In The Dark - Episode 6: The Full Picture

Episode Date: August 27, 2024

Startling new information emerges from deep within the investigation files. Then the In the Dark team gets a big break. To find online-only features, visit newyorker.com/season3. And to get episodes early and ad-free, visit newyorker.com/dark.  Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Previously on In the Dark How did the Marines seem? They are angry and they want just to shoot. They get his rifle in the bed and start shooting at us when we are under the bed. He put his rifle and started shooting to me and Noor. Maybe a lot of this is imagination. None of this was near as bad as it seemed. I'm talking about what actually happened to the civilians.

They did not get the pictures. Those pictures today are still not been seen. Where are they? I'm not insane. Where are they? Frankly, I believe I gave the Marines the benefit of the doubt every opportunity that I could. Yeah, I mean, did you think that a war crime had been committed? I don't have any opinion on that. The first investigation into what happened on November 19, 2005 in Haditha,

the one conducted by Colonel Watt, was brief and friendly and not too detailed. But for all of Watt's inclination to give the Marines the benefit of the doubt, he did recommend another investigation, a criminal one. And this investigation was conducted by investigators who were not so friendly, not so willing to give the Marines the benefit of the doubt. This investigation was conducted by NCIS, the investigative arm of the Navy. The NCIS investigation was massive. It went on for months. It involved dozens of agents working in Iraq and the United States. We very much had a responsibility to the Iraqi people and to the U.S. military. We talked to one of those investigators. Her name is Kelly Garbo. Everybody involved deserved to understand exactly what happened. And should the military attorneys find that prosecutions were warranted,

we wanted to be able to have provided all of the possible information so that the families of the victims could feel like we had served justice. NCIS agents went inside the houses, the killing sites, and took measurements of the rooms. They pried bullets out of walls. They picked shell casings off the ground. They talked to hundreds of people. It was one of the largest war crimes investigations since the one into the killings at My Lai during the Vietnam War. The full records of the NCIS investigation, as far as I can tell, had never been released to the public until we received them by suing the U.S. military. And that's how I found out that perhaps these investigators' greatest accomplishment

was what they were able to find out from the shooters themselves. greatest accomplishment was what they were able to find out from the shooters themselves. There were six people involved in the shootings that day, at the white car and inside the houses. There was the squad leader, Sergeant Frank Woodridge, who the Marines we spoke with described as quiet and reserved. Like he was quiet, but a good, a good dude. There was Corporal Sonic Delacruz. That dude loved the Marine Corps. And four other men. Corporal Hector Salinas.

He was experienced and definitely would probably have not taken any shit over there. Private First Class Humberto Mendoza. Never gave us a hard time. He did what I was told. Lance Corporal Justin Sherritt. He was just a cool guy. He was that cool guy that you wanted to hang out with. And Lance Corporal Stephen Tatum, a lanky Marine from Oklahoma who no one could remember much about. NCIS investigators interviewed most of these men for hours, over months, often in multiple sessions.

They would come back to the shooters, tell them what they'd heard from other people, challenge their accounts. And the statements that NCIS got out of all this told a very different story than the one the Marines had told to Colonel Watt. This is Season 3 of In the Dark, an investigative podcast from The New Yorker.

This season is about the killing of 24 men, women, and children by U.S. Marines in Haditha, Iraq. It's a story not just about the killings themselves, but also about the failure of the U.S. military to bring the men responsible for them to justice. This is Episode 6, The Full Picture. The accounts the Marines gave over hours and hours of interrogation by NCIS were full of revelations. Like take what one Marine, Sonic Delacruz, admitted to NCIS about what happened to the very first people shot by Marines that day, the five men who'd been traveling in a white car on the same road as the Marines' convoy. Delacruz told NCIS that he shot at the men. He said he only did it because his squad leader,

Sergeant Frank Wuderich, shot them first. As for why the men were shot, Delacruz had told the first investigative team, the one led by Colonel Watt, that the men were shot because they were running away, the sort of thing that might be suspicious. But Delacruz told NCIS that was actually a lie. malicious. But Delacruz told NCIS that was actually a lie. The men were just standing there, some of them with their hands up. He said he'd lied about it after Wuderich told him to. After the shooting by the white car, the Marines moved to the houses. And the NCIS statements from the shooters about what happened inside those houses were full of startling admissions. Like how when the Marines arrived at 11-year-old Safa's house, they apparently rang the doorbell,

and then Safa's dad, Eunice, came to the door to answer it. One of the Marines, Humberto Mendoza, told NCIS that he then shot Eunice right in the doorway. Shot a man for answering his own door. And Mendoza also told investigators that he'd shot another man in the house nearby because

he thought he was reaching for something, even though he never saw a gun. I read statement after statement from Marines describing firing quickly inside the houses without identifying who they were shooting at, even though the rules of engagement said you had to identify people, had to determine that they were the enemy before shooting at them. One Marine, Hector Salinas, described shooting a figure in the hallway of six-year-old Abdul Rahman's house. That figure turned out to be a grandmother. Another Marine, Lance Corporal Justin Sherritt,

told investigators that he stood near the doorway of Abdul Rahman's living room and fired blindly until he ran out of ammo. All right, it is Friday, and I am on page 10,000. One day in my apartment, I was sitting down for my daily reading of the investigative file, making my way through the thousands of pages we'd received. So I'm diving in. It's 9.44 in the morning. And I've made a lot of coffee to get me through this, because this is a particularly dense batch of documents I know I have in front of me today.

And then I came across something, buried in all these documents. A statement. Actually, a series of statements that I'd never seen before. This is a Tatum thing. These statements were from a Marine who had seemed to be relatively unremarkable. When we talked to other Marines, almost no one could remember anything about him. Lance Corporal Stephen Tatum. Tatum had flown under the radar during the initial investigation by Colonel Watt. His statement to Watt was vague and unmemorable.

He'd admitted to being in the first two houses that morning, the house where 6-year-old Abdul Rahman lived with his family, and the next house, where 11-year-old Safa lived with her family. But Tatum didn't mention shooting at anyone inside the houses. It was all incredibly vague. But right away, when Tatum started talking to NCIS investigators, he admitted that he'd been one of the shooters. He said he'd actually shot at people in both of those houses.

He'd shot in the living room of Abdul Rahman's house and inside Safa's house, in the bedroom, where Safa and her mother and siblings and aunt were, many of them lying close to each other on a bed. But that wasn't all Tatum told NCIS. lying close to each other on a bed. But that wasn't all Tatum told NCIS. Tatum talked to NCIS several times.

And at first, he claimed he didn't know who he was firing at. He said it was dusty and smoky, and he could only make out shapes. He was just shooting at targets. Targets he assumed to be hostile. Then one day, NCIS investigators were interrogating Tatum again. And this time, he broke down. He started crying. In this interview and in other interviews to NCIS,

Tatum revealed that he knew that he was shooting women and children. He was looking right at them, but he shot them anyway. Tatum told investigators that in the first house, Abdul Rahman's house, inside the living room, he personally had shot four people, all on the right side of the room. He said he knew he was shooting women and children in that room. He said he hadn't seen any weapons on any of them, and that none of the people were even standing up when he shot them. Tatum told NCIS that he only stopped shooting after everything in the room stopped moving. He recalled how later that day, he saw two children being let out of the house to get medical treatment. Those two children

were Abdul Rahman and his sister Iman. Tatum said he wondered, how did they survive? In the next house, Safa's house, the house where Safa hid in the back bedroom while her entire family was killed around her, Tatum's statements were even more detailed. Tatum said he saw his squad leader, Sergeant Wuderich, firing in that back bedroom. And he followed Wuderich inside. He said he recognized that women and children were together in that back bedroom before he shot them. He said some of the children were kneeling. I don't remember the exact number, Tatum said, but only that it was a lot.

And then Tatum described one child in particular. He said he wasn't sure if this child was a boy or a girl, but that they were wearing a white shirt and had short hair and were standing on the bed. Tatum told investigators that he looked at the child and then fired. He said, quote, Knowing it was a kid, I still shot him. Knowing it was a kid, I still shot him.

Tatum had admitted to knowingly shooting a child, actually several children, in two houses. It was about as clear-cut of an admission of guilt that you could get. At the risk of stating the obvious, it's illegal to knowingly kill children who don't pose a threat. It's a war crime. And yet Tatum had never been convicted of a of the blame on his squad leader, Sergeant Wuderich. Tatum said the only reason he shot the children in the bedroom was because he saw Wuderich shooting at them first.

As for what happened in the house nearby, Abdul Rahman's house, Tatum told investigators that he shot the women and children in that house because, quote, women and kids can hurt you too. Tatum told investigators, quote, I regret that innocent children were killed that day, but I also know I did what I had to do. Thank you. These statements by Tatum ended up being used by military prosecutors to file charges against him. After the charges were filed, Tatum's defense was that he actually hadn't made any of those statements about knowingly killing women and children, the implication being that the statements had been fabricated by NCIS. The investigators hadn't recorded audio of the interviews with Tatum or with any of the Marines, but they had taken detailed notes, notes from all the interviews they'd had with Tatum

where he'd admitted to knowing who he was shooting. I have those notes, and they match the typed-up statements. These notes and statements were written by multiple investigators over the course of several interviews, conducted weeks apart. As for Sergeant Wuderich, the squad leader, the one who Tatum said had shot first in Abdulrahman's living room and in the back bedroom of Safa's house, and who Delacruz said shot first at the people by the white car, Wuderich never talked to NCIS. He refused to.

Wuderich had admitted to the first investigator, Colonel Watt, that he shot at people by the white car. But his statement to Watt about what happened inside the houses was vague. He would later forcefully deny that he ever fired his weapon inside either of those houses. I wanted to talk to all six of the men who were involved in the killings that day. Hi, I'm trying to reach Mr. Mendoza. My name is Madeline. I called. I sent letters. I want to get the story right.

I got no response. I went to Della Cruz's house in Texas. We were stopping by to talk to Mr. Della Cruz. He wasn't home. He was not in town right now. Oh, okay. I knocked on Salinas' door, also in Texas, with our producer Natalie.

He was not happy to see us. He declined to talk. Maybe we can leave our contact info at least? Absolutely not. We later sent Salinas a letter with our findings about what he did that day, some of which were pulled from his own statements to investigators. Salinas responded in a brief email, calling it all false. I tried to go to Mendoza's house and to Wuderich's.

Both of them, it turns out, live in the same city in California in separate gated communities. There's a lot of signs, private property, no trespassing, violators will be prosecuted. It wasn't possible to get inside. Shoot. Well, there goes our plan to door knock. And we tried to talk to Stephen Tatum, the Marine who NCIS said admitted to knowingly killing women and children in two houses.

Our reporter Parker and our producer Natalie went to try to find him. Well, we're at the 7-Eleven outside of Oklahoma City. And we're about to drive to Stephen Tatum's house. They drove into the subdivision in Oklahoma City where Tatum lives, out in the flat, windy plains. It was November. The trees were bare. The grass was dead. They passed one red brick house after another until they found his. Tatum opened the door. He was tall and clean-shaven, with the same side-parted hair we'd seen in photos of him back in Iraq.

His hair was now graying. He was wearing a blue hoodie and jeans. Hey, my name's Parker. This is Natalie. We're radio reporters. We're working on a project about the Iraq War. And we're researching the day in detail when Corporal Tarazis was killed. Sounds like it was quite an intense day. I have no comment. If you have any questions, you can talk to my lawyer.

How would we get in touch with... Zimmerman and Zimmerman. They're out of Houston. We've read some of your statements to investigators and it sounds like you really regret the way things turned out that day. Who wouldn't? But like I said, I have no comment. You can talk to my lawyer. You can give him the questions and he'll decide whether I answer them or not. You said you do regret what happened that day. What about that day? Again, you can contact my lawyer and he will forward the questions on to me and I'll decide what I want to answer. Okay. There's just one thing we need to make sure we ask you while we're here. I've

already told you everything you're going to get. Which is that we've read your statements to investigators where you said that you saw women and children in those rooms and you shot them anyway. Tatum went inside. The interview was over. Tatum went inside. The interview was over. A couple weeks later, I called the law firm that represented Tatum to try to see if Tatum would reconsider our interview request. I ended up talking to one of Tatum's lawyers, a woman named Terry Zimmerman. I explained that I wanted to talk to Tatum.

I said I wondered what his life was like now. She told me that she thought my questions were valuable, but that she thought it probably wouldn't be a good idea for Tatum to talk to us. She said, quote, you know, there's no statute of limitations for murder. So as a lawyer, I'm kind of hesitant to advise a client to make any statements about a case when his case isn't resolved. Zimmerman said she'd check in with Tatum and get back to me. We spoke a few weeks later, and she told me she had a statement for me from Tatum.

So he's authorized me to tell you that he's doing really, really well today. He's grown up a lot, and he authorized me to tell you that he feels terrible about the loss of life. I mean, obviously, nobody wants to be responsible for killing another human being. But he was just doing his job the way he was trained to do. And as his lawyers, we've analyzed the facts and the law that applied at the time, and we don't feel like he violated any kind of rule, any kind of authority or law in any way. He never intended to break the law. He never intended to do anything wrong. And we as his lawyers don't think he did anything wrong.

Got it. You know, one of the statements that really does stand out to me is something that Tatum told investigators that in one of the houses he shot at a child knowing it was a child. And so I just wonder how you can reconcile that statement with the idea that he didn't do anything wrong. That's a totally fair question. I'll have to go through my file and find the statement that you're talking about. I told Zimmerman I could send her a copy of Tatum's statements. Yeah, if you'll email that to me, I will take a copy of Tatum's statements. I emailed her Tatum's statements. A few weeks later, she emailed me back.

She said she was going to stick with what she told me on the phone. She wrote, quote, the phone. She wrote, quote, Lance Corporal Tatum was doing what he was trained to do on the orders of people senior to him and was just as upset to learn of a loss of life as anyone else. He obviously wishes that had not happened, but he never meant to, nor in my opinion did he, break the law. As I do with all of my clients, I have advised him not to make any statements to anyone about this situation, but he thinks about this situation every day. He's done his best to get his education and a job and to be successful in life. We'll be back after the break. I'm going to love waiting for you at The New Yorker. Like this story, published just this year by Patrick Radden Keefe about a teen

who got mixed up in the London underworld and then mysteriously fell into the Thames. In the four years since Zach's death, the family has had to confront the extent to which the boy they thought they knew had been living a double existence. None of the Brettlers had ever imagined that Zach might be moving about London pretending to be someone else altogether. This season of In the Dark took us four years to report. You're hearing it now because The New Yorker believes in what we do. So go to newyorker.com slash dark and become a subscriber today. That's newyorker.com slash dark. And become a subscriber today. That's newyorker.com slash dark.

By this point, there was so much that I'd learned about what had happened that day in Haditha. But there was still something missing. Those pictures today have still not been seen. People are proud of that. Where are they? The pictures. The photos of the bodies,

taken by Marines just hours after the killings. The photos that the commandant of the Marine Corps, General Michael Hagee, had bragged about keeping secret. The photos that we'd sued the U.S. military to get, with the help of the survivors, the two collards, who went house to house collecting signatures from family members of the dead, saying they wanted us to have these images. Photos that the public has never seen.

These photos could show us what statements and memories could not. They could take us to the killing sites, to see these sites as they looked that day, to show us the bodies of the dead. I'd wanted these photos for one reason. They were evidence that could help me better understand what really happened that day.

That's why all the family members had signed those forms, saying they wanted us to have them. And then one day... Holy shit. I am, like, vibrating right now. I just woke up to an email that says... Well, it actually says something really boring, but I know how to decipher it.

It says, It actually says something really boring, but I know how to decipher it. It says, NCIS, Freedom of Information Act Request, Release of Information-Photographs. Wow. Okay, I'm going to tell Madeline hello what's up we have the photos we have all the photos

oh my gosh okay this is a very big deal okay let me open this This is a very big deal. Okay, let me open this. Alright, I'm opening... Oh my god. Oh my god. After four years of FOIA requests and lawsuits and help from the survivors,

the military had finally agreed to turn over the photos to us. My God, there's so many photos. There were more than 100 photos. They included many taken by Marines on the day of the killings, and they included photos taken months later by the criminal investigators from NCIS. The photos go through the entire chronology of the killings. So this is all photos of the people from the car. Yep. There are images of every single person the Marines killed that day. I'm going to open the next file.

In the photos, you can see the numbers that the Marines scrawled on the bodies of the dead with a red sharpie. I'm looking at a photo of someone who looks like they have maybe a 20 drawn on their head. It's a little unclear. There are wide shots of rooms, bullet holes, and blood covering the walls. Maybe shrapnel or bullet holes, shattered window, bullet hole in the window. And there are close-ups of faces. These are horrible.

Yeah, I see why you wouldn't want these photos released to the public. We kept going through them. One horrible photo after another. Oh, there's one photo that's so devastating. There's a mom on her back, lying dead on the bed. And then all of her dead children around her. And there's a little boy who's, like, curled up next to his mom. You can see how he's, like, kind of has his arm on his mom's stomach.

Yeah, and he's just, like, burrowing into the blanket. Yeah. Yeah. It was terrible. Yeah. Now that we had the photos, we needed to make sense of them, to see what exactly these photos could tell us. I needed to look at these photos with someone who knows what to look for.

So we got in touch with a forensics expert named Kevin Parmelee. Do you go by Mr. Parmelee or Kevin or how shall I address you? If it's informal, we could just do a Kevin. That's fine. Okay. All right. Well, I'm Madeline Barron. It's great to meet you. Parmelee is a former detective with more than 20 years experience in law enforcement. His specialties include forensic reconstruction. He helped create national standards for how to investigate crime scenes. When I first called up Parmalee to ask if he'd be willing to review the materials I had,

he agreed to take a look. But he cautioned me not to expect him to get too worked up over the photos. He said he'd spent his career looking at photos that most people would consider terribly gruesome. Photos like that, he said, can look really bad, but not actually prove anything. He added that his brother was a Marine who'd fought in Iraq. He said he knew that in war zones, decisions about what to do can get really complicated. Over there, it's a different environment, and your threats can come from anywhere. It's a much more hostile environment because it's a war zone.

I mean, you can't let your guard down at all. With all those caveats out of the way, we sent Parmalee what we had. He emailed back saying he'd stayed up until two in the morning, the first night he got the materials. And he continued meticulously reviewing everything we'd sent. A few weeks later, I gave him a call. So, I mean, overall, how valuable would you say these photos are? Oh, exceptionally valuable. They are very powerful.

Like, these photos are beautiful. It might sound like an odd thing to say, but these photos are beautiful. But Parmalee is a forensics expert. He was looking at these photos in a very particular way to see what they could tell us. And it turned out they could tell us a lot. Especially with the bullet defects and the blood and the positioning of the bodies, that actually lends a lot of information towards reconstructing the sequence of events.

So this is how we kind of piece it all together. Let's start with the first people the Marines killed that day. Five men who were killed after getting out of a white car near the site of the IED explosion. Some of the Marines had claimed those men were running when they were shot. But then one of those Marines changed his story. Sonic Dela Cruz told NCIS that actually the men were just standing by the car, some of them with their hands up, when they were killed. The photos clearly showed that the men were right next to the car,

not where you'd expect to see them if they'd been running away. And there was something else that was a little less obvious, something that Parmelee noticed, that indicated that maybe what happened to these men was even more chilling than what Delacruz had said. It was the way the body of one of the men was positioned. It looked like his legs were tucked underneath him. He was lying on his back.

So he has his knees up against that mound. He's the one that has his legs underneath him. It made Parmelee wonder something about what the man was doing when he was killed. Given the man's position on the ground, Parmelee ventured a guess. He could have been kneeling. Kneeling. Parmelee was careful to say that he couldn't say that for sure. It was just a possibility.

That the way this man's body was, a logical explanation for how it got that way, was that he'd been kneeling when he was shot. This possibility that some of the men were kneeling was actually corroborated by the statements of two soldiers from the Iraqi army who were in the convoy with the Marines that day. They have their statements to NCIS, and they both said that the men were kneeling. One of them even said the men had their hands on

top of their heads when they were shot. So the truth of what happened to the men by the white car was now becoming clear. They almost certainly were not running. At least some of the men may have even been kneeling. We moved on to the next set of photos. These were taken inside six-year-old Abdulrahman's house, the first house that Marines entered that morning. Tatum had admitted to NCIS that he'd shot people inside the living room of this house. According to NCIS records, Tatum said that he shot four people,

all on the right side of the room, and that he knew that the people he shot included women and children, and that the people hadn't even been standing when he shot them. Tatum didn't provide many details beyond that. The only person we talked to who'd seen what happened inside this room was Abdulrahman, and he really couldn't remember much. And so it was hard for me to picture this scene. I had the memories of a man who was just six years old when the killings happened, and the statements of Marines under investigation for murder. All I knew for sure was that four people had been killed in that room. Three adults, Abdul Rahman's mother, his uncle, and his grandfather.

And one child, Abdul Rahman's four-year-old brother, Abdullah. The photos show that the grandfather's body was very badly damaged, and the uncle had been shot in the head. But it was what the photos showed about what happened to Abdulrahman's mom, Asma, and her four-year-old son, Abdullah, that really stood out to Parmely. This one broke everything open. The first photo of the living room that we looked at was a wide shot. You can see white walls, a patterned red rug on the floor, and pillows scattered around.

There's a couch along the back wall and what looks like a space heater, a typical living room in Iraq. Could you zoom in, especially to the position of them? And there, in the far corner of the room, next to the couch, I saw two bodies huddled together. I realized I was looking at Asma and her four-year-old son, Abdullah. They were on the right side of the room, the side of the room where Tatum said he shot four people. Asma and Abdullah were kneeling in the corner of the room, heads down, their foreheads touching the ground, in a position like you would be in if you ever had to do a tornado drill at school.

Basically, the least threatening position the human body can be in. They're kneeling, facing, well, they're facing the floor, but they're kneeling with the bottom of their head facing towards the doorway, so they're next to each other. Asma looked like she'd been wounded on her neck. It's not clear how exactly she was killed. But looking at these photos, you could imagine this moment of a mom trying to protect her son. Four-year-old Abdullah was pressed up between his mom and the wall, and his mom had put her arm around him in what would be their final moments. The photo has her left arm over him.

Almost like she's getting as close to the wall as she can. My guess, I mean, who knows, but it seems like she might have put him in the safest possible place she could try to put him. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. This was all awful. But what Parmalee was about to tell me was even worse. It had to do with what the photos could tell us about how exactly Asma's son was killed.

In the photos the military sent us, there's a close-up photo of four-year-old Abdullah. It looks like someone had taken him out of the position he was in next to his mom and propped him up. He was wearing a t-shirt with a cartoon helicopter on it. And the first thing the photo clearly showed was that Abdullah had been shot in the head. The wound goes from his back right neck and it goes forward to his left temple. So what does that tell you? Oh, that lines up the trajectory. The trajectory. Where Parmely was going now was right to the question of where the shot came from. Where the shooter would have had to have been when he fired at Abdullah's head.

Parmelee saw this question as a math problem. Geometry, actually. It's something that forensics experts do all the time. Determine where a shooter would have been shooting from, their position. If you shoot a bullet from a gun, you can pretty much determine what the bullet trajectory would have been. You're basically drawing a straight line from where the shooter's gun was through the entry wound and the exit wound. So now we have that line segment, and then what you do is you go from the exit wound, which is blown out on the left side, you go to the entry wound, which is his right neck, and you're going to bring that back towards where the shooter was located. There was furniture in the room that would have limited the places a shooter could have stood. And of course, there were also walls. We also had the

measurements of the room. They'd been taken by military investigators. Parmalee took all that into account too. And then he gave me his analysis. Overwhelmingly, the information from that child, his wounds and the trajectory are very, very clear. The person who shot Abdullah couldn't have been doing something like firing blindly from the entryway. That's total opposite trajectory. That angle just didn't line up. Not at all. Like, not in the doorway. Oh, absolutely not. Parmely pointed to a small object, the space heater, right next to Abdallah's mom, Asma, just a few feet from Abdallah. That spot, right next to that space heater, Parmely said, was where the person who shot Abdullah would have been standing. So he was standing right next to her in front of that object.

He's pointing his rifle down at the boy, pointing it down towards the boy's head. That would be the angle that he was shooting him from. Parmely was saying the shooter was incredibly close to this little boy, just a few feet away. Basically standing over the mom Asma and shooting down into Abdullah's head. This is an up close and personal shot where you're putting a bullet into a little boy. Like he was shot from like one side of his head to the other.

He was executed from the back right to the front left temple while his face was down in a kneeling position. And you're saying executed. Talk about that. Why are you saying executed? There's no misconstruing the size of this child and the position that they're in that they're not a threat to them. As Parmalee was telling me this, it was obvious that he was getting upset. At one point, it almost looked like he was about to cry. I wondered how he was feeling. He paused for a long time. I've seen a lot of kids killed throughout my career.

It's not easy. But it just takes me back to all those experiences as well. It's just, it's disgusting. It really is. You know, I wasn't in a war zone. I give a lot of latitude and tolerance to understanding what people were going through in those times. And we're all human and we make decisions in a fast pace and, you know, split seconds. This wasn't split second. This wasn't split second. And this is really, it really pulls at my emotions a lot. Looking at the photos of Abdullah, he's so small.

He's clearly just a little kid, huddled in a corner, with his mom maybe trying to calm him or protect him by putting her arm around him. And someone stood over this mother, aimed their gun at this little boy, and shot him in the head. There's no doubt that that's an execution. Once they decide to stand a foot next to a four-year-old child and put a bullet in his head, there's no way that you cannot see that that's a child. There's no way that you can't process that information.

That's why I firmly believe that that was an execution. Parmalee and I moved on to the photos of the next house, the house where 11-year-old Safa had hidden next to the bed while her mom and siblings were shot to death. The Marines killed eight people inside this house. They killed Safa's father, Eunice, when he answered the door. And then the Marines killed seven people, all in the back bedroom. Tatum had told NCIS that he'd seen Wuderich shooting in this back bedroom, and so he'd followed Wuderich inside. According to NCIS records, Tatum said

he'd seen children in the room, on the bed, including a child who was actually standing on the bed. Tatum said this child was wearing a white shirt. Tatum told NCIS he looked at this child and then opened fire. There are several photos of this bedroom. In the photos, you can see the spot where Safa had said she was hiding with her sister Noor next to the bed. Noor's body is right there, exactly where Safa said it was, crouching down in the small space between the bed and the wall. And on the other side of the bed, near the doorway, was Safa's aunt lying dead on the floor. The aunt that Safa said was shot after she peeked out into the hallway

to see what was going on. And then there was the bed, where Safa had said her siblings had huddled with their mom, terrified. The photos of this bed are devastating. Safa's mom is lying on her back, her head on a pillow. Lying next to her are four of her children. There's little Aisha, just three years old, wearing a shirt with a flower on it, her head covered in blood. There's her older sister, 10-year-old Seba, lying next to her. There's her brother, 8-year-old Mohamed, the one who Safa had

told us had initially survived the shooting but was injured and screaming. He's her brother, eight-year-old Mohamed, the one who Safa had told us had initially survived the shooting, but was injured and screaming. He's curled up next to his mom, his elbow touching her stomach. And then there was five-year-old Zainab. Zainab's injuries were particularly gruesome. Her head was so badly damaged, I couldn't even see it in the photos. I had to ask Parmalee to show it to me. Her head is to the right. It's just under, it's next to the child that's in green. Okay. You see it down at the bottom, it's a little bit dark. It's a bottom center. Without getting too detailed here, I'll just say that there wasn't much left of her head. It was mostly gone.

Parmalee pointed out a yellow blanket on the bed in front of Zaynab. He said that if Zaynab had been shot lying down, you'd expect to see a lot of blood and other parts of her head on the blanket. But the blanket didn't appear to have much blood on it at all. Because right now, if you look at the yellow blanket or that yellow cloth right there, it's not consistent with being shot in that location. Instead, there was a lot of blood on the wall next to the bed,

which DiParmeli suggested that at the time that Zaynab was shot, she was actually sitting up on the bed, or maybe even standing on it. I would think that the head was higher. was shot, she was actually sitting up on the bed, or maybe even standing on it. I would think that the head was higher. If the child's head is up and I shoot, it's going to go towards that wall that has all of that. A five-year-old shot standing on a bed, just as Tatum had described. This bedroom was small. We have the measurements. It was just 13 by 17 feet. The bed took up a lot of that space, and there was furniture along some of the walls, making the

space seem even smaller. No matter where the Marines were in the room, they would have been close to the people they were shooting. In general, looking at the photos of Safa's house, what is your assessment of whether the shooters would have been able to see that they were shooting women and children? So, they go in, they went into the room, and they were just taking shots at the people in the bed. How did they not perceive that these were children, as they have to identify that they're in the bed? How did they not perceive that these were children as they have to identify that they're in the bed? Yeah, don't expect me to rationalize that one. According to NCIS's forensic examiner, who analyzed the bullet trajectories, one of the shooters would have had to have been standing near the foot of the bed.

The space was so small that the tip of the Marines' rifle likely reached over the bed when it was being fired. After the break, one last set of photos. Hi, this is David Remnick. I'm proud to share the news that three films from the New Yorker documentary series have been shortlisted for the Academy Awards. And they are Incident, Seat 31, Zoe Zephyr, and Eternal Father. And they all immerse you in the finest cinematic journalism, exploring themes of justice, identity, and the bonds that shape us. These extraordinary films, which were created by established filmmakers, as well as emerging artists, will inform, challenge, and move you. I encourage you to

watch them along with our full slate of documentary and narrative films at newyorker.com slash video. The final house the Marines went into that day was the house where the Marines killed the four brothers. When we spoke with their surviving family members, Ehab, Najla, and Najla's son, Khaled Jamal, they all said they wanted more than anything to know exactly what happened inside that house. She just wants to know who, who, who've been murdered first. The last thing the family said they saw was the four brothers being marched into the house by two Marines, and then a short while later, they'd heard gunshots.

He wants to know the little details after they couldn't see them anymore. Khaled Jamal had told us that he's always going over and over that day in his mind, wondering exactly what happened inside that house. Who was killed first? Did his father have to watch as his younger brothers were killed? He told us he'd even dreamt about it. That's why he signed the form saying he wanted us to have the photos, and why he helped the other Khalid, Khaled Salman Rasif,

take those forms door-to-door in Haditha, to collect signatures from other surviving family members of those killed. To know. The photos of the inside of this house, the photos of Khaled Jamal's father and his three younger brothers, were the last set of photos we looked at. Khaled Jamal and his mom Najla and Aunt Ehab had described each one of the four brothers in loving detail, what they were like as fathers, husbands, uncles. Now I was looking at photos of all four men lying dead on the floor. The Marines who were involved in this shooting had told investigators that when they entered the house, there were four men inside,

two of them holding AK-47s. A Marine fired first, and all four men were shot dead. The photos show the men lying dead, shot in the head. And there were other photos, photos that didn't have any bodies in them, that turned out to be more revealing. These were photos of bullet holes and bloodstains on the furniture and walls of the room. They'd been taken by forensic investigators from NCIS, who'd entered this house four months after the killings, to try to collect evidence from this room. I have the tiniest bit of audio of these investigators

recording themselves entering this house back in 2006. Time is 12.33. We've been clearance to enter House 4, marking in the hall hallway, marking what appears to be reddish-brown. This will be B1, potential bloody fingerprints. We're going to be here longer than we thought. When the NCIS investigators entered the room,

they looked for any evidence of the shootings. By then, months after the killings, the blood on the floor had been cleaned up, and most of the room by this point looked pretty normal. But something caught the investigators' eyes. There was a big piece of most of the room by this point looked pretty normal. But something caught the investigators' eyes. There was a big piece of furniture in the room, a freestanding wooden wardrobe. The family said they'd found the body of one of the brothers, Marwan, inside this wardrobe. And on the door of that wardrobe, the investigators noticed something. A small hole, the size of a bullet. They opened the door, and inside they

found bloodstains, and another hole leading out the back. Then they moved the wardrobe away from the wall, and that's when they noticed something metallic in the wall, a bullet. They pulled it out. It was a.556 round, the type of bullet used in an M-16. There were two Marines who admitted to being in that house, Lance Corporal Justin Sherritt and Sergeant Frank Wuderich. Sherritt didn't have an M-16, but his squad leader, Sergeant Wuderich, did. NCIS concluded that most likely Wuderich shot Marwan, as Marwan hid in the wardrobe with the door closed. Then there was the question of how Khaled Jamal's father, Jamal, had died. Investigators found another set of bullet holes and bloodstains that lined up with where Khaled Jamal's father's body had been found. They concluded that Khaled

Jamal's father had been sitting or crouching down against the wall next to the wardrobe. Investigators found a nine millimeter bullet in the wall behind where his body had been. The only Marine who had a 9mm in that house was Sherritt. And then there were the two other men in the room, Chasib and Kattan. Both of them had been shot in the face, right by the doorway, while they were standing. What the NCIS investigators had found, and what these photos showed, contradicted the Marines' accounts, especially Sherritt's, which was particularly detailed. Sherritt claimed that after he shot the first two men near the doorway, the other two men started moving toward them. Or, as Sherritt put it in a statement to investigators, he, quote,

He, quote, saw others in the corner moving to their fallen comrades, so I was not taking any chances of them picking up the AKs. I fired at them and took them out. But according to the photos and the NCIS forensic analysis, these two men were definitely not moving toward their fallen comrades. One of them, Marwan, had jumped into a wardrobe. The other, Khaled Jamal's father, was crouched down or sitting in a far corner. This hardly sounded like the behavior of insurgents who had lured the Marines to a house to kill them. It sounded a lot more like what terrified, unarmed men would do

when they realized they were trapped in a room with Marines intent on killing them. Marines who were standing in the doorway, blocking their escape. This stood out to Parmalee too. So you have people in the room moving away from the doorway. They're not, you know, coming together. And yeah, you couldn't be more isolated trying to get into a closet as opposed to going towards your comrades. So that definitely refutes that statement right off the bat. And then that also reduces the credibility of the people that are giving those statements. Taken together, all this evidence allowed NCIS to reconstruct what most likely happened inside this room. NCIS concluded

that most likely the first person killed was Ketan, because his body was closest to the doorway. Then Chasib, who was right behind his brother Ketan. NCIS thought it most likely that Jamal, Khaled Jamal's father, was shot next, as he sat or crouched on the floor across the room. father, was shot next as he sat or crouched on the floor across the room. Marwan was probably the last brother to be killed. NCIS thought it most likely that the Marines saw Marwan go into the wardrobe and that then Wuderich stood in front of the wardrobe and opened fire with a single shot at the closed door, a shot that hit Marwan in the head. shot that hit Marwan in the head. After looking at all the photos and reading the NCIS reports, I got in touch with Khaled Jamal and told him that if he wanted, I could tell him what the photos and the other forensic evidence indicated about what most likely happened in the final

moments of the lives of his father and uncles. Khaled Jamal told me yes, he wanted to know. And so we set up a call with an interpreter, and I told Khaled Jamal what we'd learned. Khaled Jamal had wanted to know, but knowing brought its own pain. Khaled Jamal told me that he'd hoped to hear that his father and uncles had fought back, had resisted the Marines somehow. And now, knowing that his father had been crouching down behind a door and one of his uncles had been inside a wardrobe,

the idea that his father and uncles had died fighting had been replaced by something that was somehow even sadder. Khalid Jamal asked me a question. Could I send him the photos of his dead father and uncles? I told him yes, but I cautioned him that the photos were very graphic. He said he understood. And so I sent him copies of the photos, the photos of his own family that the military had kept for all these years. The photos that Khalid Jamal had worked so hard to get by gathering all of those signatures. They were now his. I'd looked at all the evidence.

I'd looked at the photos, at the Marines' statements, at all the thousands of pages of documents in the investigative files. I'd watched the video that Khalid Salman Rasif had helped to make. We'd interviewed the Marines who'd responded to the killings, and we'd interviewed the survivors, including people who'd actually witnessed the killings. What happened on the morning of November 19, 2005, was no longer a mystery.

Dela Cruz and Wuderich had shot at the five men by the white car. Some of the men, Dela Cruz said, had their hands up. The photos showed at least one of the men was maybe even kneeling. Some of the Marines had then gone into Abdulrahman's house. A Marine named Hector Salinas had killed a grandmother in the hallway. A Marine named Humberto Mendoza had killed the father. The Marines went into the living room.

Sherritt and Tatum both admit to shooting in this room. Sherritt told investigators that he stood near the doorway and fired blindly until he ran out of ammo. Tatum says Wuderich was shooting too. Tatum said he shot four people all along the right side of the room. The photo showed that the people on the right side included four-year-old Abdullah and his mom Asma. One man escaped from the house, but was later shot by Marines outside. The Marines went to a house close by. They apparently rang the doorbell. Safa's dad,

Yunus, answered. Mendoza shot and killed him. The Marines entered the house. Tatum made his way to the back bedroom. He said he saw Wuderich already inside the bedroom, shooting at people. Tatum went inside the bedroom, too. According to NCIS records, Tatum said he saw women and children. He saw a child, maybe five-year-old Zaynab, standing on the bed. And Tatum opened fire. the bed, and Tatum opened fire. The Marines went into one last house. According to the survivors, the Marines separated the men from the women, children, and elderly, and ordered the men, four of them, all brothers, into one of the houses. Wuderich and Sherritt went into the house and killed them. Sherritt did most of the killing. He shot three of the brothers in the head. The fourth brother, Marwan, appeared to have jumped into a wardrobe. But according to NCIS, Wuderich shot through the wardrobe door and the bullet hit Marwan in the head. This was a case full of evidence.

Photos, forensics, statements from Iraqi eyewitnesses. Statements where Marines implicated themselves and each other. There were even the confessions from Tatum. 24 killings. And yet, there wasn't a single criminal conviction for any of them. How did that happen? How did the military go from having all this evidence to having the cases completely fall apart?

The answer to that question, coming up on In the Dark. One last thing about the photos. Once we got them, we talked for a long time as a team about what to do with them. We talked with our editors and with other colleagues at The New Yorker, and we talked to some of the survivors as well. And we decided to publish a selection of photos that we thought were especially important to understanding what happened that day. All these photos were published with the permission of the surviving family members of the people depicted. You can find them at newyorker.com slash season three.

In the Dark is reported and produced by me, Madeline Barron, managing producer Samara Fremark, producers Natalie Jablonski and Raymond Tungakar, and reporter Parker Yesko. In the Dark is edited by Katherine Winter and Willing Davidson. Interpreting in a Rock by Aya Muthana. Additional interpreting and translation by Aya Alshakarchi. This episode was fact-checked by Linnea Feldman Emerson. Original music by Allison Leighton Brown. Additional music by Chris Julin. Sound design and mix by John DeLore. Our theme is by Gary Meister. Our art is by Emiliano Ponzi. Art direction by Nicholas Conrad and Aviva Michaelov. FOIA legal representation from the FOIA team at

Loewe & Loewe. Legal review by Fabio Bertone. In the Dark was created by American Public Media Thank you. You can send them to us at inthedarkatnewyorker.com. And make sure to follow In the Dark wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, this is David Remnick, and I'm pleased to share the news that I'm Not a Robot, a live-action short film from the New Yorker's Screening Room series, has been shortlisted for the Academy Awards. This thought-provoking film grapples with questions that we can all relate to about identity and technology and what it means to be human in an increasingly digital world.

I encourage you to watch I'm Not a Robot, along with our full slate of documentary and narrative films, at newyorker.com slash video. From PRX.