VANESSA’S STORY
Houstonian’s death at the hands of a fellow soldier galvanized a movement, shining a light on a life that was brief but vibrant
When Vanessa Guillén saw her family for a brief airport reunion in Houston on her way to Fort Hood in 2018, she was pink-cheeked and buoyant about the Army training she’d just completed and eager to tackle the duties of a soldier — a role she had dreamed of since childhood.
By the time the small-arms mechanic left for a routine weapons check at the post 16 months later, she was counting the days until she could leave the military and weighed down by concerns she didn’t want to talk about. Her mother asked what was wrong, why was she so skinny, what was happening at the post. “Nothing, mami,” Guillén would say. “They are just too strict. They are not good people.”
The 20-year-old then 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 that first day 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 disappearance and gruesome slaying sparked a national outcry. Her family, their lawyer and crowds of supporters rallied behind the young soldier as an example of the U.S. Army’s sluggish response to the loss of one of its own on home turf and a crisis of unmitigated sexual harassment in the ranks.
Her death — viewed in steely focus by a country on lockdown amid a re-energized civil rights movement — pushed lawmakers to seek reforms in how the Army treats women, especially women of color. It prompted a collective lament among Lati
nos who saw in the sweet-faced young soldier a daughter, a sister, a friend.
But the Houston native, 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 never reported sexual harassment through official channels. She told her mother near the end that a sergeant had been harassing her. She told her best friend that 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 laugh or brush it off if she said something. She bristled at the idea of quitting the Army. She would not violate her oath.
Spc. Aaron David Robinson, 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 she helped Robinson dismember and hide the body.
As officials investigate the failings revealed by the horrific episode, family and friends are recalling Guillén: She was the 5-foot-2 teen who drew cheers from football players when she bench-pressed as much as they could in the high school weight room. The kid who outran her coach in the Houston half marathon. The self-proclaimed “gymaholic” who was working up to dead lifting 270 pounds, more than twice her weight.
Through sheer will, she made her lofty goals reality.
A competitor
Vanessa Guillén was born Sept. 30, 1999, at Ben Taub Hospital, the second of six children. The 9-pound infant spent the first three weeks of her life in the ICU because of acute breathing problems.
Her parents, Gloria and Rogelio Guillén, immigrants from a farm town called Los Delgado in Zacatecas, Mexico, 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 Guillén 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.
Several coaches recalled that Guillén spent 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 at Hartman Middle School. Guillén playfully taunted him on the soccer field.
“She said, ‘You play soccer, homeboy? I never seen no Black person play soccer,’ ” Franklin recalled. “She was like, ‘I’ll cross you up.’ ” They continued to banter and try to one-up each before and after practice.
Her coach remembered one time Franklin yelled out to her in the crowded weight room, “How much are you lifting?” She snapped back, “More than you.” Everyone burst out laughing. Eventually, Guillén stopped lifting and joined the merriment.
That strength extended beyond the physical realm.
“She always lifted up her teammates in practice and in meets; if someone was new she would run with them to make them feel more comfortable,” Giles-Franklin said.
She was quick to hide evidence of basic yearnings. If her running coach caught her eating junk food in the hallway, she would stop chewing, hide the hot chips bag and smile. If she spotted her in the vicinity of a boy, Guillén would get some distance away and say, laughing, “Coach, we’re just friends,” Giles-Franklin said.
She was rarely emotional. She cried once when she got a short haircut she hated and again around graduation time when a coach gave her a basket of items to help her transition out of high school.
She worried about her diet, her weight and talked with friends about who was going with whom to the prom. On the rare occasions Guillén went out dancing with friends, she’d get really dressed up. And she had a swagger, Franklin said. A girl confident enough to go to 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 that her parents had sacrificed a lot and she wanted to make them proud and give them what they didn’t have as kids. Her mother adamantly opposed the idea, though, saying the military is for men. They argued about it.
When Guillén came home weeks after her 18th birthday and told her mother she had enlisted, her father intervened on her behalf. 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,” Guillén’s friend Ashley Macias said. “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 with her 2018 classmates on June 9 at NRG Stadium, she shipped out to Fort Jackson in South Carolina for basic training. She then traveled in late August to Fort Lee, Va., for specialized training in small-arms and artillery repair.
Family members piled into the car to meet her for the brief stopover at George Bush Intercontinental the following December. Guillén ran to her mother’s arms, exuberant about the Army and the next phase of her military life at Fort Hood.
She never deployed overseas.
Instead, over the next year the woman who’d fearlessly confronted barriers faced anxiety she was unable to conceal from friends and family.
She was assigned upon arrival on Dec. 19, 2018, to forward support with the Regimental Engineer Squadron, 3rd Cavalry Regiment.
She didn’t like the place from the start, her family said. She complained it was dirty, the food was bad, officers were mean.
Fort Hood is the largest active duty armored post in the United States. It operates like its own city with restaurants, supermarkets and public parks inside the installation. It’s the site where an Army major and psychiatrist killed 13 people in the worst mass shooting on a U.S. military base.
Guillén lived in a single-sex barracks, not unlike a college dorm, with locked two-person rooms along a hallway that each have a study area and a shared bathroom, officials said.
Life took a turn for the worse, family said, 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 her friend Sierra that a soldier named Aaron R. had walked in on her in the shower. Guillén told her mother in February during a visit home 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
Back at the post, soldiers were adhering to pandemic restrictions. The Army issued camouflage masks and hand sanitzer. Under that protocol, Fort Hood spokesman Chris Haug said, essential workers like Guillén were still expected to report to work.
On April 22, she was off-duty and wearing civilian clothing, a black T-shirt, lavender leggings and black Nike shoes.
She was called in to do something at work in her arms room, close to her barracks, and she likely figured she’d be there for a short time. She was essentially doing a favor on her day off, Haug said. During the pandemic, officials had been more lenient about uniforms.
According to court documents, Guillén was summoned in the late morning by Robinson to another armory room where he worked. They knew
each other but he was not in her chain of command, said Army investigator Damon Phelps. She read him serial numbers and he gave her the serial number for a .50 caliber machine gun he wanted her to service.
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.
Robinson, 20, later told investigators he saw her and that her next stop should have been the motor pool to drop off paperwork. Witnesses in the motor pool were expecting her, but she never showed up.
Family and close friends had been in steady contact in the days prior. She missed her regular midday call with the boyfriend in Houston she was planning to marry. They were alarmed by the evening of April 22 when they realized none of them had heard from her.
Her sisters Mayra and Yovana and her boyfriend Juan Cruz drove up from Houston that night and arrived at the post about 2:30 a.m. Officials said they had to wait until 9 a.m. to enter. They met with military police that day but learned nothing about what had happened to Guillén.
The Fort Hood website says “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 majority 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.
During the same period 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.
At the post, Robinson was alternately bragging about his time in Iraq and talking about suicide, said Spc. Keon Aguilar, 26, who was assigned to the same platoon as Robinson.
Aguilar and other soldiers told Robinson it was not appropriate to brag about a deployment. 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, provided informal marriage counseling to the young couple at his church and at their home. Smallwood said he thought the married soldier took his former platoon mate in to help make ends meet but that he also considered him a friend.
The pastor spoke to Robinson once when he visited 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.”
At some point, Smallwood learned that Cecily had moved out of the house. Keon told him she was now romantically involved with Robinson.
Military sexual abuse
The Guillén family and their lawyer, Natalie Khawam, believe the sexual harassment Guillén talked about is tied to her murder.
The criminal investigation included interviews with “hundreds of people, to include all acquaintances and coworkers,” but found no credible evidence that anyone reported or believed Guillén was the victim of sexual harassment or assault, Army investigator Phelps has said.
But publicity over the case mobilized sexual assault and harassment victims in the military and their advocates across the country.
As celebrities drum up help and supporters create dozens of murals and corridos to honor her, the Guillén family and Khawam have appeared at events in Houston, Fort Hood and Washington, D.C., pledging that they will fight for answers about her death at the hands of a murderer, not an enemy soldier. Her mother and sister Mayra often share their tearful grief, but 16-year-old Lupe pours her fury and anguish into screaming tirades demanding justice for Guillén.
Within two weeks of its formation, a private Facebook group called “I am Vanessa
Guillén” attracted 12,000 female military members who posted about abuse 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 active duty in the U.S. Navy and asked that her last name not be used for fear of retribution.
Tayler said that though she didn’t think she was at risk, she fell victim to persistent sexual harassment in the military. “Now, I see this culture of corruption failing so many women and victims.”
The problem of sexual harassment and sexual assault — from demeaning comments and nicknames to rape — has persisted in the armed services despite myriad investigations and reforms. In 2019, military services received 7,825 formal reports of sexual assault, a U.S. Department of Defense report says. But a survey found that an estimated 20,500 active duty service members experienced sexual assault in 2018, according to the same report.
At Fort Hood, there is a history of sexual abuse involving soldiers and command staff, with high numbers of assaults and poor handling of harassment and assault allegations noted in Department of Defense reports. In 2015, Sgt. 1st Class Gregory McQueen, a man once tasked with coordinating his Fort Hood battalion’s sexual assault prevention program, was convicted of sex trafficking vulnerable female soldiers.
Haug said Fort Hood has a robust sexual assault prevention program.
He added: “There is no indication the murder (of Guillén) had anything to do with sexual harassment or sexual abuse.”
Missing
After Guillén went missing, more than 500 soldiers in her regiment searched through buildings, barracks, fields, training areas, lakes and trails. The search area expanded to Central Texas.
In an interview six days after her disappearance, Robinson told officials that after he saw Guillén, he left for his off-post home and was with his girlfriend, Cecily Aguilar. Witnesses told investigators on May 18 that they saw Robinson leave the post the night Vanessa went missing carting a heavy strong box on wheels.
Guillén’s family has said that there were delays before the search was started in earnest, that security at the post was lax, that investigators failed to follow early leads and let Robinson slip away from the post after they identified him as the suspect in her murder.
“We are completely committed to finding Vanessa and aggressively going after every single piece of credible information and every lead in this investigation,” said Chris Grey, spokesman for Army CID, at the time of the search.
“We cared that she was missing,” said Haug. “We were working very hard to try to find her.”
Her disappearance brought national attention, offers of rewards for information, social media postings.
Texas EquuSearch, which specializes in finding missing persons, ran sonar in the Leon River and Belton Lake, said Tim Miller, head of the group. Search teams also used drones and canines in the search.
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 confirmed the murder. Robinson had killed Guillén with a hammer in his armory room after he summoned her there, according to an FBI affidavit filed in the case. He removed her body in the transport case witnesses later described and, with the help of Aguilar, dismembered and buried the remains along the Leon River. They later returned to the site and 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’ two-story 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 swings between large public gatherings and private sorrow at home. They have not set a date for the funeral but said it will be at the Catholic Charismatic Center.
Vanessa’s 4-year-old brother, Roger, doesn’t know where his sister is.
The Guilléns — for all their outspokenness and advocacy — haven’t found a way to tell him. He’s the baby of the family. He would chortle with joy when Vanessa chased him around their house.
He doesn’t know what happened to her. He doesn’t know what broke apart his family. Sig Christenson contributed
to this report.
“We cared that she was missing. We were working very hard to try to find her.” Chris Haug, Fort Hood spokesman