Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan set for execution by firing squad Dec. 3

Nidal Hasan will be executed by firing squad on December 3, 2026, at Fort Hood in Texas—the same military installation where he opened fire on unarmed soldiers seventeen years earlier. The execution date, announced through an email to the families of his victims, marks the first military execution in the United States since 1961, a gap of sixty-five years. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recommended the firing squad method, and President Trump approved it.

On November 5, 2009, Hasan, then an Army psychiatrist and major, walked into the readiness center at Fort Hood where soldiers were preparing to deploy. He fired 146 rounds. Thirteen people died. Thirty-two others were wounded. The dead included a nineteen-year-old private, a twenty-one-year-old private who was pregnant, captains and majors and sergeants—all of them unarmed, all of them caught in a moment of preparation that became their last. Witnesses reported hearing Hasan shout "Allahu Akbar" before he began firing. Police returned fire and left him paralyzed from the chest down.

Hasan, now fifty-six, has spent the last seventeen years on death row at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. His case moved through the military justice system with the weight of its own gravity. Under Army regulation, only the president can approve a military execution. A 2019 revision to that regulation removed lethal injection as an option and left the method to be designated by the secretary of the Army, recommended by the provost marshal general. The firing squad—a method not used in a military execution since World War II, when Private Eddie Slovik was executed in France for desertion—was chosen for Hasan's case.

The last military execution before that occurred in 1961, when Private John Bennett was hanged after conviction for rape and attempted murder of an eleven-year-old girl. The gap between then and now spans more than six decades of American military history. Hasan's execution will close that gap.

The families of the thirteen people killed have been notified before any public announcement. They have been asked whether they wish to attend. For seventeen years, these families have been bound together by the same tragedy, their lives marked by a single day in November. The execution, many of them hope, will be the final chapter of a story that has defined them since 2009. The names of those who died are recorded: Lieutenant Colonel Juanita Warman, fifty-five; Major Libardo Eduardo Caraveo, fifty-two; Captain John P. Gaffaney, fifty-six; Captain Russell Seager, fifty-one; Staff Sergeant Justin DeCrow, thirty-two; Sergeant Amy Krueger, twenty-nine; Specialist Jason Dean Hunt, twenty-two; Specialist Frederick Z. Greene, twenty-nine; Private First Class Aaron T Nemelka, nineteen; Private First Class Michael S. Pearson, twenty-two; Private First Class Kham S. Xiong, twenty-three; Private Francheska Velez, twenty-one, and her unborn child; and Michael Grant Cahill, sixty-two. Each name carries the weight of a life interrupted.