Edgardo Arlequin, the mayor of Guayanilla, the hometown of soldier, Spc. Ivan Lopez points a photo in which Lopez took part as a municipal band member, during an interview with the press in Guayanilla, Puerto Rico, Thursday, April 3, 2014.GUAYANILLA, Puerto Rico – He grew up in Puerto Rico and played percussion in his high school band. He spent a decade working as a police officer and serving in the National Guard, part of that time as a peacekeeper in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. And then he joined the U.S. Army.
That was Ivan Lopez’s seemingly unremarkable route into the military. But what happened from there — and why the 34-year-old soldier turned against his comrades at Fort Hood, Texas, with such deadly fury — baffled some of those who knew him.
“He had a lot of friends. I never saw him fighting. He never seemed like a boy who had emotional problems,” said Guayanilla Mayor Edgardo Arlequin Velez, who was also the leader of the school band that Lopez played in in this small, working-class town.
But Fort Hood commander Lt. Gen. Mark Milley said Thursday that there was evidence Lopez was psychologically unstable, and that was believed to be a “fundamental underlying cause” in Wednesday’s shooting rampage, in which Lopez killed three people, wounded 16 and took his own life.
Lopez was sent to Iraq as a truck driver in 2011 during the final months of the war there. He did not see combat and was not wounded, military officials said.