Aftershock: The Blast That Shook Psycho Platoon
Five soldiers injured in the same 2009 bomb blast are a case study in a new epidemic among America’s troops, who are grappling with a combination of concussion and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Series:Brain Wars: How the Military Is Failing Its Wounded
Updated March 13: ABC News and CNN have reported that the soldier who allegedly killed 16 Afghan civilians previously suffered a traumatic brain injury during one of his four deployments, citing unnamed Defense Department sources. As part of our extensive coverage of traumatic brain injury, ProPublica featured a unit of soldiers dubbed “Psycho Platoon” who sustained brain injuries in Iraq and had severe mental health challenges when they returned from their deployments. In another story, we also visited Fort Lewis, where the soldier accused of the killings was based. While there, we talked to soldiers about how they are assessed for brain injuries.
A version of this story was co-produced with NPR and aired on All Things Considered. (Listen here.) This story was also published as part of Amazon’s Kindle Singles program, and is available for reading on that device.
MINOT, ND — At 8:20 p.m. on Sept. 21, 2010, Iraq veteran Brock Savelkoul decided it was time to die. He lurched from his black Tacoma pickup truck, gripping a 9-mm pistol. In front of him, a half dozen law enforcement officers crouched behind patrol cars with their weapons drawn. They had surrounded him on a muddy red road after an hour-long chase that reached speeds of 105 miles per hour. Savelkoul stared at the ring of men and women before ducking into the cab of his truck. He cranked up the radio. A country song about whiskey and cigarettes wafted out across an endless sprawl of North Dakota farmland, stubbled from the recent harvest. Sleet was falling, chilling the air. Savelkoul, 29, walked slowly toward the officers. He gestured wildly with his gun. “Go ahead, shoot me! … Please, shoot me,” he yelled, his face illuminated in a chiaroscuro of blazing spotlights and the deepening darkness. “Do it. Pull it. Do I have to point my gun at you to … do it?”
Twenty feet away, the officers shifted nervously. Some placed their fingers on the triggers of their shotguns and took aim at Savelkoul’s chest. They were exhausted, on edge after the chase and long standoff. They knew only the sketchiest of details about the man in front of them, his blond hair short, his face twisted in grief and anger. Dispatchers had told them that Savelkoul had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. They warned that he might have been drinking. Family members told police that Savelkoul had fled his home with six weapons, including a semiautomatic assault rifle and several hundred rounds of hollow point ammunition. To Megan Christopher, a trooper with the North Dakota Highway Patrol, Savelkoul’s intentions seemed obvious. “Suicide by cop,” she thought. “He wants to go out in a blaze of glory.”
As it happened, Savelkoul’s state of mind was of interest not only to the cops, but to some of the nation’s top military officers and medical researchers.
More than 2 million troops have deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001. Tens of thousands have returned with a bedeviling mix of psychological and cognitive problems. For decades, doctors have recognized that soldiers can suffer lasting wounds from the sheer terror of combat, a condition referred to today as post-traumatic stress disorder. They also have come to know that blows to the head from roadside bombs — the signature weapon in Iraq and Afghanistan — can result in mild traumatic injuries to the brain, or concussions, that can leave soldiers unable to remember, to follow orders, to think normally.
Now it is becoming clear that soldiers like Savelkoul are coming home afflicted with both conditions, in numbers never seen before. Studies have estimated that about 20 percent of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have suffered a mild traumatic brain injury while deployed. Of those, anywhere between 5 percent to nearly 50 percent may suffer both PTSD and lingering problems from traumatic brain injuries. It is an epidemic so new that doctors aren’t even sure what to call it, let alone how best to diagnose and treat it.
Savelkoul and four of his comrades landed on the front lines of this confounding new conflict over the minds of America’s soldiers when an Iraqi rocket exploded near their trailer in January 2009. By chance, a senior Army neuropsychologist was in Iraq at the time to conduct a study on the military’s tools for diagnosing concussions. After learning of the attack, he persuaded Savelkoul and the others to enroll. The men became the first fully documented victims of “pure blast” concussions — that is, mild traumatic brain injuries caused by the force of an explosion, rather than a secondary effect, such as slamming into a Humvee wall after a roadside bomb.
The concussions marked only the beginning of the men’s problems. Aftershocks from the blast would ripple through each of their lives differently, mirroring the spectrum of psychic and physical outcomes that doctors have begun to catalog. Of the five men injured that night, three remain in the Army and are currently deployed to overseas war zones. One recovered quickly, though he continues to suffer occasional severe headaches. Two recuperated more gradually but complain of forgetfulness and problems concentrating. A fourth left the military, tired of the violence and still grappling with concussion symptoms.
Savelkoul struggled the most to return to the person he had been before. On that night last September, his troubles transformed from academic data point to terrifyingly real confrontation. All the Army’s men, all its research, all its treatments, had failed to prevent the desperate showdown that would unfold on a deserted stretch of highway just south of the pinched hills of the Dakota badlands. Now the outcome depended on one distraught man and a half-dozen nerve-wracked police officers, trying to negotiate a battlefield of the mind that none of them — no one in the world, really — understood.
An Unremarkable Blast
In the violence of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it was an unremarkable attack on an unremarkable day.
On the night of Jan. 16, 2009, several soldiers were hunched around a small television screen in a trailer at Camp Liberty, a sprawling base just outside of Baghdad. The men of Psycho platoon, Hell Raisers Battery, 1-7 Field Artillery of the famed 1st Infantry Division, the Big Red One, had arrived in Iraq from Fort Riley, Kan., in October 2008. They were on their second or third tours. After spending most of the day patrolling a nearby Iraqi village, they decided to unwind by playing “Call of Duty 4,” a video game that allows players to act as U.S. Marines fighting in an unspecified Middle Eastern country. Subtitled “Modern Warfare,” the game’s scenes are harrowingly similar to the conflict in Iraq, with patrols down narrow streets of dun-colored buildings, sudden explosions and attacks by hidden enemies. “It sounds strange, but it’s how we relaxed,” said Staff Sgt. Derrick Junge, a muscular Illinois native with a shaved head and a fondness for reading Virgil, John Milton and Charles Dickens.
At about 8 p.m., the men heard the warning klaxon of the Phalanx, an antimissile system designed to destroy incoming mortar and artillery rounds by spraying bullets into the sky. The men continued playing “Call of Duty.” Rocket attacks were common. The insurgents aimed so poorly that they rarely posed a danger. Seven minutes after the first warning, a second sounded. One man remembered that a fellow player, referring to the video game, called out “He’s got a grenade!” Then, chaos enveloped the men.
Staff Sgt. James Hopkins, a Missouri native with a slight build, sharp face and a love of Red Vines candy, was sitting on his bed in a room next door to the rest of the men. He was talking to his wife on Skype. The blast force threw him to the floor. “It was just loud and thunderous. The living quarters actually shook. It was like if I were to stand next to the biggest Fourth of July explosion ever.”
Interactive Timeline: How One Blast Affected Five Soldiers
Spc. Jared Hollingshead was standing when the blast hit. The stocky Texan remembered “a bright flash of light, a very loud bang and everything goes blank after that. It was the most heart-wrenching thing you’ll ever go through. It feels like your whole body clamps up. It’s beyond words. It’s utter terror.”
Shane Fuller, then a corporal, was sitting with his back to the wall, listening to music on his laptop computer. “I just slumped over from the force of it,” said Fuller, a Missourian who joined the Army after the lawnmower engine factory where he worked shut down. “All I could hear was ringing for 10 to 15 seconds.”
An Iranian-made 107mm rocket had just slammed into one of the 12-foot-high concrete blast walls that protected the soldiers’ housing compound, blowing a football-sized hole into the wall. Shrapnel, jagged and red hot, shredded the thin shell of the trailer, puncturing it with holes. Lights crashed down from the ceiling. Power went out. Fuller miraculously escaped physical injury, though shrapnel pierced the wall around him and ripped apart a Missouri State flag hanging above his head.
The men remember the next few minutes haphazardly, like a movie in which they duck in and out of the theater. In the dark and smoke that filled the trailer, several of them heard Savelkoul call out: “I’m hit, I’m hit!” A piece of metal from the rocket had burned his leg, making him the only soldier to suffer an external injury in the blast. Junge groped through the dark for a flashlight. Hopkins staggered out of his room to check on his men. Hollingshead grabbed his rifle. Fuller, who had blacked out, came to with blood streaming from his nose. Several ran to Savelkoul, dragging him to a nearby bunker.
Within minutes, combat medics arrived and took the men to a nearby medical clinic. They cleaned and bandaged Savelkoul’s wound. They checked out Fuller but determined he had no injury. Though medics are supposed to check soldiers exposed to a blast for concussion, none of the men remembers talking about traumatic brain injury — though all admit their memories were hazy. According to a doctor who reviewed their medical charts, none were diagnosed with concussions.
The men felt lucky. Nobody had died, nobody was seriously wounded, as far as they could tell. “I looked at it as though it wasn’t a huge deal,” Junge said. “You look at yourself and you say, nothing really happened to me.”
By the next morning, Junge and several others went back on patrol.
As chance would have it, two weeks earlier, Lt. Col. Mike Russell — then the Army’s most senior neuropsychologist — had landed in Iraq to begin a study of concussion at the behest of the Army’s surgeon general. One of the first graduates of the neuropsychology program at Walter Reed Hospital, Russell had spent much of his career studying traumatic brain injury at Army hospitals and combat zones all over the world. He was something of an iconoclast in the military. Blunt-spoken and easily frustrated with bureaucracy, Russell decided the best way to find patients for his study was simply to hang out in military clinics, seeking blast survivors. He happened to hear about the rocket attacks at Camp Liberty and asked to examine Savelkoul and his comrades personally.
After assessing them at a field clinic on base three days after the blast, Russell concluded that five of the soldiers in the blast that night had, indeed, suffered mild traumatic brain injuries. The signs were obvious, Russell said, showing up clearly in the daylong battery of neuropsychology exams he performed. “When you work a lot with acute concussion, you actually kind of recognize even the look of a person who has been acutely concussed, which is kind of a dazed expression, a little bit unfocused, a little bit slow to respond,” Russell said. “Several of them had significant gaps in their memory. And it wasn’t clear how long they were unconscious. The last thing they remember is they were playing video games. The next thing they remember, they are outside the trailer in a shelter. Some minutes had actually passed where they weren’t recording memories. That’s post-traumatic amnesia. And that’s your classic symptoms of a concussion.”
For each of the men, Russell entered two diagnoses in their electronic medical records:
1. Concussion
2. Post concussive syndrome
The New Epidemic
War has always fueled innovation, helpful and horrible. Better body armor and battlefield medicine have helped soldiers survive injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan that would have proven fatal in previous conflicts. But the advances that have saved soldiers’ bodies cannot protect their minds from insurgents’ primary weapon, the roadside bomb. Blast waves penetrate through Humvee doors, bulletproof vests and Kevlar helmets, rattling soldiers’ brains and altering cells and circuitry. Most recover quickly, but some suffer lasting damage to their cognitive abilities. At the same time, the terrifying experience of surviving such blasts haunts them, seeping out in violent nightmares and emotional outbursts.
Given the number of troops deployed, tens of thousands of soldiers, Marines, sailors and airmen may be suffering from this pernicious combination of PTSD and lasting problems from mild traumatic brain injury. They become, quite literally, different men and women than they used to be, a generation of warriors whose fight has shifted from external combat zones to invisible internal battlefields.
The issue has ignited debate in scientific and military circles, where much of the basic science remains in dispute. Are the two conditions related? If so, how? Does having a mild traumatic brain injury increase the chance of developing post-traumatic stress disorder? Or does surviving a terrifying event somehow make it more difficult for the brain to recover from a concussion? Doctors also struggle to tell the two conditions apart. PTSD and traumatic brain injury can produce similar symptoms, such as problems with memory and concentration. Yet both conditions escape detection by medical imaging devices, hindering diagnosis. Other conditions further complicate the picture. Besides PTSD and cognitive problems stemming from brain injury, soldiers also face chronic pain, missing limbs, vision, hearing and other physical problems. “It’s very complicated,” said Jennifer Vasterling, who has studied the issue and treated soldiers as chief of psychology at the Boston Veteran’s Administration Hospital. “There are no simple scenarios.”
Until recently, concussions were not even seen as particularly serious. Boxers boasted of returning to the ring after being knocked out. Soldiers in combat shook off feeling dazed and unfocused. Symptoms of concussions can include headaches, dizziness, difficulty speaking, memory troubles and sometimes balance and visions problems. Most people recover within four to six weeks. But for some, the symptoms can persist for months or even years. Civilian studies have found that between 5 percent and 15 percent of concussion victims endure long-term problems — a condition formally known as post-concussion syndrome. Recent studies of athletes in the NFL and other sports have shown that repeated concussions can result in chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a condition associated with dementia and other Alzheimer’s-like disorders.
Some researchers believe that soldiers’ concussions may pose an even more complex medical challenge. Soldiers sustain their injuries in settings dramatically different from those encountered by athletes or car accident victims. Civilian concussions are typically caused by a physical blow to the head. But nobody is sure exactly how the brain is damaged in a blast concussion. Do blast waves rupture miniature blood vessels inside the brain? Does the force sever connections between neurons? Does it damage individual brain cells? Or does it simply slam the helmet into the head hard enough to injure the brain?
After the blast, soldiers face a different environment than typical concussion victims. No fans applaud as they rise from the field. Medics often can’t rush them to the safety of a hospital right away. Instead, they remain on a hostile battlefield, fighting for their lives, the violence and rush of combat filling their brain with abnormal levels of chemicals such as adrenaline. Those left dazed, but not unconscious, experience a fear so fierce that it may simultaneously trigger post-traumatic stress. Paradoxically, patients who suffer severe traumatic brain injuries are less likely to develop PTSD — perhaps because, knocked unconscious, they do not actually experience the horror unfolding around them.
“The scientific literature does not capture or mention the kind of patient that we are seeing,” said Maria Mouritidas, psychology chair at Baltimore’s College of Notre Dame, who worked with soldiers returning from the battlefield. “You can’t compare this to a football game or a car injury. In a football game, if you go down, the game stops. On the battlefield, the game doesn’t stop. Your survival depends on it.”
For decades, the military has struggled to sort out the mysteries of concussions. In response to soldiers suffering head injuries during the Gulf War, the Pentagon and the Veterans Affairs joined forces to create what is today called the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center, a network of research and treatment clinics. But the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq dramatically expanded the need. Military doctors began noticing a wave of troops suffering brain injuries in blasts. In August 2006, the Armed Forces Epidemiological Board, responsible for monitoring health trends among troops, noted the growing number of head injuries. In a memo first disclosed by USA Today, the board warned senior Pentagon health officials that the military’s medical system “lacks a system-wide approach for proper identification, management, and surveillance for individuals who sustain a TBI, in particular mild TBI/concussion.”
However, it wasn’t until the Walter Reed Hospital scandal of 2007 that the military dramatically increased attention to the so-called “invisible” wounds of war. The Washington Post revealed that officials at the hospital, the crown jewel of the military medical system, housed soldiers with brain damage in moldy hospital rooms, often ignoring their needs. The scandal caused an uproar in Congress and across the nation. Lawmakers passed legislation devoting more than $300 million in new research funds to brain injuries and PTSD. They ordered the military to conduct cognitive screenings of soldiers before and after deployment. President Bush created a commission headed by retired Sen. Bob Dole and former Health Secretary Donna Shalala to suggest recommendations to improve care for soldiers with PTSD and brain injury. In 2008, the Rand Corporation produced a groundbreaking report estimating that 19 percent of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan had suffered a probable traumatic brain injury, while another 18 percent reported symptoms of PTSD or depression. About 5 percent reported a combination.
Yet, despite the pressure and the growing numbers, the Pentagon’s response was uneven, at best. ProPublica and NPR reported last year that the military continues to have problems diagnosing and treating brain-injured soldiers. The military’s standard screens failed to catch as many as 40 percent of concussions, according to a study published earlier this month. Injuries weren’t always noted in soldiers’ medical files because of poor recordkeeping. In some cases, soldiers resisted admitting that they had sustained head traumas because of a desire to remain on the battlefield with comrades. In the command echelons, some high-ranking military officers dismissed the effects of mild traumatic brain injuries.
Col. Heidi Terrio, an Army doctor who has worked extensively with soldiers returning from the combat field, conducted a study published in the Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation that reported that 7.5 percent of combat soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan showed three or more symptoms associated with post-concussion syndrome, with another 20 percent reporting one symptom. Terrio said her study showed that it was important to pay attention to soldiers with concussions. “Mild traumatic injury does not mean it’s a mild problem,” she said. “Mild doesn’t necessarily mean mild consequences. One concussion may cause you to have lifelong problems. Most of the time it doesn’t but it can.”
The lack of clarity has frustrated battlefield commanders trying to navigate the debate in the middle of a war. “I don’t feel comfortable on where the science is right now,” said Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the vice chief of staff for the Army. “It’s an extraordinarily tough nut to crack.”
Chiarelli has worked relentlessly to change that, convening conferences of top neurologists and flying them to his wood-paneled office in the Pentagon’s inner ring to hammer out possible treatments. He has encouraged researchers to find biomarkers to better diagnose brain injury. He envisions a system that, with enough data, could one day help commanders predict which soldiers were at greatest risk of committing suicide.
Interactive Timeline: How One Blast Affected Five Soldiers
Although he acknowledges there is more work ahead, Chiarelli’s temper flares at the suggestion that the Army is not trying hard enough to improve how it diagnoses and treats soldiers with brain trauma. He points to a directive issued last year that mandated rest periods for soldiers involved in blasts and thorough neurological examinations for those suffering three or more concussions. He also notes that the military has spent millions of dollars on research that has generated promising new technologies to identify and treat injuries related to PTSD and TBI.
“Our doctors are doing everything they can to come up with the best techniques possible to insure they get better at the initial diagnosis of these injuries,” Chiarelli said. “But it is extremely difficult because the science is not as developed as it is with the mechanical nature of this war.”
Call of Duty
Though the men of Psycho platoon returned to duty shortly after the explosion, several continued to experience aftereffects.
Hollingshead remembered stumbling across the base, unable to keep his balance on the white gravel that lined the ground between buildings. His ears rang constantly. He had difficulty keeping track of what his sergeants were telling him to do. “I just could not remember it. I’d ask three different times. It’s a very unusual feeling, not being able to remember all of a sudden.” Hopkins had similar trouble. “I just didn’t feel right. I could barely walk a straight line,” he said. “I was forgetting things, my attention span was shot, someone would be directly talking to me and I would not even really be paying attention. I couldn’t recall or say back what they said to me. It was like I was paying attention but I wasn’t gathering the information.” Junge had splitting headaches, so he popped ibuprofen and Tylenol PM to help get to sleep.
In March, the Army held a ceremony to award the men combat action badges, given to soldiers who have attacked or been attacked by the enemy. For the wound to his leg, Savelkoul also received a Purple Heart, one of the military’s most revered symbols of sacrifice, an honor dating back to George Washington. The other men, however, were turned down, even though Army regulations specifically list concussion as an injury deserving recognition. Hopkins was incensed. He began firing off appeals on behalf of himself and his men, with no success. “They don’t consider [concussions] to be an injury that is going to stay with you for the long term,” he said. “That’s a big slap in the face.”
For most of the men, some symptoms improved. Their balance got better, the headaches were not as severe — a typical recovery from mild traumatic brain injury. But the symptoms did not go away entirely. Fuller’s ears kept ringing. Hollingshead’s headaches remained painful, sometimes disabling. Still, the men continued providing security details for senior commanders, patrolling villages, or protecting fuel and food convoys racing across the desert. “After we saw Dr. Russell, that was it. It was back to work,” Hollingshead said. “Nobody ever came back to us to follow up.”
Savelkoul was awarded another commendation, the Army Achievement Medal, for manning a gun truck and coordinating air support during a dangerous run between Baghdad and Al Hillah. That April, he was scheduled for a rest and relaxation break. He decided to go with a friend to Thailand. On March 20, he posted a message on Facebook: “on my way to Thailand !!!!” His sister, Angie, quickly wrote back: “have fun. Don’t do anything stupid.”
Savelkoul didn’t reply.
The Farm Kid
Savelkoul grew up in North Dakota. His father was a car salesman, then a truck driver. When Savelkoul was getting ready to enter high school, the family enrolled him in a school in Glenburn, pop. 347, in far north-central North Dakota because their hometown school in Minot, pop. 36,000, was too big. Savelkoul played football and basketball for the Glenburn High Panthers. During halftime, he played trumpet in the high school band. At Christmas at his grandparents, Savelkoul and Angie, a flute player, would play mini-concerts. The family had its troubles, and Savelkoul’s parents eventually divorced, but they stayed close.
Savelkoul loved hunting: deer, geese, coots. When he was 14, Savelkoul and his father Bruce drove out to the North Dakota badlands on a rainy, gray winter day. They hiked up a hill, getting soaked as they searched for game for hours. Suddenly, right in front of them, Bruce spotted a mule deer. It would be Brock’s first kill. He started shaking uncontrollably as he tried to lower his rifle. Bruce gently crouched in front of him and had Brock lay the rifle across his shoulder, steadying it. Brock aimed, killing the deer with a single shot. It was a beautiful buck, its antlers tall and broad above its head. The mount, which won first place at a local trophy show in 1996, would hang on the wall of Bruce’s mobile home, the first thing you see when you walked in the door. “He was a good kid, a very good kid,” said Bruce, who is balding, with glasses. His pride in his son is obvious. “He was a farm kid. We had farm values — scruples and values and respect.”
After high school, Brock Savelkoul attended community college but soon dropped out. He was bored and unsure of what he wanted to do. He moved to Fargo, where he got a job with a fencing company. One day, he was on a job with an older man. He suddenly realized that he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life building fences in Fargo. In February 2003, he signed up with the Army. He was assigned to Fort Riley. Six months later, Savelkoul headed to Iraq for the first of three tours.
During his tours, Savelkoul took on a number of different jobs. He was the gunner on a Humvee that patrolled the streets. He did foot patrols of villages. He took a course and began to operate Ravens, small surveillance drones used to fly above roads to make sure they were clear of bombs. Mike Krebsbach, a friend from basic training, said Savelkoul was a good, conscientious soldier. They were based in Baghdad, their quarters a palace that had once belonged to Saddam Hussein. At night, they would sit on the roof, staring over the boxy brown cityscape. Krebsbach, an atheist, would debate Brock, a Catholic, about God, life, the war. “We didn’t talk much about the fear,” Krebsbach said.
Two incidents seemed to affect Savelkoul, changing him. During his first tour, his unit began taking fire after turning down an alleyway. The men, novices to combat, fired back, seeking desperately to escape. All survived, but the incident shook them. “Everybody was tripping out,” Krebsbach said. “We were acting like a combat infantry team, but with zero training. … There was just a bunch of really scared soldiers.”
During his second tour in 2005, Savelkoul was responsible for giving the OK after he scanned a route with the Raven and determined that there were no signs of IEDs, or improvised explosive devices. In an article for a base newsletter, he proudly told the reporter that his job saved soldiers’ lives. “We’re protecting them from the sky,” he said. One day, however, a convoy driving down a route he had checked hit an IED. Details are unclear. Savelkoul rarely spoke of it. The bomb destroyed one of the vehicles. Several soldiers apparently died in the blast. “It blew the truck into nothing. You didn’t even know it was a Humvee,” said Krebsbach, who remembered seeing the vehicle after it was towed back to base. He said Savelkoul became sullen and withdrawn afterward. “It was hard to get him not to fixate” on that incident, he said.
Bruce Savelkoul remembers getting a solemn phone call from his son after the explosion.
“Dad, I’m responsible for those deaths,” Brock told his father.
“No, you’re not,” Bruce responded, trying to console him. One of Savelkoul’s commanders, who did not want to be identified because the Army had not authorized him to comment, said that he had looked into the incident and concluded that Savelkoul was not negligent in carrying out his duties.
In any case, the Humvee deaths weighed on Savelkoul, as did the failure of a brief marriage, which ended in divorce just a few months before he left Iraq in January 2006. To Angie, his sister, he seemed different. Although some family members had suffered depression, Savelkoul had never shown any signs of mental distress. “He wasn’t his normal self. He was very quiet, withdrawn,” Angie said. “It’s like he wasn’t there.”
With straight blond hair and an open, honest face, Angie is the glue of the Savelkoul family, the little sister who keeps tabs on everyone. A labor and delivery nurse married to a plumber, she juggles crazy work hours with family crises and the kids’ basketball games. Through it all, she made sure to communicate with Brock regularly. When he deployed to Iraq again in October 2008, she convinced him to open a Facebook account. They exchanged messages after the Jan. 16 explosion. Brock assured her he was OK.
That was why Angie got nervous when Brock didn’t respond to her messages after he left for Thailand. “You need to write, call, something,” she wrote. ” … gettin worried … ”
She had reason to be. Her brother had begun to fall apart.
Former WWE NXT Champion makes shocking AEW debut 1 week after exit
Shounak Chakrabarti, ClutchPoints
Thu, January 29, 2026 at 12:34 PM UTC·
1 min read
Former WWE NXT Champion makes shocking AEW debut 1 week after exit appeared first on ClutchPoints. Add ClutchPoints as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
Just days after finishing up with WWE, former NXT champion Tommaso Ciampa made his AEW debut on the Wednesday, Jan. 28, 2026, edition of Dynamite. Shortly after making his shocking debut, Ciampa also found himself in a title match.
After Mark Briscoe successfully defended his TNT championship against El Clone, he issued an open challenge for his title, which was soon answered by Ciampa. Making his debut to a brand new theme song and moniker, ‘Psycho Killer,’ Ciampa walked out and stood face-to-face with Briscoe before kissing him on the cheek and departing. Moments after this awkward moment, the match was made official.
Just an hour after his debut, Tony Khan publicly announced the signing and confirmed Ciampa’s status as All Elite. Ciampa departed WWE last week when his contract expired, and he chose not to re-sign. Ciampa worked for WWE in two tenures, with his latest one lasting ten years. He’s a former two-time NXT Champion and held both the WWE Tag Team championship and NXT Tag Team championship with Johnny Gargano. Before joining WWE, Ciampa also actively wrestled for ROH (Ring of Honor) from 2011 to 2015, where he even held the ROH TV title.
Tommaso Ciampa addresses his AEW debut
Shortly after the match was announced, AEW’s social media team uploaded exclusive footage on their digital platforms, where Ciampa was heard addressing his debut. “Tonight, Tommaso Ciampa became All Elite. Saturday, I become the AEW TNT Champion. The psycho killer is alive!” Ciampa exclaimed.
Ciampa was transferred to WWE’s alumni section roster page on Jan. 27, 2026, indicating his exit from the company. He has now filed two monikers for his new gimmick, Psycho Killer and Psycho King.
