FORT HOOD — Sgt. 1st Class Maria Guerra had just sat down to lunch at a facility she supervised that was packed with soldiers on their way to the war zone when a voice cut through the air.
She jumped from her chair, demanded to know what was happening and heard popping sounds that some mistook for firecrackers going off.
“What the (expletive) is going on in my building?!” asked Guerra, the noncommissioned officer in charge of the Soldier Readiness Processing Center. “And somebody yelled, 'Shooter! Shooter!”
What happened next was as fresh in mind Thursday as it was nearly four years ago when witnesses said they saw an Army psychiatrist, Maj. Nidal Hasan gun down 13 soldiers in the SRP, also called Building 42003.
A tough NCO who took charge of triaging the patients that day, barking orders at her overwhelmed staff, the process required her to coolly place a blue absorbent pad on the heads of the dead and mark “D” on it along with the time of death.
Those memories have stuck with her as well as others who've never shaken visions of the dead and mortally wounded, one of them a soldier who never got out of his fold-out chair.
They told the court in frequently emotional testimony of wide-open eyes that didn't blink, labored breathing that comes with the final moments of life, and the blood — especially at Station 13, a waiting area where dozens of soldiers sat, waiting in a long line of chairs.
“It was covered in blood,” said retired Sgt. Monique Archuletta, who was in the office with Guerra as the attack began Nov. 5, 2009. “It was a huge puddle of blood.”
The testimony, the most emotional yet in a rare military capital murder that is in its third day, put Hasan at the scene of the shooting, with Guerra providing the best eyewitness account yet of how he fired on soldiers and civilians in the facility.
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