Did the war make him do it?

Reporting from John Day, Ore. — 

When Jessie Bratcher’s fiancee told him the baby might not be his, that she had been raped two months earlier, he went quiet. The former Oregon National Guardsman hung his head for the longest time. Then he went into the next room, put the barrel of an AK-47 in his mouth and took it out again.

He told Celena Davis not to expect to get any sleep that night. He walked up to her with a pair of scissors and slowly cut off her hair.

Two mornings later, they drove to the hardware store. While Davis waited in the truck, Bratcher went in and bought a gun. He came out, loaded it and asked: Do we go to the police? Or go find the guy?

“Police,” Davis said.

Except it was a Saturday, and the main door to the station was locked. Bratcher and Davis didn’t know there was an emergency door on the side of the building.

So they headed for Jose Ceja Medina’s trailer.

At first Medina, standing on his porch in running shorts, denied knowing Davis. Then he said that they’d had sex, but that he hadn’t raped her, and he offered to take care of the baby.

He ended up with six hollow-point bullets in him.

At Bratcher’s murder trial, the district attorney argued that the 27-year-old onetime grocery clerk had hunted down and killed Medina.

But Bratcher’s lawyer said that when his client held the gun that morning, he was more than a furiously jealous boyfriend. He was a trained killer who’d been taught by the Army to mow down threats without much thinking. A man whose diminutive stature, quiet politeness and once-cheerful nature disguised the fact that he was, in the words of a sociologist who testified in the case, “a walking time bomb.”

In what veterans’ rights leaders say is the first major criminal exoneration linked to post-traumatic stress disorder, a jury in Canyon City, Ore., last month found that Bratcher was legally insane when he shot Medina.

“I only know of one cure for the experiences from these wars,” sociologist William Brown, a former Army drill sergeant, said later. “And that’s a lobotomy.”

Wars have always sent home haunted souls -- their anger, nightmares and flashbacks known at various times as shell shock, combat fatigue or, beginning with Vietnam, PTSD. But many trauma experts say Iraq and Afghanistan are producing a troubling hybrid of stress and traumatic brain injury, thanks to the roadside bombs that have become part of warfare. And unlike their Vietnam predecessors, who would normally serve a single tour, today’s soldiers are sometimes deployed for combat three or four times.

“We’re getting ready to face an epidemic,” said Floyd Meshad, president of the National Veterans Federation and author of a book on helping PTSD victims with what he said will be, for many of them, an inevitable trip through the criminal justice system.

Though a PTSD diagnosis has helped reduce prison terms for some defendants -- and resulted in the acquittal this year of a former Army captain in California charged with robbery -- Meshad said that Bratcher’s is the only such murder case he knows of.

“This is a major precedent,” he said.

Under Oregon law, jurors could have convicted Bratcher on a reduced charge of first-degree manslaughter, if they determined that he was a sane person acting in the passion of the moment. Instead they found him “guilty except insane” -- a ruling that will allow him to receive psychological treatment instead of prison.

“You’re going to hear a story that has all the elements of a Shakespearean tragedy,” Grant County Public Defender Markku Sario had told the jury during opening statements in the tiny rural courthouse in Canyon City. “War, sex, madness, violence. . . . And it ends as most Shakespearean tragedies do: Everybody loses.”

Bratcher was born and raised in Prairie City, just east of John Day, on loping land that rolls off the timbered mountains of eastern Oregon. His father, a Mexican farm worker, left almost immediately. His mother wasn’t up to raising him, so he lived with his grandfather David Baughman, a logger and auto body mechanic.

Baughman tried to raise Bratcher the way he’d been brought up.

“Speak the truth or don’t say nothing to nobody” was the wisdom Baughman said he passed along.

He took his grandson hunting, but Bratcher never wanted to do the killing. “It was violence to him,” Baughman said. “He just didn’t want to see anything die.”

After Sept. 11, Bratcher joined the Oregon National Guard.

“It was on our soil. You know what I mean?” he said in a recent jailhouse interview. Plus, he knew that as a veteran, he would get a college education. There wasn’t much chance of that otherwise.

Bratcher boarded a plane for Kuwait early in 2005 and spent the next 11 months at Forward Operating Base Warrior in Kirkuk, Iraq.

“Jessie was always the type of individual who talked to all the Iraqis, wanted to take pictures. Real happy,” said Martin Castellanoz, 43, a fellow Oregonian who was Bratcher’s platoon sergeant. “But after the first rocket attacks, I could see in Jessie’s demeanor already that he was beginning to get scared. Of course, I myself was scared.”

Bratcher also angered several of his fellow infantrymen when he refused to open fire on what he believed was an unknown target in the village of Tarjil, then contradicted their story when an investigation was launched.

“Because the other three individuals found out what he had wrote on his statement, he was basically seen as . . . a snitch,” Castellanoz said.

The young machine gunner asked for a transfer. “And I said, ‘I’m not gonna let anybody do nothing to you,’ ” Castellanoz said. “But the look on his face -- he wasn’t sure. He started being more withdrawn from us.”

One soldier Bratcher trusted was a fellow guardsman from Oregon, John Ogburn III. On patrol one day, Ogburn’s Humvee rolled over in an accident. Bratcher watched as his friend was crushed to death.

“I think that was the first . . . time that Bratcher had actually seen death up close,” Castellanoz said.

“I started seeing big changes in his attitude after that,” his platoon sergeant said. “It was more like ‘I don’t care.’ He had the mentality of ‘We die, we die.’ . . . We went out on patrols then, and he was hyper-alert. I’d hear him say things that I’d never thought I’d hear Bratcher say: ‘I’ll shoot ‘em. I’ll kill ‘em.’ ”

When Bratcher came back to Prairie City in late 2005, he got a job stocking shelves at the local supermarket, where he met Davis. But he would become resentful, even furious, when customers would reach back and take newer jugs of milk after he had carefully stacked the older ones in front.

Soon he was fired.

He started quarreling with his grandfather. For days at a time, Bratcher lived in the woods, setting up military-style perimeters and patrolling them with his modified assault rifles.

“When my boy come back, he really come back as a different boy,” Baughman said. “I couldn’t talk to him hardly at all anymore. At night sometimes he’d jump out of bed real fast, and he’d holler. He just had things on his mind, deep things, that I guess he probably couldn’t explain to anybody, really.”

Bratcher went to the Veterans Administration hospital several times. Doctors rejected his first claim of PTSD, though they later declared him 70% and then 100% disabled. They sent him home with medication to calm him down and help him sleep.

“I ran into him one time [at the VA], and he said: ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me, see?’ ” said Castellanoz, who is fighting his own stress disability.

Just like always, he told Bratcher not to worry. But then he quietly worried himself.

“People don’t understand. There’s times when I don’t have no feelings for nothing. I don’t care. I don’t sleep. . . . It’s like being disconnected from everything. Empty. I could see a dead man and wouldn’t even care. And I know this is something Bratcher went through.”

In November 2006, Bratcher and Davis moved into an apartment in John Day, and things seemed to get better for a while.

In mid-2008, Davis took a home pregnancy test, and when it turned out positive, Bratcher was so happy he grabbed the test kit and kissed it. He went on the Internet and looked up what kind of food Davis ought to be eating.

They started saving money to buy a house.

On the night of Aug. 14, 2008, Davis said, she was lying in bed, with Bratcher sitting nearby. She decided she needed to come clean.

According to Medina’s friends and family, Davis had earlier been in a relationship with the divorced father of three.

But during the trial, the judge ruled that whether there had been a rape or not was irrelevant. Nothing mattered except what the ex-guardsman thought had happened.

Nobody had deprogrammed Bratcher when he got home, Sario told the jury. He was the same hair-trigger killing machine he had been trained to be around Kirkuk.

“In previous wars, soldiers were told to aim carefully till you knew what you were shooting at. In this war, that’s not the case,” Sario argued. “The one thing they always emphasized was instant reaction to threats. If there’s a threat, eliminate it. Eliminate it now, without thinking, with overwhelming force.”

Bratcher had told his lawyer that in Medina’s yard that day, it was like he was in Kirkuk, watching murderous events unfold around him. He saw somebody shooting Medina, emptying all 10 rounds from the clip. Medina’s 14-year-old nephew was shouting from the front porch, and Bratcher saw him as an Iraqi woman screaming.

Afterward, Davis and Bratcher looked for a police car to flag down so he could turn himself in.

“Will you wait for me?” Bratcher asked Davis.

“Yeah,” she said. “I’ll wait for you.”

In another small trailer not far from where Medina died, his parents and two brothers have been trying to figure out why Jose is dead and nobody’s to blame.

“There’s no proof he was having a flashback, which he complained about. But there’s proof he bought the gun, and there’s proof that he used it,” said Francisco Medina, 19. “We understand he has PTSD. But does that give him the right to just go murder somebody?”

Prosecutor Ryan Joslin presented evidence that Bratcher hadn’t seen many dead bodies in Iraq. And although a state psychologist concluded that Bratcher was suffering from stress disorder, another one said his responses on evaluation tests were so extreme that Bratcher could be faking it.

“When he took out his gun and shot at the victim 10 times, mostly in the back and the side of the head, as the victim was fleeing -- did he really not know what he was doing?” Joslin said. “Or was he unable to keep himself from doing it?”

The prosecutor said Bratcher’s Army experience should never have been the centerpiece of the trial.

“The defense attorney spent a lot of time criticizing the military, and justifiably so. Blaming this whole issue on their failure to act and treat his PTSD,” he said. “My response is: Baloney. He used it as an excuse for his actions.”

Bratcher is being held at the small jail in Grant County until at least Dec. 7, when the judge will decide how to proceed. He could release Bratcher, which is unlikely, or order him admitted to Oregon State Hospital for psychiatric treatment, with regular reviews for release. Sario will argue that he should be sent to an intensive veterans’ treatment program in Los Angeles that specializes in combat stress.

Bratcher gets one hour of visits a week. A month after the shooting, he and Davis got married in the jail. She is now 20.

They have a daughter named Nevaeh -- “heaven” spelled backward.

Bratcher said he prays a lot but can’t seem to let go of his anger at the D.A. for having argued the case the way he did. Why was he trying to diminish the horror of what had gone on in Iraq? Did he have any idea?

Looking tired and frail as he clutched the jail phone to his ear, Bratcher said the military works to dehumanize its soldiers. “Then after they get that accomplished, they want to dehumanize the people you’re fighting, the enemy. And after they’ve done that, they’ve pretty much altered your value of human life. And then you come back home.”

He hung up the phone and turned to be led away by the deputies. He looked over his shoulder, like he wanted to say something else but couldn’t.

kim.murphy@latimes.com