Why Did A New Army Ranger Allegedly Commit A Gruesome Motel Murder-Suicide?

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The Army is actively cooperating with law enforcement in Washington state as they continue their investigation into a newly minted Ranger’s alleged gruesome murder and mutilation of a woman in a motel outside Seattle in July, just before he fired on two parked vehicles and fatally shot himself, Stars and Stripes reports.

  • Pvt. Krishna Mahadevan-Prasad, a 20-year-old soldier assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, reportedly spent just three minutes on July 24th killing and mutilating a 38-year-old woman in a Renton, Washington, motel room, according to surveillance footage viewed by The Seattle Times.
  • A timeline put together by law enforcement indicates that after exiting the motel room, Mahadevan-Prasad walked through a parking lot before opening fire with a rifle and shotgun on two parked cars waiting at the nearby Hood Canal bridge. He narrowly missed the two drivers and two sleeping children, ages 5 and 6, before shooting himself at the entrance to the bridge.
  • “We are aware of the incident that occurred July 24th, 2018 in the vicinity of Hood Canal Bridge, and are cooperating with the Washington State Patrol who maintain lead in this investigation,” U.S. Army Special Operations Command spokesman Lt. Col. Robert Bockholt told Stars and Stripes on Tuesday.
  • According to local law enforcement, Mahadevan-Prasad had only been at Joint Base Lewis-McChord for two weeks; he’d completed his One Station Unit Training, Basic Airborne Course, and Ranger Assessment and Selection Program 1 at Fort Benning, Georgia, earlier that month after joining the Army in September 2017.

The grisly details of what exactly happened in that motel room are not public, but according to Stripes, investigators suspect that Mahadevan-Prasad “may have committed other acts of violence” in the past based on what detectives found when they arrived on the scene.

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Jared Keller

Former Managing Editor

Jared Keller is the former managing editor of Task & Purpose. His writing has appeared in Aeon, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the New Republic, Pacific Standard, Smithsonian, and The Washington Post, among other publications.