Soldier who killed Iraqi had record

Drug investigation was under way

Dr. Yasser Salihee's body lay in his compact car on a busy Baghdad street for everyone to see.

The doctor, employed as a journalist, was shot by an American soldier who claimed that Salihee refused to slow down and who believed he presented a threat.

Though the details are disputed, the results were not: The June 2005 shooting outraged the very population the military is trying to win over.

"Before the accident I loved the Americans ... but after the accident, I hate all the Army," Salihee's widow, Raghad al-Jabar al-Wazan, also a medical doctor, told The Sacramento Bee. "All my neighbors were hating the Americans."

The shooter seemed beyond suspicion, with a resume fit for a character from a John Wayne movie: son of a Vietnam-era fighter pilot, former elite Army Ranger, sniper team leader, accomplished hunter and marksman, aspiring wilderness guide with a trunk full of awards and a small fan club of admiring young soldiers.

"This kid was a good soldier," said former Louisiana National Guard Maj. Andre Vige, who conducted an administrative inquiry into the shooting. "Good outfit. Good guys. One of the premier combat brigades of the National Guard. They were the standard-bearer."

But a yearlong examination by The Bee found that the shooter, Staff Sgt. Joseph J. Romero, brought a long, troubled past with him to Iraq, and the Guard unit Vige praised was riddled with misfits, drug users and soldiers with criminal records -- at least two of them former mental patients.

Romero is one of more than 70 soldiers and Marines with questionable backgrounds who were linked to incidents in the military, most occurring in Iraq, The Bee examination found.

Romero's history was similar to that of many of the others in The Bee examination: financial difficulties, domestic troubles, minor but persistent criminal histories, allegations of substance abuse -- or combinations of the four.

"CID [Army Criminal Investigation Command] had a long rap sheet on him," said Col. John Dunlap of the Louisiana National Guard, who supervised two drug investigations of Romero in Iraq. "There was a ton of stuff, and it was like he'd slip out every time. Nothing would happen to him."

When he shot Salihee, Romero was under investigation for selling cocaine, military records show, and days before the shooting, Romero threatened to kill a fellow soldier who reported him to CID.

Twenty-one days after the shooting, the drug allegations prompted the Army to strip Romero of his leadership, bar him from missions and take away his large-caliber sniper rifle.

Romero declined to comment for this report.

1990: The record begins

The earliest public criminal record on Romero in his hometown of Lafayette shows that on April 15, 1990, he was charged in municipal court with simple assault along with his friend Michael Wayne Boleyn Jr., who was charged with battery.

Ten months later, on Feb. 14, 1991, Lafayette Parish sheriff's detectives learned that Romero was visiting gun dealers to price a stolen shotgun. Five days later, sheriff's records show, Romero told detectives he got the shotgun from Boleyn in exchange for a deer hunting stand, a water slide and a pair of rubber boots.

Authorities subsequently accused Boleyn in a string of residential burglaries that included the shotgun theft, and, Boleyn said, he agreed to join the Louisiana National Guard at the suggestion of law enforcement officers. As a result, he said, the prosecutor dropped six of the eight burglary charges, and he was sentenced to five years' probation.

Boleyn, during an interview at his home near Lafayette, said he and Romero had committed the burglaries together and he has been angry ever since because he took all the blame.