
8:46
said he'd actually shot at people in both of
8:48
those houses. He'd shot in the
8:50
living room of Abdul-Rahman's house and
8:52
inside Safa's house, in the bedroom, where Safa
8:54
and her mother and siblings and aunt were.
8:57
Many of them lying close to each other on a bed.
9:01
But that wasn't all Tatum told NCIS. Tatum
9:07
talked to NCIS several times. And
9:09
at first, he claimed he didn't know who he was
9:11
firing at. He said it was dusty
9:13
and smoky. They could only make out shapes. He
9:16
was just shooting at targets, targets
9:18
he assumed to be hostile. Then
9:21
one day, NCIS investigators were
9:23
interrogating Tatum again. And
9:26
this time, he broke down. He started
9:28
crying. In this interview
9:30
and in other interviews to NCIS, Tatum
9:33
revealed that he knew that he was
9:35
shooting women and children. He
9:37
was looking right at them, but he
9:39
shot them anyway. Tatum
9:43
told investigators that in the first
9:45
house, Abdul-Rahman's house, inside the living
9:47
room, he personally had shot
9:49
four people, all on the right side of
9:51
the room. He said he knew
9:53
he was shooting women and children in that room. He
9:56
said he hadn't seen any weapons on any of them and
9:59
that none of the people. were even standing up when he
10:01
shot them. Tatum told
10:03
NCIS that he only stopped shooting after
10:05
everything in the room stopped moving. He
10:09
recalled how later that day, he saw two children being
10:11
let out of the house to get medical treatment. Those
10:14
two children robbed Will Rachman and his
10:16
sister Iman. Tatum said
10:18
he wondered, how did they survive? In
10:23
the next house, Safa's house, the house where
10:25
Safa hid in the back bedroom while her
10:28
entire family was killed around her, Tatum's statements
10:30
were even more detailed. Tatum
10:32
said he saw his squad leader,
10:34
Sergeant Wudrich, firing in that back
10:37
bedroom. And he followed
10:39
Wudrich inside. He said
10:41
he recognized that women and children were together in
10:43
that back bedroom before he shot them. He
10:45
said some of the children were kneeling. I
10:48
don't remember the exact number, Tatum said, but
10:50
only that it was a lot. And
10:53
then Tatum described one child in particular. He
10:56
said he wasn't sure if this child was a boy or a girl,
10:59
but that they were wearing a white shirt and had short
11:01
hair and were standing on the bed.
11:04
Tatum told investigators that he looked at the
11:06
child and then fired. He
11:09
said, quote, knowing it was a kid,
11:12
I still shot him. Knowing
11:23
it was a kid, I still shot him.
11:26
Tatum had admitted to knowingly shooting
11:28
a child, actually several children, in
11:30
two houses. It was
11:32
about as clear cut of an admission of guilt that you could
11:34
get. At the risk of
11:36
stating the obvious, it's illegal to knowingly
11:38
kill children who don't pose a threat. It's
11:41
a war crime. And yet Tatum
11:43
had never been convicted of a crime, never
11:45
served a day in prison. Tatum
11:48
appeared to place at least some of the blame
11:51
on his squad leader, Sergeant Wudrich. Tatum
11:53
said the only reason he shot the children in
11:55
the bedroom was because he saw Wudrich
11:57
shooting at them first. happened
12:00
in the house nearby, Abdul-Rahman's house,
12:03
Tatum told investigators that he shot the women
12:05
and children in that house because, quote, women
12:08
and kids can hurt you too. Tatum
12:10
told investigators, quote, I
12:12
regret that innocent children were killed that day, but
12:15
I also know I did what I had to do.
13:01
These statements by Tatum ended up being
13:04
used by military prosecutors to file charges
13:06
against him. After the
13:08
charges were filed, Tatum's defense was that
13:10
he actually hadn't made any of those statements
13:13
about knowingly killing women and children, the
13:15
implication being that the statements had been
13:18
fabricated by NCIS. The
13:20
investigators hadn't recorded audio of the interviews with
13:22
Tatum or with any of the Marines, but
13:25
they had taken detailed notes, notes
13:27
from all the interviews they'd had with Tatum where
13:29
he'd admitted to knowing who he was shooting. I
13:32
have those notes and they match the typed up
13:34
statements. These notes and
13:36
statements were written by multiple investigators
13:38
over the course of several interviews
13:40
conducted weeks apart. As
13:43
for Sergeant Wudarich, the squad leader, the one
13:45
who Tatum said had shot first in Abdul-Rahman's
13:47
living room and in the back bedroom of
13:50
Safa's house and who Delacruz said shot first
13:52
at the people by the white car. Wudarich
13:55
never talked to NCIS. He refused
13:57
to. Wudarich had admitted
16:00
November, the trees were bare, the grass
16:02
was dead, they passed one red brick
16:04
house after another until they found his.
16:10
Oh, I think that's his house right there. Yeah,
16:12
are you ready? Yeah.
16:26
Tatum opened the door. He was tall
16:28
and clean shaven. With the same side parted
16:30
hair, we'd seen in photos of him back in Iraq. His
16:33
hair was now graying. He was wearing a blue
16:35
hoodie and jeans. Hey, hello. My name's
16:37
Parker. This is Natalie. We're radio
16:39
reporters. We're working on a project about the
16:42
Iraq war. And we're searching the day in
16:44
Hadith elements corporal trousers was killed. It sounds
16:46
like it was quite an intense day. I
16:48
have no comment. If you
16:50
have any questions, we need to talk to my lawyer. How
16:53
would we get in touch with? Zimmerman and Zimmerman.
16:55
They're out of Houston. We've
16:58
read some of your statements to investigators and it
17:00
sounds like you really regret the way things turned
17:02
out that day. Who wouldn't?
17:05
But like I said, I have no comment. You
17:07
can talk to my lawyer. You can give him
17:09
the questions and he'll decide what I answer. You said
17:12
you do regret what happened that day. What about that
17:14
day? Again,
17:18
you can contact my lawyer. And
17:20
he will forward the questions on to me and I'll decide
17:22
what I want to answer. Okay. There's
17:24
just one thing we need to make sure we ask you
17:26
while we're here. I've already told you everything you're going to
17:28
get. Which is that we've read your statements to investigators where
17:30
you said... Have a nice day. ...that
17:32
you saw women and children in those rooms and you shot
17:34
them anyway. Tatum
17:39
went inside. The interview was over. A
17:48
couple weeks later, I called the law firm
17:50
that represented Tatum to try to see if
17:52
Tatum would reconsider our interview request. I ended
17:54
up talking to one of Tatum's lawyers, a
17:57
woman named Terry Zimmerman. I explained that I wanted to talk to her.
18:00
to talk to Tatum. I said I wondered what his life
18:02
was like now. She told me
18:04
that she thought my questions were valuable, but
18:06
that she thought it probably wouldn't be a good idea
18:08
for Tatum to talk to us. She
18:10
said, quote, you know, there's no
18:12
statute of limitations for murder. So
18:15
as a lawyer, I'm kind of hesitant to advise
18:17
a client to make any statements about a case
18:19
when his case isn't resolved. Zimmerman
18:22
said she'd check in with Tatum and get back to me.
18:25
We spoke a few weeks later, and she told me she
18:27
had a statement for me from Tatum. So
18:30
he's authorized me to tell you that he's
18:32
doing really, really well today. He's
18:35
grown up a lot and he authorized me
18:37
to tell you that he feels
18:41
terrible about the loss of life. I
18:43
mean, obviously nobody wants to
18:45
be responsible for killing another human being, but
18:48
he was just doing his job the way
18:50
he was trained to do. And
18:53
as his lawyers, we've analyzed, you know, the
18:55
facts and the law that applied
18:57
at the time. And we don't feel like he
18:59
violated any kind of rule, any
19:01
kind of authority or law in any
19:03
way. He never intended to break
19:06
the law. He never intended to do anything
19:08
wrong. And we as his lawyers don't think
19:10
he did anything wrong. Got it.
19:13
You know, one of the statements that really
19:16
does stand out to me is something
19:18
that Tatum told investigators that
19:21
in one of the houses, he shot
19:23
at a child knowing it was a
19:26
child. And so I
19:28
just wonder how you can reconcile that statement
19:30
with the idea that he didn't do anything
19:32
wrong. That's a totally fair
19:34
question. I'll have to
19:36
go through my file and find the statement that you're
19:39
talking about. I told Zimmerman I
19:41
could send her a copy of Tatum statements. Yeah.
19:43
If you'll email me that to me, I will
19:45
take a look at it. Sounds good. OK,
19:47
thank you. Yeah, take care. Bye. Bye.
19:51
I emailed her Tatum statements. A
19:54
few weeks later, she emailed me back. She
19:56
said she was going to stick with what she told me on the phone.
19:59
She wrote, quote. Lance Corporal Tatum
20:01
was doing what he was trained to do on
20:03
the orders of people senior to him and
20:05
was just as upset to learn of a loss of life
20:08
as anyone else. He obviously
20:10
wishes that had not happened, but he never
20:12
meant to nor in my opinion did he
20:14
break the law. As I
20:16
do with all of my clients, I've advised him
20:18
not to make any statements to anyone about this
20:20
situation. But he thinks about this
20:22
situation every day. He's done
20:24
his best to get his education and a job
20:26
and to be successful in life. We'll
20:36
be back after the break. Hey,
20:48
it's Madeline. If
20:50
you're a fan of In the Dark and
20:52
you love long form storytelling, and you've listened
20:54
to all the serialized investigative podcasts, and and
20:57
you've already watched everything good on Netflix,
21:00
there is a wealth of stories you're going to
21:02
love waiting for you at the New Yorker. Like
21:05
this story published just this year by Patrick
21:07
Radd and Keefe about a teen who got
21:09
mixed up in the London underworld and then
21:11
mysteriously fell into the Thames. In
21:14
the four years since Zach's death, the
21:16
family has had to confront the extent to which
21:18
the boy they thought they knew had been living
21:20
a double existence. None of the
21:23
Brettlers had ever imagined that Zach might be
21:25
moving about London pretending to be someone else
21:27
altogether. This
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season of In the Dark took us four years
21:32
to report. You're hearing it now
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because the New Yorker believes in what we do.
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So go to newyorker.com/dark and
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newyorker.com/dark. From
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My Devo, an Apple original podcast
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produced by Futuro Studios. Follow and
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listen on Apple Podcasts. By
22:24
this point, there was so much that I'd learned
22:26
about what had happened that day in Haditha. But
22:29
there was still something missing. The
22:32
pictures, the photos of
22:35
the bodies taken by
22:45
Marines just hours after the killings. The
22:48
photos that the commandant of the Marine
22:50
Corps, General Michael Hagee, had bragged about
22:52
keeping secret. The photos
22:54
that we'd sued the U.S. military to get
22:57
with the help of the survivors, the two collards,
23:00
who went house to house collecting signatures from
23:02
family members of the dead, saying
23:04
they wanted us to have these images, photos
23:07
that the public has never seen. These
23:10
photos could show us what statements and memories
23:12
could not. They could take us
23:14
to the killing sites, to see these sites
23:16
as they looked that day, to show
23:19
us the bodies of the dead. I'd
23:21
wanted these photos for one reason. They
23:24
were evidence that could help me better understand
23:26
what really happened that day. That's
23:28
why all the family members had signed those forms,
23:30
saying they wanted us to have them. And
23:33
then one day... Holy
23:37
shit. I
23:39
am, like, vibrating right now. I look...
23:43
I just woke up to an
23:45
email that says... Well, it
23:47
actually says something really boring, but I
23:50
know how to decipher it. It says,
23:53
NCIS Freedom of Information Act
23:55
Request Release of Information Dash
23:58
Photographs. Wow.
24:05
Okay, I'm going to
24:10
tell Madeline. Hello.
24:12
Hello. What's up? I,
24:16
we have the photos. We
24:19
have all the photos. Oh
24:23
my gosh. Okay.
24:28
This is a very big deal. Okay,
24:34
let me open this. All
24:37
right, I'm opening. Oh
24:40
my God. Oh
24:42
my God. After
24:44
four years of FOIA
24:46
requests and lawsuits and
24:48
help from the survivors, the military
24:51
had finally agreed to turn over
24:53
the photos to us. Oh
24:55
my God, there's so many photos. There
24:58
were more than a hundred photos. They
25:00
included many taken by Marines on the day of
25:02
the killings, and they included
25:04
photos taken months later by
25:06
the criminal investigators from NCIS. The
25:11
photos go through the entire chronology of the
25:13
killings. So this is all photos of
25:15
the people from the car? Yep.
25:17
There are images of every single person the Marines
25:19
killed that day. I'm going to open the next
25:21
file. For photos, you can
25:23
see the numbers that the Marines scrawled on the
25:25
bodies of the dead with a red sharpie. I'm
25:27
looking at a photo of someone who
25:30
looks like they have maybe a 20
25:32
drawn on their head. It's a little unclear.
25:36
There are wide shots of rooms,
25:38
bullet holes, and blood covering the
25:40
walls. Maybe shrapnel or bullet holes,
25:42
shattered window, bullet hole in the
25:44
window. And there are close-ups
25:46
of faces. These are horrible.
25:49
Yeah, I see why you wouldn't want these photos released
25:51
to the public. We kept
25:53
going through them. One horrible
25:55
photo after another. Oh, there's
25:58
one photo. It's so devastating. There's
26:00
a mom on her back lying
26:03
dead on the bed. And
26:07
then all of her dead children around her. And
26:12
there's a little boy who's like curled up next
26:15
to his mom. You can see how he's like
26:18
kind of has his arm on
26:20
his mom's stomach. Yeah, and
26:22
he's just like burrowing into the blanket.
26:25
Yeah. It's
26:30
terrible. Yeah.
26:42
Now that we had the photos, we needed to
26:44
make sense of them to see
26:46
what exactly these photos could tell us. I
26:49
needed to look at these photos with someone who knows what
26:51
to look for. So we got
26:53
in touch with a forensics expert named Kevin
26:56
Parmalee. You go by Mr. Parmalee
26:58
or Kevin or how shall I address you?
27:00
If it's informal, we could just do a
27:02
Kevin, that's fine. Okay, all right. Well, I'm
27:05
Madeline Barron. It's great to meet you. Parmalee
27:07
is a former detective with more than 20
27:09
years experience in law enforcement. His
27:11
specialties include forensic reconstruction. He
27:14
helped create national standards for how to investigate
27:16
crime scenes. When I
27:18
first called up Parmalee to ask if he'd be willing
27:20
to review the materials I had, he agreed
27:22
to take a look. But he cautioned
27:24
me not to expect him to get too worked up
27:26
over the photos. He said he'd
27:29
spend his career looking at photos that most
27:31
people would consider terribly gruesome. Photos
27:33
like that, he said, can look really bad, but
27:36
not actually prove anything. He
27:38
added that his brother was a Marine who'd fought in Iraq. He
27:41
said he knew that in war zones, decisions about
27:43
what to do can get really complicated. Over
27:46
there, it's a different environment and your
27:48
threats can come from anywhere. You
27:50
know, it's a much more hostile
27:53
environment because it's a war zone. I
27:55
mean, you can't let your guard
27:57
down at all with
27:59
all those caveats. out of the way, we
28:01
sent Parmalee what we had. He
28:03
emailed back saying he'd stayed up until two in the
28:06
morning, the first night he got the materials. And
28:08
he continued meticulously reviewing everything we'd
28:10
sent. A few weeks later, I
28:13
gave him a call. So I
28:15
mean, overall, how valuable would you say
28:17
these photos are? Oh, exceptionally
28:19
valuable. They are very
28:21
powerful. Like these photos are beautiful.
28:24
It might sound like an odd thing to say, these
28:27
photos are beautiful. But Parmalee
28:29
is a forensics expert. He
28:31
was looking at these photos in a very particular
28:33
way to see what they could tell us. And
28:36
it turned out they could tell us a lot. Especially
28:39
with the bullet defects and the
28:41
blood and the positioning of the
28:43
bodies, that actually lends
28:45
a lot of information towards
28:48
reconstructing the sequence of events.
28:50
So this is how we kind of piece
28:53
it all together. Let's
28:55
start with the first people the Marines killed that day.
28:58
Five men who were killed after getting out of
29:00
a white car near the site of the IED
29:02
explosion. Some of the Marines had claimed
29:04
those men were running when they were shot. But
29:07
then one of those Marines changed the story. Sonic
29:11
Delacruz told NCIS that actually the
29:13
men were just standing by the
29:15
car. Some of them with their
29:17
hands up when they were killed. The
29:19
photos clearly showed that the men were right next to
29:21
the car, not where you'd expect to
29:23
see them if they'd been running away. And
29:26
there was something else that was a little less obvious. Something
29:29
that Parmalee noticed that indicated that maybe
29:31
what happened to these men was
29:33
even more chilling than what Delacruz had said. It
29:37
was the way the body of one of the men was positioned.
29:40
It looked like his legs were tucked underneath him. He
29:42
was lying on his back. So he
29:44
has his knees up against that
29:46
mound. He's the one that has
29:49
his legs underneath him. It made
29:51
Parmalee wonder something about what the man was doing
29:54
when he was killed. Given the
29:56
man's position on the ground, Parmalee ventured
29:58
a guess. He could have have been
30:00
kneeling. Kneeling.
30:03
Parmalee was careful to say that he couldn't say
30:05
that for sure. It was just a possibility that
30:08
the way this man's body was, a
30:10
logical explanation for how it got that way, was
30:13
that he'd been kneeling when he was shot. This
30:16
possibility that some of the men were
30:19
kneeling was actually corroborated by the statements
30:21
of two soldiers from the Iraqi army
30:23
who were in the convoy with the
30:25
Marines that day. They have their statements
30:27
to NCIS and they both said that
30:29
the men were kneeling. One
30:31
of them even said the men had their hands on
30:33
top of their heads when they were shot. So
30:37
the truth of what happened to the men by the white car
30:40
was now becoming clear. They
30:42
almost certainly were not running. At
30:44
least some of the men may have even been kneeling.
30:51
We moved on to the next set of photos. These
30:53
were taken inside six-year-old Abdul-Rahman's house,
30:56
the first house that Marines entered that morning. Tatum
30:59
had admitted to NCIS that he'd shot
31:01
people inside the living room of this house. According
31:04
to NCIS records, Tatum said that he shot
31:06
four people, all on the right side of
31:08
the room, and that he
31:10
knew that the people he shot included women and children
31:12
and that the people hadn't even been
31:14
standing when he shot them. Tatum
31:17
didn't provide many details beyond that. The
31:20
only person we talked to who'd seen what
31:22
happened inside this room was Abdul-Rahman, and
31:25
he really couldn't remember much. And
31:27
so it was hard for me to picture this scene. I
31:30
had the memories of a man who was just six
31:32
years old when the killings happened and
31:34
the statements of Marines under investigation for
31:36
murder. All
31:38
I knew for sure was that four people had
31:40
been killed in that room. Three
31:43
adults, Abdul-Rahman's mother, his
31:45
uncle, and his grandfather, and
31:47
one child, Abdul-Rahman's
31:49
four-year-old brother, Abdullah. The
31:53
photos show that the grandfather's body was
31:55
very badly damaged and the uncle had
31:57
been shot in the head. It
32:00
was what the photos showed about what
32:02
happened to Abdul-Rahman's mom, Asma, and
32:04
her four-year-old son Abdullah, that really
32:06
stood out to Parmalee. This one
32:08
broke everything open. The
32:11
first photo of the living room that we looked at was
32:13
a wide shot. You can see
32:15
white walls, a patterned red rug on the
32:17
floor, and pillows scattered around. There's
32:19
a couch along the back wall and what looks
32:21
like a space heater, a typical living room
32:24
in Iraq. Could you zoom in,
32:27
especially to the position of them?
32:30
And there, in the far corner of the room,
32:32
next to the couch, I saw
32:34
two bodies huddled together. I
32:37
realized I was looking at Asma and
32:39
her four-year-old son Abdullah. They
32:42
were on the right side of the room, the
32:44
side of the room where Tatum said he shot
32:46
four people. Asma
32:48
and Abdullah were kneeling in the corner of the
32:50
room, heads down, their foreheads
32:52
touching the ground. In a position
32:55
like you would be in if you ever had to do
32:57
a tornado drill at school. Basically,
32:59
the least threatening position the human body can be
33:01
in. They're kneeling facing,
33:03
oh, they're facing the floor,
33:05
but they're kneeling with the
33:07
bottom of their head facing towards the doorway,
33:09
so they're next to each other. Asma
33:13
looked like she'd been wounded on her neck. It's
33:16
not clear how exactly she was killed. But
33:18
looking at these photos, you could imagine this
33:20
moment of a mom trying to protect
33:23
her son. Four-year-old Abdullah
33:25
was pressed up between his mom and the
33:27
wall, and his mom had put her
33:29
arm around him in what would be
33:31
their final moments. The photo
33:33
has her left arm over him. Almost
33:36
like she's getting as close to the wall as she
33:38
can. I guess, I mean, who knows,
33:40
but it seems like she might have put him in
33:42
the safest possible place she could try to put him.
33:45
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.
33:49
This was all awful, but what Parmalee
33:51
was about to tell me was even worse. It
33:54
had to do with what the photos could tell us about
33:57
how exactly Asma's son was killed. In
34:00
the photos the military sent us, there's
34:02
a close-up photo of four-year-old Abdullah. It
34:05
looks like someone had taken him out of the position
34:07
he was in next to his mom and propped him
34:09
up. He was wearing a
34:11
t-shirt with a cartoon helicopter on it. And
34:14
the first thing the photo clearly showed was
34:16
that Abdullah had been shot in the head. The
34:19
wound goes from his back right neck and
34:21
it goes forward to his left temple. So
34:24
what does that tell you? Oh, that
34:26
lines up the trajectory. The
34:29
trajectory, where Parmally was
34:31
going now, was right to the question of
34:33
where the shot came from. Where
34:35
the shooter would have had to have been when he
34:38
fired at Abdullah's head. Parmally
34:40
saw this question as a math
34:42
problem, geometry actually. It's something
34:44
that forensics experts do all the time. Determine
34:47
where a shooter would have been shooting from,
34:49
their position. If you shoot
34:51
a bullet from a gun, you can pretty
34:53
much determine what the bullet trajectory would have
34:55
been. You're basically drawing a straight line from
34:58
where the shooter's gun was through the entry
35:00
wound and the exit wound. So
35:02
now we have that line segment and
35:04
then what you do is you go from the exit wound,
35:06
which is blown out in the left side, you
35:10
go to the entry wound, which is his
35:12
right neck, and you're
35:14
gonna bring that back towards where the shooter
35:16
was located. There was furniture in the room
35:19
that would have limited the places a shooter
35:21
could have stood. And of course
35:23
there were also walls. We
35:25
also had the measurements of the room. They'd been
35:27
taken by military investigators. Parmally
35:29
took all that into account too. And
35:32
then he gave me his analysis. Overwhelmingly,
35:35
the information from that child,
35:37
his wounds and the trajectory
35:40
are very, very clear. The
35:43
person who shot Abdullah couldn't have
35:45
been doing something like firing blindly
35:48
from the entryway. That's total opposite
35:50
trajectory. That angle just didn't
35:52
line up. Not at all. Like,
35:55
not in the doorway. Oh, absolutely
35:57
not. Parmally pointed
35:59
to a small object, the space heater,
36:02
right next to Abdullah's mom, Asmaa, just
36:04
a few feet from Abdullah. That
36:07
spot, right next to that space heater,
36:09
Parmalee said, was where the
36:11
person who shot Abdullah would have been standing. So
36:14
he was standing right next to her in front of that
36:16
object. He's pointing his rifle
36:18
down at the boy, pointing
36:21
it down towards the boy's head.
36:24
That would be the angle that he was shooting him from.
36:27
Parmalee was saying the shooter was incredibly
36:29
close to this little boy, just
36:32
a few feet away, basically
36:34
standing over the mom, Asmaa, and
36:36
shooting down into Abdullah's head. This
36:39
is an up close and personal shot, where
36:41
you're putting a bullet into a
36:43
little boy. Like he was shot from like one
36:45
side of his head to the other. He
36:48
was executed from the back right to
36:50
the front left temple while his face
36:53
was down in an annealing position. And
36:55
you're saying executed. Talk about that. Why
36:58
are you saying executed? There's no
37:00
misconstruing the size of this child and the
37:02
position that they're in, that they're
37:04
not a threat to them. As
37:07
Parmalee was telling me this, it was obvious that he
37:09
was getting upset. At one point,
37:11
it almost looked like he was about to cry. I
37:14
wondered how he was feeling. He
37:16
paused for a long time. I've
37:26
seen a lot of kids killed throughout my career.
37:29
It's not easy, but it
37:32
just takes me back to all those
37:34
experiences as well. It's
37:39
just, it's disgusting. It
37:41
really is. You
37:45
know, I
37:48
wasn't in a war zone. I give
37:50
a lot of latitude and
37:52
tolerance to understanding what
37:54
people were going through in
37:57
those times. And
37:59
we're all human. make decisions in
38:03
a fast pace and split
38:05
seconds. This
38:08
wasn't split second. And
38:14
this is really, it
38:18
really pulls at my
38:20
emotions a lot. Looking
38:29
at the photos of Abdullah, he's so small,
38:32
he's clearly just a little kid, huddled
38:35
in a corner, with his mom maybe trying
38:37
to calm him or protect him by putting
38:39
her arm around him. And
38:41
someone stood over this mother, aimed
38:44
their gun at this little boy, and
38:46
shot him in the head. There's
38:48
no doubt that that's an execution.
38:51
Once they decide to stand a foot
38:54
next to a four-year-old child and put a bullet
38:56
in his head, there's
38:58
no way that you cannot see that that's a
39:00
child. There's no way that you can't process that
39:03
information. That's why
39:05
I firmly believe that that was an execution.
39:30
Parmalee and I moved on to the photos of the
39:32
next house, the house where 11-year-old
39:34
Safa had hidden next to the bed while
39:37
her mom and siblings were shot to death. The
39:40
Marines killed eight people inside this house.
39:42
They killed Safa's father, Eunice, when he
39:44
answered the door. And then
39:46
the Marines killed seven people all in the back
39:48
bedroom. Tatum had
39:51
told NCIS that he'd seen Wooterich shooting
39:53
in this back bedroom, and
39:55
so he'd followed Wooterich inside. According
39:58
to NCIS records, Tatum said... He'd
40:00
seen children in the room, on the bed, including
40:03
a child who was actually standing on the bed.
40:06
Tatum said this child was wearing a white
40:08
shirt. Tatum told NCIS he
40:10
looked at this child and
40:12
then opened fire. There
40:15
are several photos of this bedroom. In
40:17
the photos, you can see the spot where Safa
40:19
had said she was hiding with her sister, Nor,
40:21
next to the bed. Nor's body
40:24
is right there, exactly where Safa said it
40:26
was, crouching down in the small
40:28
space between the bed and the wall. And
40:31
on the other side of the bed, near the doorway, was
40:33
Safa's aunt lying dead on the floor. The
40:36
aunt that Safa said was shot after she peeked
40:38
out into the hallway to see what was going
40:40
on. And then there
40:42
was the bed, where Safa had said
40:44
her siblings had huddled with their mom,
40:46
terrified. The
40:48
photos of this bed are devastating. Safa's
40:51
mom is lying on her back, her head on
40:53
a pillow. Lying next to
40:56
her are four of her children. There's
40:58
little Aisha, just three years old, wearing a
41:00
shirt with a flower on it, her head
41:03
covered in blood. There's her
41:05
older sister, 10-year-old Saba, lying next to
41:07
her. There's her
41:09
brother, 8-year-old Mohammed, the one
41:11
who Safa had told us had initially survived
41:13
the shooting, but was injured and screaming. He's
41:16
curled up next to his mom, his elbow
41:19
touching her stomach. And
41:22
then there was 5-year-old Zainab. Zainab's
41:24
injuries were particularly gruesome. Her
41:27
head was so badly damaged, I couldn't even see
41:29
it in the photos. I had to
41:31
ask Parmalee to show it to me. Her
41:33
head is to the right. It's
41:36
just under... It's
41:39
next to the child that's in green. Okay.
41:41
You see it down at the bottom, it's a little bit dark. It's
41:45
a bottom center. Without
41:48
getting too detailed here, I'll just
41:50
say that there wasn't much left of her head. It
41:52
was mostly gone. Parmalee
41:55
pointed out a yellow blanket on
41:57
the bed in front of Zainab. He
41:59
said... that if Zainab had been shot lying down,
42:02
you'd expect to see a lot of blood and other
42:04
parts of her head on the blanket. But
42:07
the blanket didn't appear to have much blood on it
42:09
at all. Because right now,
42:11
if you look at the yellow blanket
42:13
or that yellow cloth right there, it's
42:18
not consistent with being shot in that location. Instead,
42:20
there was a lot of blood on the wall
42:23
next to the bed, which
42:25
de-parmily suggested that at the time
42:27
that Zainab was shot, she was actually
42:29
sitting up on the bed, or maybe even
42:31
standing on it. But I would think
42:34
that the head was higher. If
42:36
the child's head is up and I
42:38
shoot, it's going to go towards that
42:40
wall that has all of that.
42:43
A five-year-old shot standing on a bed, just
42:46
as Tatum had described. This
42:49
bedroom was small. We have the measurements. It
42:52
was just 13 by 17 feet. The bed took up a
42:55
lot of that space. And there was furniture
42:57
along some of the walls, making the
42:59
space seem even smaller. No
43:01
matter where the Marines were in the room, they
43:04
would have been close to the people they were shooting. In
43:07
general, looking at the photos of Safa's
43:09
house, what is
43:12
your assessment of whether the
43:14
shooters would have been able to see that
43:16
they were shooting women and children? So
43:22
they go in, they
43:24
went into the room, and they were just taking
43:26
shots at the people
43:28
in the bed. How did they not
43:31
perceive that the viewers were children, as
43:33
they have to identify
43:35
that they were in the
43:37
bed? Yeah, don't expect me
43:39
to rationalize that one. According
43:43
to NCIS's forensic examiner, who
43:45
analyzed the bullet trajectories, one
43:47
of the shooters would have had to have been standing near
43:49
the foot of the bed. The
43:51
space was so small that the tip
43:54
of the Marine's rifle likely reached over the
43:56
bed when it was being fired. moving
50:00
toward their fallen comrades. One
50:03
of them, Marwan, had jumped into a
50:05
wardrobe. The other, College of
50:07
Mall's father, was crouched down or
50:09
sitting in a far corner. This
50:11
hardly sounded like the behavior of insurgents who had lured
50:14
the Marines to a house to kill them. It
50:17
sounded a lot more like what terrified, unarmed
50:19
men would do when they realized
50:21
they were trapped in a room with Marines
50:23
intent on killing them. Marines
50:25
who were standing in the doorway, blocking
50:27
their escape. This stood
50:29
out to Parmalee, too. So
50:32
you have people in the room
50:34
moving away from the doorway. They're
50:37
not, you know, coming together.
50:40
And yeah, you couldn't be
50:42
more isolated trying to get into a closet as
50:45
opposed to going towards your comrades.
50:48
So that definitely refutes that statement
50:50
right off the bat. And then
50:52
that also reduces the
50:54
credibility of the
50:57
people that are giving those statements. Taken
51:00
together, all this evidence allowed
51:03
NCIS to reconstruct what most likely
51:05
happened inside this room. NCIS
51:08
concluded that most likely the first
51:10
person killed was Katan, because
51:12
his body was closest to the doorway. Then
51:15
Chasib, who was right behind his brother Katan.
51:19
NCIS thought it most likely that Jamal,
51:21
College of Mall's father, was
51:23
shot next, as he sat or crouched on the
51:25
floor across the room. Marwan
51:27
was probably the last brother to be killed.
51:30
NCIS thought it most likely that the
51:32
Marines saw Marwan go into the wardrobe,
51:34
and that then Wudarich stood in front
51:36
of the wardrobe and opened fire with
51:38
a single shot at the closed door.
51:41
A shot that hit Marwan
51:44
in the head. After looking
51:46
at all the photos and
51:48
reading the NCIS reports, I
51:51
got in touch with College of Mall. And
51:57
told him that if he wanted, I could tell
51:59
him what the photo. full
56:00
of evidence. Photos,
56:02
forensics, statements from Iraqi
56:04
eyewitnesses, statements where
56:06
Marines implicated themselves and each other.
56:09
There were even the confessions from Tatum. 24
56:12
killings. And
56:15
yet, there wasn't a single criminal
56:17
conviction for any of them. How
56:20
did that happen? How
56:23
did the military go from having all this
56:25
evidence to having the cases
56:28
completely fall apart? The
56:31
answer to that question, coming
56:34
up on In the Dark. One
56:41
last thing about the photos. Once
56:44
we got them, we talked for a long time as
56:46
a team about what to do with them. We
56:48
talked with our editors and with other colleagues at
56:50
The New Yorker. And we talked
56:53
to some of the survivors as well. And
56:55
we decided to publish a selection of
56:57
photos that we thought were especially important
56:59
to understanding what happened that day. All
57:02
these photos were published with the permission of
57:04
the surviving family members of the people depicted.
57:07
You can find them
57:09
at newyorker.com/season 3. In
57:17
the Dark is reported and produced by me,
57:19
Madeline Barron, managing producer Samara
57:22
Freemark, producers Natalie
57:24
Jablonski and Raymond Tungekar, and
57:26
reporter Parker Jesko. In
57:29
the Dark is edited by Catherine Winter and
57:31
Willing Davidson. Interpreting in
57:33
a Rock by Aya Muthena. Additional
57:35
interpreting and translation by Aya
57:37
Alshakarchi. This episode was
57:39
fact-checked by Linnea Feldman Emison. Original
57:42
music by Allison Leighton Brown. Additional
57:45
music by Chris Julin. Sound
57:47
design and mix by John Delor. Our
57:50
theme is by Gary Meister. Our
57:52
art is by Emiliano Ponzi. Art
57:55
direction by Nicholas Conrad and Aviva
57:57
Michaelove. FOIA legal
57:59
representation.
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