Base Crimes

The military has a domestic violence problem.
By Karen Houppert

AT NORTH CAROLINA’S Fort Bragg this February, Army Special Forces trainee Richard Corcoran got mad at his estranged wife, Michele. He’d gotten mad before, but this would mark the sixth and final time the Cumberland County Sheriffs Department would be called to break up a “domestic disturbance” between Corcoran and his wife. At 8:30 p.m. Corcoran arrived at his wife’s house and went after 30-year-old Michele with a gun, firing at her as she fled to a neighbor’s. (She was wounded but survived.) He shot and wounded another Fort Bragg soldier who was in the house and then shot and killed himself—all while his seven-month-old daughter lay in another room.
He joins a band of brothers. Corcoran’s is the 10th fatality in a slew of domestic violence homicides involving Fort Bragg soldiers since 2002; in one six-week spree four Army wives were murdered by their husbands or ex-husbands. Including nonfatal incidents, there were 832 victims of domestic violence between 2002 and 2004 at Fort Bragg alone, according to Army figures.
And yet Corcoran’s attack stands out. Not only had he just attended a mandated anger-management class on-post that same afternoon—calling into question the efficacy of these sessions that the Army considers the cornerstone of its domestic violence treatment program—but Corcoran had a past that should have kept him out of the Army in the first place: He had been indicted for rape at the age of 19.
On March 1, 1989, in the town of Glen Ridge, New Jersey, Corcoran and six other high school athletes sexually assaulted a retarded girl with sticks and a baseball bat. Corcoran, like all the boys, admitted being present but insisted he just watched. Four of the boys were tried and convicted in a grueling five-month trial. Three days before Corcoran’s trial was slated to begin in 1994, the victim’s parents decided it was not in their daughter’s best interest to pursue another trial. The case against Corcoran, son of a Glen Ridge police lieutenant, was dropped.
Several years later, Richard Corcoran joined the Army.
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