Alonzo Lunsford will attend Nidal Hasan’s Dec. 3 execution while questioning the decision to make it available to a live audience.
One of the service members who was wounded during the 2009 Fort Hood shooting that claimed the lives of 13 soldiers has mixed feelings regarding the shooter’s execution being livestreamed.
Alonzo Lunsford, who was shot seven times in the incident, says he will be in attendance to look Nidal Hasan, a former army psychiatrist who killed 13 people and wounded 32 others in the eye, but affirms that Hasan’s death shouldn’t be viewed as a form of entertainment.
“I don’t want kids to see it,” Lunsford, a retired Army sergeant, told ITV News. “I don’t think that kids are mentally and psychologically ready to see something like this. It’s not like you’re watching a John Wick movie and it’s not entertainment.”
He added, “It wasn’t no friggin’ entertainment when he came in that building and killed 14 people. It wasn’t no entertainment when he shot me in my head and then walked on behind me and shot me in my back. Then again, I’m clearing somebody out the building and that fool came and shot me again?
“That wasn’t not entertainment. That was cold-blooded murder.”
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Hasan is scheduled to be executed on Dec. 3 in the first military execution since 1961 and the first conducted via firing squad since the end of World War II.
Lunsford retired from the Army in 2013 and said he would be in attendance for the execution, which has drawn bipartisan criticism for the fact that it would be broadcast for a live audience to witness.
“I absolutely support the sentence of death, but live-streaming executions is what jihadists do,” Rep Austin Scott (R-GA) wrote on X. “America is better than that.”
Rep. Rob Bresnahan (R-PA) wrote on social media regarding Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s decision, “An execution shouldn’t be a live-streamed spectacle. The focus should be on justice for the victims and their families, not turning an execution into entertainment. Their pain deserves respect, not a public show.”
Typically, victims and their families are in attendance for executions. Lunsford believes that witnessing Hasan’s death personally would bring a bit of closure to one of the darkest chapters in his life and one of the darkest chapters in the history of the Texas Army base.
“At the execution, I want to be there where that man can look at me in my eyes and I can look at him in his eyes. You see me, I see you,” Lunsford said. “And I want him to understand, buddy buddy, you failed in your mission. I go where I want to go, when I want to go, how I want to go with no fear.”
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