Autopsy shows dead soldier likely tortured

Efing BASTARDS!!
I don't ever want to here that WE are the bad guy's again

El Paso Times
SAN ANTONIO -- After spending weeks studying the results of the autopsy of their son who was killed in Iraq, the parents of Spc. Byron Wayne Fouty believe he was tortured by his captors.

"We think they held him for up to four months, and those four months must have been hell," Charles Meunier, Fouty's stepfather, told the San Antonio Express-News for its Sunday editions.

When the autopsy results arrived a month ago, there was a word of caution for his mother, Hilary Meunier, who lives with her husband just outside of San Antonio.

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"I strongly recommend that you read this in the presence of people that can provide you with emotional support during this time such as your minister, family friend or a counselor," Navy Capt. C.T. Mallak, with the Office of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner in Washington, wrote in a cover letter.

Meunier read parts of the autopsy report to his wife, omitting graphic details and trying to shelter her from them.

"I've mourned and I've cried," he said. "The worst-case scenarios have gone through my mind."

It is not known how Fouty was treated before he died and severe decomposition of his remains made it difficult to reach conclusions.

But the one-page autopsy report and its four-page supplement offer clues that the 19-year-old may have been beaten and dismembered before he and Staff Sgt. Alex R. Jimenez, 25, were killed and buried in a shallow grave. The report's last page said that Fouty's nose had been broken but had "well healed prior
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to death."

The report also described foot bones detached from commingled remains of Fouty and Jimenez, and finger bones wrapped in a blanket. Part of a pair of handcuffs was found.

The remains had decayed and "demonstrated substantial sun-bleaching" after being dug up and partly eaten by animals.

Dr. Edward A. Reedy, chief deputy medical examiner, ruled Fouty's death a "homicide by undetermined means."

Meunier and his wife, Hilary, want their son's death prosecuted as a war crime.

Army officials have vowed to work with the Iraqi government to prosecute the suspects.

Fouty and Jimenez were kidnapped after their convoy was ambushed south of Baghdad in May 2007. Their families were told this July that their bodies had been found. Fouty's remains were buried July 25 at Fort Sam Houston.

Paul Stone, spokesman for the Office of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner, said the office wouldn't publicly discuss the autopsy report, but said he would help Charles and Hilary Meunier interpret the findings.