Passing the buck on a broken face

It’s hard to make a rule against stopping just short of breaking the rules. The attitude is offensive, but it’s not an offense.

So maybe no rule can guarantee that what happened to Taylor Mack on Fort Lewis two years ago won’t happen again.

Mack, then a 20-year-old Lacey woman, woke up in a barracks room to discover her face had been beaten to a pulp. Her jaw, nose and an eye socket had been broken. A tooth had been knocked out, and she’d suffered a concussion.

The admitted perpetrator was a newly discharged soldier, Andre John Roberts, 26. According to Mack, she’d been rebuffing Roberts’ advances. She wound up in the room alone with him the night of June 19, 2007, and woke up looking worse than a mauled prizefighter.

What happened then – as reported Sunday by The News Tribune’s Sean Robinson – was an exercise in evading responsibility.

Mack reported the assault to the Fort Lewis military police, who noted the “bleeding from her face and mouth,” took statements and examined the scene of the assault. Shortly thereafter, according to MPs, Roberts turned himself in, drunk, waived his rights and made a sworn written statement admitting to the assault.

Then – thinking he was still in the Army – the police turned him over to what had been his unit.

So far so good. But when the unit leaders discovered he was a civilian, they didn’t refer the case to the U.S. Marshals Service or notify the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department. They simply took him off base and released him.

No rule against that. But this was a brutal attack on federal property. You’d think somebody would have shown more interest.

Seeking justice, Mack and her mother talked to Army prosecutors and got little response. Mack’s mother wound up getting the runaround because she wasn’t the victim – even though Mack was recovering from surgeries and for weeks could eat only through a straw.

The Fort Lewis police report made no follow-up note of the extent of her injuries. The day-of-incident report was forwarded to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, which eventually filed a misdemeanor charge against Roberts. Roberts, not surprisingly, had already made himself scarce.

He’s still at large. U.S. marshals are not out scouring the streets for him, presumably because the charge is so minuscule.

Thus Roberts, once eminently catchable, remains uncaught. No one’s officially fouled up; apparently, nobody broke any rules. But the minimalist response to a young woman’s broken face looks like, “What me worry?” As far as Mack is concerned, Alfred E. Neuman could have been running the show.