HdG Widower at Fort Hood Sentencing: '...I Had Something Ripped Out of Me'

Major Nidal Hasan was sentenced to death Wednesday in the Fort Hood, TX, murder of 13 people, including a woman from Havre de Grace who was about to deploy to Iraq.

Havre de Grace resident Lt. Col. Juanita Warman, 55, was shot in the Texas processing center as she awaited her deployment to Iraq as a physician's assistant, according to The Huffington Post. She was shot four times and died of internal bleeding, CNN reported.

Her widower took the stand this week during the sentencing portion of the trial, testifying about the impact her death has had on him. In a Texas courtroom Tuesday, Philip Warman said: “It was like I had something ripped out of me, and I started drinking," the Los Angeles Times reported.

He was "struggling to catch his breath and hold back tears" as he recalled the hours after the Nov. 5, 2009, shooting while he awaited a phone call from his wife that never came, Stars and Stripes reported.

Warman said he wasn't sure his wife had arrived at Fort Hood when the shootings occurred and that he considered she could be treating the wounded since she was a nurse, according to Stars and Stripes, until he was greeted by a pair of uniformed officers.

Lt. Col. Warman had lived in Seneca Pointe with her husband and worked in the mental health division at Perry Point before departing for Fort Hood, according to ExploreHarford.com. She was required to be at the processing facility for 24 hours before deploying to Iraq.

Her husband, a Havre de Grace lawyer, said she was an "extraordinary woman" who was an "excellent soldier," the Pittsburgh Post reported.

In court this week, Philip Warman testified that in the year following his wife's death, he turned to alcohol and had to ask a friend to remove any weapons from his Havre de Grace home. He eventually got sober after checking into rehab, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Approximately 20 relatives and family members were said to have testified in the sentencing phase of the trial.

The murderer, Hasan, did not say much throughout the trial but reportedly described himself as a "soldier who had switched sides," according to the Dallas Morning News.

An American-born Muslim, Hasan was an Army major and psychiatrist practicing at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda from 2003 to 2006, according to The Washington Post. He was born in Arlington, VA, to Palestinian parents and was due to deploy to Afghanistan within the month that the massacre occurred, ABC News reported at the time.

When he opened fire in Fort Hood's soldier processing center, Hasan killed 13 people and injured more than 30.

On Wednesday, a 13-member military panel issued the death sentence in Hasan's case, which automatically triggered a review by the Army Court of Appeals that could take years, CBS News reported. According to its report, the last service member sentenced to death was a man executed in 1961 after being convicted of raping and attempting to murder an 11-year-old girl.

Hasan's sentence called for death by lethal injection and for him to be stripped of his military title and pay, Reuters reported.

One of Warman's daughters, Melissa Czemerda of Pittsburgh, PA, said she was "thankful for the verdict" but was "dissatisfied with the media attention to Hasan and his extremist views," NBC News reported.

Lt. Col. Juanita Warman was buried in Nov. 2009 in Arlington National Cemetery. She was survived by her mother, husband, six siblings, two daughters, three stepchildren and eight grandchildren, according to the Pentagram.