Fort Hood probing death of soldier
Sexual accusations echo Guillén case
The parents of a Fort Hood soldier who died Monday say she was the target of sexual harassment and likened her case to the disappearance and murder of Spc. Vanessa Guillén.
Fort Hood provided few details about Pvt. Ana Basalduaruiz’s death, including the cause, in a brief news release issued Wednesday. The post said Thursday afternoon “that at this point in the investigation,” no foul play “is evident” in her death, but the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division would continue probing the incident. The post said commanders would “fully” investigate the sexual harassment allegations.
Basalduaruiz’s family could not be reached Thursday.
The Army said Basalduaruiz, 20, listed her home of record as Long Beach, Calif. She joined the Army in July 2021 and was assigned to the 1st Cavalry Division’s 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team’s 91st Engineer Battalion in December 2021.
“A loss of any one of our soldiers is a tragedy and it is no different in the death of Private Ana Basalduaruiz. Our hearts and thoughts go out to the family, friends and colleagues of Ana,” said Col. Christopher Dempsey, commander of the 1st Cavalry Division’s 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team. “We have remained in constant contact with both parents of Private Basalduaruiz, and will continue to keep them updated.”
The statement said the Criminal Investigation Division and the chain of command were “actively investigating the facts and circumstances surrounding her death” and “in contact with her family to keep them updated, receive any concerns, and provide them all releasable information.
“Additionally, chain of
command is also providing support and resources to her family and troopers that served with her.”
Basalduaruiz’s mother, Alejandra Ruiz Zarco, said her daughter told her weeks ago that a higher-ranking soldier was “harassing her” and that she’d been the object of repeated sexual advances from other people on the post, according to Noticias Telemundo.
In a phone interview from her home in Michoacán, a Mexican state where she lives, Ruiz Zarco added that her daughter said, “everyone wants me to sleep with them” but they were repugnant people.
“(She told me) that she wanted to see me, that she wanted to hug me, and she wanted me to hug her a lot, like when she was little,” Ruiz Zarco told Telemundo.
A report from the Rand Corp. think-tank revealed that Fort Hood had 885 estimated sex assault and rape victims in 2014 — the highest in the Defense Department, though five Army posts had 500 or more. The Army never confirmed the number.
Sexual harassment and sexual assault have plagued the armed services for decades. The Pentagon said 6,236 sexual assault and harassment reports were filed by service members in the fiscal year 2019, a 3 percent increase over the previous year. Defense Department data also show an estimated 13,382 servicewomen, 6.2 percent of the force, were sexually assaulted in 2018, up from 9,834 in 2014.
Convictions are rare, with a few hundred coming down in any given year.
“You cannot have 20,000 sexual assault cases a year, have 7,000 people report, and then end up having a handful — 250 — that get convicted,” then U.S. Rep. Jackie Speier, D-calif., said in 2021 when arguing for profound changes in the military justice system. “You can’t tell me that those 7,000 that report, that 99 percent of them are lying.”
Post officials have not said how many soldiers have died on or off Fort Hood this year or in 2022.
The Army, in late 2020, changed the way it accounts for missing soldiers, who often are suspected of going AWOL, after Guillén, 20, of Houston, disappeared. It now classifies soldiers who go missing as “absent-unknown” for 48 hours. The Army said it had listed 117 soldiers as AWOL two years ago, with 113 returning to Fort Hood. Another 33 were listed as having deserted, including some who left the post the previous year.
Guillén’s death sparked a national uproar that led to the firings of Maj. Gen. Scott Efflandt, the post’s acting commander when Guillén disappeared in April 2020, and the 1st Cavalry Division’s top commander and NCO after her family complained of indifference. Bludgeoned with a hammer on April 22 on the post, she was last seen at her 3rd Cavalry Regiment’s engineer squadron headquarters.
Her remains were found June 30 along the Leon River, miles from Fort Hood.
Guillén had told her family about being sexually harassed, but investigators said she never reported it to Fort Hood authorities. When she vanished from her workplace on the post, social media erupted with testimonials from former service members who described sexual harassment and assaults.
A new law, the “I Am Vanessa Guillén Act,” was signed by President Joe Biden in late December 2021.
It took away the right of commanders to order trials for defendants in sexual assault and harassment cases.
Up until that point, commanders in the U.S. military had always decided when to order court-martials for a variety of offenses. That authority predated the formation of the Continental Army.
Guillén’s disappearance brought weeks of intense scrutiny of the Army’s inability to combat sex offenses even before her body was found and suspected killer, Spc. Aaron David Robinson shot himself as police closed in on him.
Lt. Gen. Sean C. Bernabe took command of Fort Hood last October, well after Guillén’s death rocked the military, but recently said his predecessor worked through nine findings and 70 recommendations made in the wake of the Guillén scandal by the Fort Hood Independent Review Committee.
That, he said, left him “pretty confident that those things had been addressed, at least in terms of immediate action. Our task now is to sustain that going forward, and I feel like we are in a very good place.”