One month after election, Fort Bragg soldier Enrique Roman-Martinez's head is "safe" to be ruled a homicide

 

On May 22 of this year, some paratroopers from the 82^nd Airborne Division from Fort Bragg, North Carolina were camping out at the Cape Lookout National Seashore. On that day one of them turned up “missing.” A search for the soldier began, and ten days later his decapitated head was discovered washed up along the beach; the search ended without further effort to find his body. 

Yesterday an autopsy report was finally released, claiming that it “remains unclear” how the soldier died; according to the Division of Forensic Pathology at East Carolina University Brody School of Medicine report,

While decapitation is, in and of itself, universally fatal, the remainder of the body in this case was not available for examination, and therefore potential causes of death involving the torso and extremities cannot be excluded…A definitive cause of death cannot be determined, (but) the findings, in this case, are most consistent with death due to homicide.

The report stated that the victim’s head showed “multiple chop” wounds, and his jaw was broken in at least two places. It seems reasonable to suspect that the victim was first badly beaten before he was decapitated, and then his remains were likely dumped at sea. And it took six months to decide that this was a “homicide”? Six months of failure by law enforcement to seriously investigate and search for evidence of foul play? Failure to question the soldiers who he was with, or any of the “locals” in the area? What were people at the school doing with the victim’s head all this time? Using it for “classroom instruction,” or for some perverse ogling?

Perhaps if we knew who the victim was we would “understand” better what was going on here. The soldier’s name was Enrique Roman-Martinez. If he was a black soldier or a white female, this would have been BIG news from the moment the victim’s head was discovered. An obvious, horrible racist hate crime where answers would have been demanded on one end, or “Dateline” and “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” fodder on the other end. But not here; Roman-Martinez’ murder has “hate crime” written all over it, but it wasn’t even treated as a murder even when it should have been clear to everyone that it was not only murder, but one of a shockingly appalling nature, and could have only have been “explained” by a very high degree of animus of the racial variety.

Perhaps we can “speculate” why this case was kept quiet by local law enforcement, and wasn’t a matter of public debate—absolutely “astonishing” given the fact that the victim was serving in this country’s armed forces. North Carolina was still “in play” for Joe Biden; Trump ended-up winning the state by less than 75,000 votes. Had this case been treated as a likely hate crime against a man because he was Hispanic, given all the anti-immigrant rhetoric by Trump and the well-known anti-Hispanic animosity of his principle “domestic” adviser, Stephen Miller, there might have been a small but significant anti-Trump “swing” in the vote.

But the case was not “news,” there was no apparent investigation into the case, and Trump was never required to respond to it or “defend” the very likely racist perpetrators. The mainstream media wasn’t required to use this case to call attention to ongoing issues of murder and suicides at Fort Bragg, and racist acts by white residents around the base. This can only be explained by the fact that this involved a Hispanic soldier and not a more politically palatable victim—the kind of “prejudice” we have seen in the media against addressing anti-Hispanic bigotry, and in not doing so, even  refusing to  allow Hispanics themselves to address these issues. This case should have been treated like that of the 1995 murders of a black man and woman, a case that was investigated immediately, and found to have been perpetrated by two white Fort Bragg soldiers who were paratroopers by day, and neo-Nazi stormtroopers by night.

But it was not. The Army has belatedly offered a $25,000 reward for information in the case, a tacit but much too late admission that this case has been bungled from the start, and a refusal to admit the obvious. Up until this point, Roman-Martinez’s case has been treated just as his head has been these past six months: an anonymous object of “curiosity” at best, and avoidance at worst, and very possibly for political reasons.