Quem é chris kyle

The next week, they waved at each other when she saw him dropping off his kids at school. One day, around the time of Routh’s follow-up appointment, Kyle told Jodi that he planned to call Routh, so that they could get together the coming weekend. She recalled, “The next day, I saw him again, and he pulled up close to where I was, and I stopped the truck and opened the door. And I said, ‘Hey, I forgot to ask you, but what’d you get? A niece or a nephew?’ He goes, ‘I got a niece.’ He was so happy. He had such a big smile and he was just so proud of this little baby. And that was actually the last time I talked to Chris.”

On the morning of Saturday, February 2nd, Kyle and his wife went to their son’s ballgame. Afterward, a friend of Kyle’s, Chad Littlefield, came over. Kyle and Littlefield had met on the sidelines of a youth soccer game and become fast friends. They hung out whenever Kyle found time—between book events, speaking engagements, and his obligations at Craft. They loaded up Kyle’s truck and went to pick up Routh. They were all going to a rifle range.

Routh was looking forward to the excursion. He craved the kind of companionship and solidarity that Kyle seemed capable of providing. “He needed someone to validate what he was feeling, that it was O.K. for other people to go through it,” Jen said.

The previous evening, Routh had proposed to Jen. “We were in the kitchen,” she recalled. “I was getting him his medicine. I turned around, and he got to one knee and asked me to marry him.” Routh didn’t have a ring—he was broke—but pledged to save up for one. Jen accepted the proposal, and spent the night at the house in Lancaster. (After the knife episode, Jen’s apartment building had banned Routh from the property.) They got into an argument the next morning, however, and she left around ten o’clock. Kyle and Littlefield showed up a few hours later.

Routh climbed into Kyle’s F-350, and they headed to Rough Creek Lodge, a resort ninety miles to the southwest. Kyle had helped design the thousand-yard rifle range there, and he was allowed to come and go as he pleased. The drive took a little more than an hour. According to Taya, Kyle thought that the trip would “give someone who was hurting a chance to talk on the drive, spend a short bit of time shooting, and then give him a little more time to talk on the way home, to find some outlets and resources.” One of the difficulties posed by P.T.S.D., however, is that the ability to trust others—a necessary component of treatment, according to Jonathan Shay—has often been destroyed.

Kyle parked in front of the main lodge around 3 P.M. Routh stayed in the truck while Kyle and Littlefield went inside to register. The property extends over eleven thousand acres; hunting grounds and the rifle range cover more than two-thirds of it, and a locked gate prevents golfers from straying into dangerous areas. At Kyle’s request, an employee radioed ahead to unlock the gate. Kyle and Littlefield got back in the truck, and they bumped along a dirt road for a few miles. They reached the shooting platform and raised a red Bravo flag, to warn others away. Kyle had reserved the range until four o’clock.

At 4:55 P.M., a guide noticed that the flag was still up. He drove toward the platform. He noticed several weapons set out, waiting to be fired, but he did not see Kyle’s truck. From a distance, the guide saw what appeared to be a sack. As he drew nearer, he realized that it was a dead body. Littlefield was on his back, with multiple gunshots in the chest; his pistol remained tucked in his jeans. Up close, the guide discerned grooves in the sand around Littlefield’s fingers, suggesting that he had clawed for life after hitting the ground.

Several feet away, Kyle was lying face down. He had been shot in the back and in the back of the head. Blood covered his baseball cap. His pistol lay in the sand, within reach. The guide called 911, then bent over Kyle to administer CPR. It was hopeless. He was dead.

As medics and police descended on Rough Creek, Routh was behind the wheel of Kyle’s truck. He stopped at a relative’s home, in Alvarado, around five, and called his sister. She asked about his day, and he said, “It’s kind of shitty. I broke up with my girlfriend from Louisiana.” Laura, assuming that he was talking about Jen, didn’t press him. (Jen is not from Louisiana.) Routh said that he was coming by. Laura plugged in her cell phone, whose battery was drained. “If he says anything crazy, I’m calling the police,” she told her husband, Gaines.

Twenty minutes later, Routh entered the house. He asked them if the world was freezing over, then announced that he had a new truck. Laura asked if he had traded in his car, a Volkswagen Beetle; he said no, but added, “I sold my soul for a truck.” He went on, “We went up to the gun range. I killed them.”

Laura asked her brother what he was talking about.

“Chris and his friend. I killed them. I murdered them,” he said.

“I didn’t really think he was telling the truth,” Laura told me. “And he’s, like, ‘Are you and Gaines in Hell with me?’ And I was, like, ‘No, we’re not in Hell.’ And he was, like, ‘Well, do you think I can get to Oklahoma?’ And I was, like, ‘Oklahoma? What’s in Oklahoma?’ And he’s, like, ‘Well, if I can get to Oklahoma, I can get out of this.’ And I was, like, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I think you’re telling me a story. Don’t lie to me. Tell me what happened.’ And at this point we’re almost to the front door, and so we walked outside, and when we walked outside I thought I was gonna throw up on myself, because here’s this truck that I know he could never afford. The tires alone were expensive. That’s the first thing I saw—these giant, big knobby tires on this pickup truck.”

Laura realized that Routh really must have killed two men. He offered to show Gaines the murder weapon, and began reaching into a tool chest in the truck. They told him to stop. Laura was afraid for herself and for Gaines, and she asked Routh to leave and turn himself in. Before he drove off, he said to her, “I love you, Beezer.”

“That’s my nickname—my family’s always called me that,” she told me. “In that moment, he was my baby brother again. He started walking toward me and he hugged me. And I gave him a hug back. ‘I love you, too, but I hate your demons. Please tell me this is not true,’ I said. He just looked at me with this weird look I’ve never seen from him before.”

When he was gone, Laura phoned the police. “He’s fucking psychotic,” she told the dispatcher. Her brother had P.T.S.D., she continued, and he had told Laura and her husband that “he killed them”—Kyle and Littlefield—“before they could kill him. He said he couldn’t trust anyone anymore.”

“I’m looking for something that won’t say anything about me.”

A police bulletin went out. Two officers waited outside the Routh house, which was empty—Jodi and Raymond were out of town. Routh pulled up around 8 P.M. and parked out front. The cops approached on foot. They carried on a conversation for approximately fifteen minutes before Routh threw the truck into drive and sped away. A chase ensued, and they caught him after authorities spiked his tires. At the police station, he confessed to killing Kyle and Littlefield. When the Texas Rangers searched the Rouths’ home, they found a bong and a box of ammunition.

That night, Routh was transferred to a jail in Erath County, where the murders took place. He has been on suicide watch since then. He is permitted to write letters and make phone calls, although Jen has not heard from him in months. She still loves him, and does not know whether she should stop considering herself engaged. Routh is facing charges of capital murder.

Not long after the murders, he sent me a brief letter, written in pencil: “I need out of the box I’m in. If you could help let me know. Want to go back overseas to help the world.”

Chad Littlefield’s memorial service took place at a Baptist church in Midlothian. The turnout exceeded expectations, and Taya Kyle was among those present. Three days later, Chris Kyle’s service was held, in Cowboys Stadium. It was an overcast day. Patriot Guard riders lined up outside, holding American flags. Todd and Sarah Palin attended. Although nearly seven thousand people had gathered inside the stadium, it was eerily silent. The Jumbotron flashed a series of photographs; in most of them, Kyle was holding a firearm. A soundtrack set the mood: Rod Stewart’s “Forever Young” was paired with images of Kyle’s childhood; AC/DC’s “Back in Black” accompanied battlefield shots; “You Raise Me Up,” by Josh Groban, played behind pictures of Kyle with Taya and their kids. The montage was followed by bagpipes, bass drums, and pallbearers.

Positioned in the middle of the stage was Kyle’s battle cross: a geometric arrangement of his boots, his helmet, and his Kevlar jacket (with the Punisher logo). Nobody who stepped to the lectern that day—including Randy Travis, who sang “Amazing Grace”—introduced himself. A chaplain asked God to “help us to forgive our enemy who stole Chris’s life,” and begged for “sure justice, Father, implemented through our governmental authorities, as it is demanded by the laws of our great state and our great country.” Texas executes more prisoners than any state in the U.S.

The chaplain referred to Kyle as a “husband, father, son, brother, friend, teammate, and righteous, mighty, victorious warrior.” Several of Kyle’s former SEAL teammates spoke about him. “What made him a legend was his heart,” one of them said.

Taya eventually went up. She told me that she never considered not giving a eulogy: “I wanted to say it to him, and wanted to say it loud.” At the lectern, she said that she was “not a fan of people romanticizing their loved ones in death,” and characterized her relationship with Kyle as “messy, passionate, full of every extreme emotion known to man.” She went on, “The messy, painful, constantly changing, messy ride was rolled up into the deepest, most soul-changing experience that only one man, Chris Kyle, could bring. Chris was all in, no matter what he did in life.”

The next morning, Kyle’s family and friends travelled to Austin for a state burial; the funeral procession is said to have stretched two hundred miles. Since then, Taya has made Kyle’s causes her own. (This will include mounting a defense against Jesse Ventura, who has decided to pursue damages against Kyle’s estate. A trial is expected to begin later this year.) Taya said of Kyle, “His heart and spirit can be very contagious.” In April, she appeared at a daylong seminar for educators in Texas, which detailed the kind of training required for a concealed-handgun license. (Kyle believed that classrooms would be safer if some teachers were trained to carry weapons.) More recently, she addressed the annual convention of the National Rifle Association, in Houston. Wearing a navy-and-gray dress, with Kyle’s dog tags dangling from her neck, she spoke at length about her husband, saying, “He loved his fellow-man enough to take on the immense responsibility of using his gun—the only effective tool he had—to stop the evil coming at them.” Guns, she suggested, were part of the fabric of Kyle’s identity. After he returned from war, Kyle was “blessed to be able to serve countless numbers of veterans during hunts and shoots.” She added, “He discovered a new use for guns: healing.”

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