Fort Hood Shooter Nidal Hasan to Be Executed by Firing Squad
Nidal Hasan, the former Army psychiatrist who killed 13 people in the 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, will be executed by firing squad, the Pentagon announced Monday.
If the sentence is carried out, it would be the first U.S. military execution in more than 60 years and the first Army execution by firing squad since World War II.
Trump Signs Off on the Sentence
President Donald Trump approved the execution on the recommendation of Pete Hegseth, who leads the Pentagon. Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, a military death sentence cannot be carried out without the president's approval. The decision comes nearly 17 years after the attack.
"Judgement day for Hasan has finally come," Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said, according to Al Jazeera.
No date or location has been set. "The Secretary of the Army will set the time and place," the Pentagon said, as reported by Military Times.
The 2009 Fort Hood Attack
On November 5, 2009, Hasan, then an Army major, opened fire with a semiautomatic handgun inside a readiness processing center at Fort Hood, where soldiers were preparing to deploy.
He killed 12 active-duty soldiers and one retired serviceman. Another 32 people were wounded.
Among the dead was Pfc. Francheska Velez, 21, who had just returned from a tour in Iraq and was expecting her first child. Today, a stone memorial at Fort Hood honors each of the 13 people killed that day.
Hasan was shot by responding officers during the attack and left partially paralyzed. The shooting remains one of the deadliest attacks ever carried out on a U.S. military base.
Investigators later found that Hasan had exchanged emails with Anwar al-Awlaki, a Yemeni-American cleric linked to al-Qaeda, before the attack. That connection became central to a long fight by survivors and families to have the shooting recognized as terrorism. In 2015, Congress expanded Purple Heart eligibility, and the Army awarded the medal to those killed and wounded, Army Times reported.
Conviction and Years on Death Row
Hasan represented himself at his 2013 court-martial and admitted to the shooting. He told the court he carried out the attack to stop soldiers from deploying to Afghanistan to fight Muslims, and said he did it in support of the Taliban.
In August 2013, a military jury convicted him of 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder, then sentenced him to death. As with all military death sentences, his case then went through years of mandatory appeals.
He has spent the years since on military death row at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review his case in 2025, according to Stars and Stripes. It is not yet clear whether his lawyers will try to challenge the execution in federal court.
A Rare Method With a Long History
The U.S. military has not executed anyone since 1961, when Army Pvt. John A. Bennett was hanged.
The last Army execution by firing squad took place in 1945, when Pvt. Eddie Slovik was shot in France for desertion. He remains the only American soldier executed for desertion since the Civil War.
Firing squads have made a comeback in some states. Idaho made it its preferred execution method, and South Carolina has also carried out firing squad executions in recent years.
The decision comes as execution methods face renewed scrutiny nationwide following a botched execution in Tennessee last week. The state has paused executions while officials review what went wrong, and its prison commissioner has resigned.
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