The hero of Fort Hood

KILLEEN, Texas — The police officer who brought down a gunman after he went on a shooting rampage at the Fort Hood Army base here was on the way to have her car repaired when she responded to a police radio report of gunfire at a processing center for soldiers, authorities said Friday.

As she pulled up to the center, civilian officer Kimberly Denise Munley spotted the gunman, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, brandishing a pistol and chasing down a wounded soldier outside the building, said Chuck Medley, the director of emergency services at the base.

“He turned to her and charged, firing rapidly. She returned fire and fell to the ground to help protect herself,” Medley said.

Munley and the gunman fired and hit each other simultaneously; she took shots in both legs and a wrist. Altogether, she fired four shots into his torso with her Beretta 9mm, dropping him to the ground and ending the worst mass shooting a U.S. military base has ever seen. As of Friday, 13 people had been killed and at least 30 injured.

“She eliminated the threat. She did what she was trained to do,” Medley said. “She, in my mind, saved countless lives.”

Whether Munley was solely responsible for taking down Hasan or whether he was also hit by gunfire from another responder is unclear, but she was the first to fire at him, the authorities said.

Munley, 34, is an expert in firearms and a member of the SWAT team for the civilian police department on the base, officials said.

The original 911 call came in at 1:23 p.m., and five minutes later Munley had already engaged the gunman.

Munley suffered wounds in each thigh and one to her right wrist. The base’s fire chief applied tourniquets to stop her bleeding, and she was taken to an undisclosed hospital. Her friends and family members who spoke to her Friday, including Medley, said she was recovering and in good spirits.

Hasan was transferred on Friday to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. A spokeswoman said he was in stable condition but gave no more details.

Munley, who has two children, joined the police force on the sprawling base in January 2008 after several years in the Army, most of them at Fort Hood.

Medley said Munley was an advanced firearms instructor for the civilian force, which is used to assist the military police with policing the vast fort, where 150,000 soldiers and their families live and work.

At Fort Hood, she met her husband, Matthew Munley, a member of the Special Forces. She lives with her husband and their 3-year-old daughter in a tidy community of ranch homes on the south side of Killeen. Her neighbors described her as quiet and friendly.

Medley described her as “absolutely a hero.”

“She had the training; she knew what to do. And she had the courage to do it — by doing it, she saved countless people’s lives.”

But she wasn’t the only one.

Firing into a room where hundreds of unarmed soldiers were lined up for vaccines and eye tests, Hasan had created a battle scene worse than most had witnessed in Iraq. Many stayed to help the wounded at a scene that most would have fled, falling back on their military and medical training, working furiously to save lives.

“There were many cases of soldiers and police officers yesterday putting their life on the line to save somebody else,” Medley said, fighting back tears. “And that’s what I saw.”

Sgt. Andrew Hagerman, a military police officer from Lewisville, Texas, who was on his rounds in the barracks area, was about a mile and a half away when the first crackle across the radio of “shots fired” came in.

He didn’t think much of it — probably someone throwing firecrackers off the roof again.

But then he heard, “Officer down.” With sirens blaring, he made it to the scene in three minutes.

Even so, a tremendous amount of damage had been done in a short amount of time.

“I did spin a circle a couple of times, thinking, ‘What do I need to do here?’ ” Hagerman said.

He walked past the gunman, by then unconscious on the ground in military fatigues. Ambulance drivers and medics had arrived and with his training taking over, Hagerman began directing traffic and sorting out the most serious who would need an ambulance first.

“It was controlled chaos,” Hagerman said.

Col. Kimberly Kesling, chief of medical services, was at the hospital going into a meeting when an aide gave her and other top commanders the word of an ER on full alert. She thought initially it would be a relatively minor thing, a single patient or maybe two.

By the time she got to the ER, “it quickly became evident that it was a massive event,” Kesling said.

In short order, Kesling said all six operating rooms were filled with teams working on the injured.

Within an hour and a half, some had been airlifted to other hospitals. Some patients were being treated on site; others were in surgery.

Kesling said she was proud of her staff. Going from station to station, “I didn’t see a cracked emotion,” she said. “Today, tomorrow, that might be a different thing.”

A surgeon, she had served in Iraq for nine months, returning in January 2004. For Kesling, the comparison was too real.

“I’d hoped to never see anything like that again.”

This report includes material from the Dallas Morning News, the Washington Post and the Associated Press.