![]() Exhausted and running out of options, she turned to Chris Kyle. Routh’s mother, Jodi, had pleaded with the VA doctors not to release her son. But after a five-day stay, he was released again. 19, 2013, he had another psychotic episode, holding Weed and her roommate prisoner in their apartment while brandishing a knife until police arrived, and he landed at the VA hospital once more. She later recalled that he sometimes talked as though he had, in fact, seen action in Iraq, saying: “I’ve killed before, and I’ll do it again.” On Jan. He would seem better for a time, and he even found a girlfriend, Jennifer Weed, whom he had met online. He was again given medication and discharged. In September 2012, police picked him up walking down the road, incoherent, and he was brought to the VA hospital, suffering from what psychiatrists there called a major depressive illness and psychotic delusions. Meanwhile, he steadily self-medicated with alcohol and marijuana. Doctors prescribed a raft of antipsychotic and anti-anxiety drugs, including Risperidone, a powerful antipsychotic medication used to treat schizophrenia. He was admitted to the Veterans Administration hospital in Dallas for the first time in July 2011 and diagnosed with PTSD. He talked about killing himself alarmed, his family members took away his guns. At one point he was convinced that an imaginary tapeworm was devouring everything he ate. He had trouble keeping a job and began behaving erratically, having panic attacks and saying crazy, delusional things. Within a year, his life was falling apart. He was 38.īy all accounts, Routh returned to civilian life a profoundly changed man. Finally, he served for four months in the humanitarian relief effort in Haiti following the horrifically deadly earthquake of January 2010 and came back with harrowing stories, his father later said, of “fishing hundreds of bodies - men, women, children - out of the ocean, piling them up and throwing them into mass graves.”Ĭhris Kyle, author of American Sniper and the most lethal sniper in American military history, was killed on Feb. ![]() After Iraq, he was stationed aboard the USS Bataan, an amphibious assault ship, on a seven-month Middle East deployment. There is no record that Routh went “outside the wire” - seeing combat, in military vernacular. He became an armorer, repairing and maintaining small arms, and shipped out to Iraq in 2007. Unlike Kyle, who joined the Navy at 24 after attending college and working as a rodeo rider and cowboy, Routh enlisted in the U.S. Thirteen years younger, he graduated from the same high school in nearby suburban Midlothian that Kyle had attended. The men had never met, but Routh’s life was like a distorted mirror of Kyle’s.
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