Vitals Spotlight - We Give the Doctor an Exam

Major Nidal Hasan (cbsnew.com/ap)

Major Nidal Hasan never favored going to the firing range, so why did he open fire on his fellow soldiers?

According to this family, Dr. Hasan, Alumni of Virginia Tech, wanted to get out of the Army because he was constantly harassed and called by racial slurs such as “camel jockey.” Despite his high rank and medical achievements, he had a difficult time enduring the stress of dealing with his colleagues.

Why couldn’t he pull rank on those that spoke to him in a derogatory manner?

However, Dr. Nidal Hasan also suffered from stress of getting orders of deployment to Iraq. The same sort of stress that he counseled other soldiers on that were being deployed to and from the war zone in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a Disaster and Preventive Psychiatry specialist, he had opportunities of speaking with other specialists like himself. Instead he chose to fall victim to his own destructive nature of being a suicide killer.

“Just keep in mind mass killers pretty much know they want to die and they tend to take as many people with them as they can in a shooting,” said former FBI agent and ABC News consultant Brad Garrett, who also believes Hasan didn’t want to survive the Ft. Hood shooting.

“It is one of those things where he went and wanted to kill a lot of people and commit suicide maybe in his own mind that he’s saving peoples’ lives,” said Garrett. “As illogical as that sounds, in his mind, that would be quite logical.”

After killing 13 soldiers and wounding a dozen others, Major Nidal Hasan is now stable after being taken down by a female civilian police officer, Sgt. Kimberly Munley.

READ MORE ABOUT DR. NIDAL HASAN