San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Soldier’s slaying galvanized movement
When Vanessa Guillén saw her family for a brief airport reunion in Houston on her way to Fort Hood in 2018, she was buoyant about the Army training she’d just completed and eager to start the career she’d dreamed of since childhood.
Barely a year later, Guillén was counting the days until she could leave the military.
Her mother asked what was wrong, why she was so skinny, what was happening at the post.
“Nothing, mami,” Guillén would say. “They are just too strict. They are not good people.”
In April, the 20-year-old went missing for 70 days, until a work crew found her remains in a rural area 30 miles from the post.
Investigators said a fellow soldier lured Guillén with a request about a machine gun that needed to be serviced, then bludgeoned, mutilated and buried her with help from an accomplice.
Guillén’s gruesome slaying sparked a national outcry. Her family and supporters have faulted the Army for a sluggish response to the loss of one of its own and have pointed to a crisis of sexual harassment in the ranks.
Also, her death has pushed lawmakers to seek changes in the Army’s treatment of women, especially women of color.
But Guillén, a passionate athlete who wanted to study the science of human movement, left few traces of what she was living through in her final months.
Army officials say Guillén, a small arms mechanic, never reported sexual harassment through official channels.
She told her mother a sergeant had been harassing her. She told her best friend a soldier had walked in on her in the shower. But she wasn’t going to file a complaint, she told her mother; her superiors would brush it off.
She bristled at the idea of quitting the Army. She wouldn’t violate her oath.
Spc. Aaron David Robinson, 20, the man authorities say killed her, fatally shot himself as police closed in on him in the early hours of July 1. His girlfriend, Cecily Ann Aguilar, faces trial in federal court on charges that she helped Robinson dismember and hide the body.
Family and friends recall Guillén as the 5-foot-2 teen who drew cheers from football players when she bench-pressed as much as they could. The kid who outran her coach in the Houston halfmarathon. The self-proclaimed “gymaholic” who was working up to dead-lifting 270 pounds, more than twice her weight.
A competitor
Guillén was born Sept. 30, 1999, the second of six children.
Her parents, Gloria and Rogelio Guillén, were immigrants from a farm town called Los Delgado in Zacatecas, Mexico. They settled in southeast Houston in 1997. Her mother cared for the couple’s four daughters and two sons, and her father supported the family as a machine operator.
Vanessa was a quiet, hardworking student who tested into the gifted and talented program in elementary school and took Advanced Placement classes at César E. Chávez High School.
She was a math whiz. Her AP world history teacher, Stephanie Rivera, remembers her as very focused and a strong writer.
Coaches recalled that Guillén would spend her lunch break finishing her homework. Megan Giles-Franklin, her track and cross country coach, said Guillén would arrive early for practice and ask what workout was planned so she could get started and “do a little extra.”
The three-sport varsity athlete would stay late after track and soccer practice, tuck in her earbuds and do some extra laps. She found time for club soccer and worked weekends at a flea market food stall that sold tacos and tortas.
“The way she worked out, it was ridiculous,” said her friend Dominic Franklin. “I didn’t know any girls in high school that were like that.”
Franklin, now a running back for Texas Southern University, remembered when he met her in middle school. Guillén playfully taunted him on the soccer field.
“She said, ‘You play soccer, homeboy?’” Franklin recalled. “She was like, ‘I’ll cross you up.’”
Yet she was quick to hide evidence of basic yearnings. If GilesFranklin caught her eating junk food in the hallway, she would stop chewing, hide the bag of hot chips and smile.
If Giles-Franklin happened to spot Guillén in the vicinity of a boy, the teen would move some distance away and say with a laugh, “Coach, we’re just friends.”
She worried about her diet and her weight and talked with friends about who was taking whom to the prom. On the rare occasions Guillén went out dancing with friends, she’d dress up. And she had a swagger, Franklin said. The swagger of a girl confident enough to go to the prom with her best friend, Jocelyn Sierra.
Proving herself
Friends and family say Guillén first mentioned joining the Army at age 10.
By the time she got close to enlisting, her friend Hasen Trochez remembered, “We’d tell her not to go.”
“You risk your life when you get deployed,” they told her.
Guillén told Trochez her parents had sacrificed a lot and she wanted to make them proud.
Her mother adamantly opposed the idea, saying the military is for men. Still, weeks after her 18th birthday, Vanessa came home one day and told her mother she had enlisted.
Her father spoke up for his daughter: In this country, kids can make their own decisions once they are 18, he said.
“She did it to prove to herself and everyone else that she was capable of anything,” said Vanessa’s friend Ashley Macias. “She was excited. She was planning on going to Germany.”
Military life
Guillén got her tattoos — a cross with a flower for her faith, a rose because she loved them, and a mountain to remind her of Virginia — after she joined the military, her sister Mayra said.
Two days after Guillén graduated from high school, she shipped out to Fort Jackson in South Carolina for basic training. Then she went to Fort Lee, Va., for specialized training in small arms and artillery repair.
Family members piled into the car to meet her during her brief stopover at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston in December 2018. Guillén ran into her mother’s arms, exuberant about the Army and the next phase of her life at Fort Hood.
Upon arrival at the post Dec. 19, 2018, she was assigned to forward support with the Regimental Engineer Squadron, 3rd Cavalry Regiment.
She didn’t like Fort Hood from the start, her family said. She complained it was dirty, the food was bad, officers were mean.
Fort Hood, located in Killeen, is the largest active duty armored base in the United States. It’s where an Army major killed 13 people in November 2009 in the worst mass shooting ever on a U.S. military base.
Guillén lived in a single-sex barracks, not unlike a college dorm, with locked two-person rooms that shared a bathroom.
Family members say her life took a turn for the worse after a fall 2019 combat training stint in the Mojave Desert in California. Gloria Guillén said her daughter was withdrawn when she returned in November. When she asked what was the matter, Vanessa said, “I am very tired, mami. I just want to get out of the Army.”
Her mother said Guillén later told a friend that a soldier named Aaron R. had walked in on her in the shower. Guillén told her mother in February during a home visit to Houston that a sergeant was sexually harassing her.
“Tell me the name of that miserable trash,” Gloria Guillén remembered saying to her daughter.
“I can’t, mami.”
“Have you reported it yet?” “No. They laugh at us there. They laugh at everyone. They don’t believe us. We are nobody.”
Doing extra work
On April 22, Guillén was off-duty when she was called in to do some work in her armory room, close to her barracks at Fort Hood.
She was wearing civilian clothes: a black T-shirt, lavender leggings and black Nike shoes. During the pandemic, Army officials had become more lenient about uniforms.
According to court documents, Robinson summoned Guillén later that morning to another armory room where he worked. They knew each other but he was not in her chain of command, Army investigator Damon Phelps said. Robinson gave her the serial number of a .50 caliber machine gun he wanted her to service.
Robinson later told investigators her next stop should have been the motor pool to drop off paperwork. Personnel in the motor pool were expecting her, but she never showed up.
She left her car keys, barracks key, Army ID card and wallet at her workplace. The last text on her phone was from Robinson telling her he was in the armory.
She missed her regular midday call with Juan Cruz, the boyfriend in Houston she was planning to marry. Friends became alarmed that evening when they realized none of them had heard from her.
Her sisters Mayra and Yovana drove to Fort Hood with Cruz that night, arriving about 2:30 a.m. on April 23. They had to wait until 9 a.m. to enter. They met with military police but learned nothing.
According to a Fort Hood statement: “Spc. Vanessa Guillen was reported missing to law enforcement on April 23, 2020, after leader checks in the barracks, immediate unit area, and attempts to contact her via phone failed to locate her.”
Robinson and the Aguilars
Aaron Robinson was a former high school football player from Calumet City, a predominantly Black suburb of Chicago. He enlisted in October 2017 as a combat engineer and was assigned in March 2018 to Alpha Troop, Regimental Engineer Squadron, 3rd Cavalry Regiment.
While Guillén was going through training in South Carolina and Virginia in 2018, Robinson deployed to Iraq. He returned to Fort Hood at the same time Guillén arrived.
Robinson alternately bragged about his time in Iraq and talked about suicide, said Spc. Keon Aguilar, 26, who was in the same platoon as Robinson.
Aguilar felt like his fellow soldier needed some grounding. He offered to let him stay at the home he shared with his wife, Cecily, 22.
The Aguilars’ pastor, the Rev. Mylanda Smallwood, spoke to Robinson once while visiting the couple’s house in Killeen.
“He was a cocky young man,” Smallwood said. “I didn’t have a good impression of him.”
His impression of Cecily was that she was sweet, affectionate, emotional and “really naïve.”
Smallwood learned that at some point, Cecily moved out of the house. Keon told him his wife was romantically involved with Robinson.
Military sexual abuse
The Guillén family believe the sexual harassment she talked about is tied to her murder.
The Army’s criminal investigation found no credible evidence that anyone reported or believed
that Guillén was the victim of sexual harassment or assault, Army investigator Damon Phelps said.
But publicity over the case mobilized victims of sexual assault and harassment in the military and their advocates.
A private Facebook group called “I am Vanessa Guillén” attracted 12,000 female military members who posted accounts of abuse they said they had suffered.
“I think it hit home for a lot of female military members,” said Tayler, one of the group’s founders. She is on active duty in the Navy and asked that her last name not be used for fear of retribution.
Tayler said that although she hadn’t thought she was at risk, she fell victim to persistent sexual harassment.
“Now, I see this culture of corruption failing so many women and victims,” Tayler said.
Sexual harassment and assault have been a stubborn problem in the armed services.
In 2019, the military services received 7,825 formal reports of sexual assault, a Defense Department report states. But a survey found a much larger number — an estimated 20,500 active duty service members — suffered sexual assault in 2018.
At Fort Hood, Defense Department reports have documented a history of sexual abuse involving soldiers and command staff and poor handling of complaints.
In 2015, Sgt. 1st Class Gregory McQueen, a man once responsible for coordinating his battalion’s sexual assault prevention program, was convicted of trafficking vulnerable female soldiers.
Fort Hood spokesman Chris Haug said the post has a robust sexual assault prevention program.
“There is no indication the murder (of Guillén) had anything to do with sexual harassment or sexual abuse,” he said.
Missing
After Guillén went missing, more than 500 soldiers in her regiment searched buildings, barracks, fields, training areas, lakes and trails.
In an interview six days after her disappearance, Robinson told officials that after he saw Guillén on April 22, he left for his off-post home and was with Cecily Aguilar. Witnesses told investigators they saw Robinson leave the post that night carting a heavy strong box on wheels.
On June 30, contractors working on a fence discovered Guillén’s remains in a rural area near the Leon River, about 30 miles from the post.
Investigators interviewed Aguilar and she told them about the murder. Robinson killed Guillén with a hammer in his armory room, an FBI affidavit says.
He removed her body in the strong box witnesses later described, and with the help of Aguilar he dismembered the remains and buried them along the Leon River, according to the affidavit. It says they later returned to the site, put cement on the remains and reburied them.
Robinson fled Fort Hood and killed himself shortly after midnight when approached by law enforcement in Killeen.
A shattered family
There is a Vanessa altar in her parents’ home in Houston, with pictures, candles, her first check from the Army and sunflowers, which she loved.
Gloria Guillén spends a lot of time in prayer. The family members swing between large public gatherings and private sorrow at home. They have not set a date for the funeral.
Vanessa’s 4-year-old brother, Roger, doesn’t know where his sister is.
He’s the baby of the family. He would chortle with joy when Vanessa chased him around the house.
The Guilléns haven’t found a way to tell him what happened.
Publicity over the case mobilized victims of sexual assault and harassment in the military.