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All three newscasts continued their background checks on Fort Hood suspect Nidal Hasan, the psychiatrist turned gunman. NBC's Pete Williams picked up on a National Public Radio report that Hasan's colleagues at Walter Reed Army Medical Center "has serious doubts about his mental stability" yet they "never followed through by filing any formal complaints" so army brass was unaware that the major was a potential danger. CBS' David Martin reported that other Walter Reed doctors found him "weird and had such a low opinion of him as a psychiatrist that they refused to refer other patients to him."
ABC's Pierre Thomas pointed out that Hasan bought his handguns legally, from a store in Killeen, and that the FBI knew of the purchases because of the required background check. Yet even though Hasan's name was also in the files of the Joint Terrorism Taskforce, which was monitoring his e-mail correspondence with "a radical imam suspected of ties to al-Qaeda" in Yemen, the two pieces of data were never connected: "Federal law forbids them from widely sharing--even to police--information about legal gun purchases," Thomas' "senior law enforcement" sources explained to him.
Hasan lived sparsely in a $350-a-month apartment at Fort Hood with "few worldly possessions," CBS' Martin observed. His psychiatrist's annual salary was $92,000 plus a monthly housing allowance of $1,100 and he had no family dependents. Yet "he was living like a private." Martin wondered where his money went: "Members of the mosque where he worshipped said he was a very generous man who helped others pay their utility bills."
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