A fellow Iraq War veteran battling the demons of posttraumatic stress disorder was charged yesterday with gunning down hero Navy SEAL and “American Sniper” best-selling author Chris Kyle and his friend, Texas officials said.
Kyle, a skilled sniper whose four combat tours in Iraq earned the most confirmed kills in modern US military history, was shot dead at a shooting range 50 miles southwest of Fort Worth — to which he may have invited his murderer to fire off a few rounds as a form of therapy, authorities said.
Eddie Ray Routh, 25, a Marine who served in Iraq in 2007, was arraigned on murder charges for allegedly shooting Kyle and the acclaimed sniper’s friend Chad Littlefield.
“The suspect’s mother was a schoolteacher and may have reached out to Kyle to help her son,” said Erath County Sheriff Tommy Bryant.
“Mr. Kyle works with people, and he took him out to the range to work with him,” Bryant said. “We kind of have an idea that maybe that’s why they were at the range, for some type of therapy that Mr. Kyle assists people with.”
After leaving the Navy in 2009, Kyle, a married father of two, started a security consulting firm and volunteered with troubled veterans.
He often took them to the shooting range, hoping the camaraderie of being with fellow veterans would ease their psychic pain.
“To my knowledge, this is the first time they had gone to the shooting range,” added Capt. Jason Upshaw, of the Erath County Sheriff’s Office.
Kyle and Littlefield, 35, suffered multiple close-range gunshot wounds fired from a semi-automatic handgun.
The shooting happened Saturday at the remote gun range of the Rough Creek Lodge.
“What I know is Chris and a gentleman — great guy, I knew him well, Chad Littlefield — took a veteran out shooting who was struggling with PTSD to try to assist him, try to help him, try to, you know, give him a helping hand, and he turned the gun on both of them, killing them,” Travis Cox, the director of a nonprofit that Kyle helped found, said.
After the senseless bloodbath, Routh left the shooting range in Kyle’s black pickup truck and went to his sister’s home in Midlothian, where he allegedly confessed to her and her husband.
He was arrested several hours later near his home after a brief pursuit.
There were no witnesses to the shooting, and Routh is being held on $3 million bail.
Bryant said that it was unknown whether the suspect was on any medication or had a diagnosis of any mental disorders but that he “may have been suffering from some type of mental illness from being in the military himself.”
The US military confirmed that Routh was a corporal in the Marines, serving on active duty from 2006 to 2010. He was deployed to Iraq in 2007 and Haiti in 2010.
The full title of Kyle’s book is “American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in US Military History.”