2006 slaying capped vet's descent

TOOELE, Utah — Not long after Lance Cpl. Walter Rollo Smith returned from Iraq, the Marines dispatched him to Quantico, Va., for a marksmanship instructor course.

Smith, then a 21-year-old Marine Corps reservist from Utah, had been shaken to the core by the intensity of his experience during the invasion of Iraq. Once a squeaky-clean Mormon boy who aspired to serve a mission abroad, he had come home a smoker and drinker, unsure if he believed in God.

In Quantico, he reported to the firing range with a friend from Fox Company, the combined Salt Lake City-Las Vegas battalion nicknamed the Saints and Sinners. Raising his rifle, he stared through the scope and started shaking. What he saw were not the inanimate targets before him but vivid, hallucinatory images of Iraq: "the cars coming at us, the chaos, the dust, the women and children, the bodies we left behind," he said.

Each time he squeezed the trigger, Smith cried, harder and harder until he was, in his own words, "bawling on the rifle range, which Marines just do not do." Mortified, he allowed himself to be pulled away. And not long afterward, the Marines began processing his medical discharge for post-traumatic stress disorder, severing his link to the Reserve unit that anchored him and sending him off to seek help from veterans hospitals.

The incident on the firing range was the first "red flag," as the prosecutor in Tooele County, Utah, termed it, that Smith sent up as he gradually disintegrated psychologically. At his lowest point, in March 2006, he killed Nicole Marie Speirs, the 22-year-old mother of his twin children, drowning her in a bathtub without any evident provocation or reason.

"There was no intent," said Gary K. Searle, the deputy Tooele County attorney. "It was almost like things kept ratcheting up, without any real intervention that I can see, until one day he snapped."

Clearly, Smith's descent into homicidal, and suicidal, behavior is not representative of returning veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. But among the homicide cases involving recent war veterans examined by The New York Times, Smith's stands out because his identity as a psychologically injured veteran shaped the way that his crime was perceived locally and handled by local authorities.

Smith confessed to the killing at a Veterans Affairs hospital, which immediately set his crime in the context of his deployment and of a growing concern about care for veterans with combat stress. The fact that Smith was discharged from the Marines for post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, made the prosecutor reluctant to bring the case to a jury.