September 17, 2013.

Shooting Suspect Had Record of Gun Use, Misconduct

Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth. Just once in his life he had possessed----after the event: that was what counted----concrete, unmistakable evidence of an act of falsification. He had held it between his fingers for as long as thirty seconds. In 1973, it must have been----at any rate, it was at about the time when he and Katharine had parted. But the really relevant date was seven or eight years earlier.

Aaron Alexis, the 34-year-old suspect killed in the U.S.Navy Yard shooting spree, had at least two earlier brushes with the law involving guns that led to the end of his four-year Navy career in 2011.

The story really began in the middle sixties, the period of the great purges in which the original leaders of the Revolution were wiped out once and for all. By 1970 none of them was left, except Big Brother himself. All the rest had by that time been exposed as traitors and counter-revolutionaries. Goldstein had fled and was hiding no one knew where, and of the others, a few had simply disappeared, while the majority had been executed after spectacular public trials at which they made confession of their crimes. Among the last survivors were three men named Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford. It must have been in 1965 that these three had been arrested. As often happened, they had vanished for a year or more, so that one did not know whether they were alive or dead, and then had suddenly been brought forth to incriminate themselves in the usual way. They had confessed to intelligence with the enemy (at that date, too, the enemy was Eurasia), embezzlement of public funds, the murder of various trusted Party members, intrigues against the leadership of Big Brother which had started long before the Revolution happened, and acts of sabotage causing the death of hundreds of thousands of people. After confessing to these things they had been pardoned, reinstated in the Party, and given posts which were in fact sinecures but which sounded important. All three had written long, abject articles in The Times, analyzing the reasons for their defection and promising to make amends.

Mr. Alexis was a New York native who lived in Fort Worth, Texas, and worked in a Navy fleet logistics support squadron based there before he was discharged from the military after a 2010 arrest for firing a gun at his apartment. The incident sent a bullet into a neighbor's property a few days after an alleged confrontation with the neighbor over noise.

Some time after their release Winston had actually seen all three of them in the Chestnut Tree Cafe. He remembered the sort of terrified fascination with which he had watched them out of the corner of his eye. They were men far older than himself, relics of the ancient world, almost the last great figures left over from the heroic days of the Party. The glamour of the underground struggle and the civil war still faintly clung to them. He had the feeling, though already at that time facts and dates were growing blurry, that he had known their names years earlier than he had known that of Big Brother. But also they were outlaws, enemies, untouchables, doomed with absolute certainty to extinction within a year or two. No one who had once fallen into the hands of the Thought Police ever escaped in the end. They were corpses waiting to be sent back to the grave.

No one was injured and no charges were filed, according to the Tarrant County Criminal District Attorney's Office. According to the police report, Mr. Alexis said that "he was trying to clean his gun while cooking and that his hands were slippery."