The presiding officer in the investigation into the killing of 24 Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha concluded the cases lacked sufficient evidence to proceed with murder charges. Investigators recommended charging Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich with negligent homicide rather than murder because of the nature of the investigation. Murder charges against Lance Cpl. Justin Sharratt were thrown out and it is expected that generals overseeing the case will follow suit for charges pending against Lance Cpl. Stephen Tatum.
Sharratt was charged with the execution style murder of three Iraqi men, but later had the charges dismissed. Tatum faced an Article 32 investigation for the negligent homicide of two men, a woman and a child, as well as assault on two children injured by a grenade. Wuterich was charged with 18-counts of murder during a "clearing operation" following in IED – improvised explosive device – on a military convoy of the U.S. Marine's Kilo Company in the town of Haditha.
On November 19th, 2005, a convoy of Marines from Kilo Company was on patrol in Haditha. An IED was detonated under a humvee, killing Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas ("TJ") and wounding two others. According to Iraqi witnesses, Marines entered a house near the area and fired on its residents, killing seven. Marines then entered a second home and detonated a grenade, killing eight of its residents, including a 2-year-old boy. Witness accounts then describe the Marines entering a third home, killing four men inside a small closet. According to the official account from the U.S. Marines, the entire event lasted five hours with at least 23 dead. 15 were classified as non-combatants. The Marines found two AK-47's in the five hour raid.
Observers had classified the Haditha incident as evidence of the Iraq war contributing to incidents of atrocity, as the My Lai massacre did in Vietnam. In contrast to the My Lai investigation, however, delays and other jurisprudential pitfalls complicated the Haditha investigation. In My Lai, the judges, witnesses, and the accused were on-site of the event. In Haditha, however, the investigation was handicapped by ongoing conflict at the scene of the killings, evidence disappeared, and witnesses simply forgot the details when the investigation got underway 13 months after the fact. The Haditha investigation was conducted at Camp Pendleton, Calif., and not in Iraq.
But in the end, the case of Haditha was largely written off as a consequence of the fog of war. With an enemy fighting in urban areas mixed with civilians, the cases may have lacked the evidence necessary to prosecute the Marines with outright murder. Col. Ware, who recommended dropping the murder charges against Wuterich, noted that the evidence “is simply not strong enough to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.”
