A Fort Stewart soldier is under investigation by police after videos showed an explosive outburst in which he used profanity and twisted the arm of the woman he was with while wearing his Army combat uniform in a mall parking lot in Savannah, Georgia.
“Our family violence unit is aware of the incident and conducting an investigation,” Bianca Johnson, a Savannah Police Department public information officer, told Army Times, adding that the woman whose arm was twisted is the soldier’s significant other.
The soldier is also being investigated by base officials, who confirmed he is a member of the 3rd Infantry Division.
“The soldier is under investigation and that behavior is not condoned by division leadership,” said Christopher Fletcher, Fort Stewart-Hunter Army Airfield spokesman. “We are working with civilian and military authorities to address this situation.”
Fletcher could not release the unit or identity of the soldier in the video. Authorities have not said whether he is facing any charges or what actions if any may be taken involving the soldier.
The video shown here contains profanity.
The soldier is not currently detained by city police, Johnson said, however local media reported that he had been detained by military police. Fletcher could not confirm that’s the case.
It is unclear from the videos how the incident started.
They appear to show the soldier and his partner putting a stroller into their car as the soldier has a verbal altercation with people in the parking lot.
At one point, the soldier yells at the group to “shut the f--- up," and begins stripping his fatigue jacket off. The woman he is with attempts to tell him to “stop,” and hold him back from escalating the situation further, when he grabs her arm and twists it.
“And he has the nerve to serve our country,” one woman in the parking lot said after the soldier twisted his partner’s arm.
The soldier replied with “f--- your country; f--- America.”
The incident took place at Oglethorpe Mall, roughly a mile from Hunter Army Airfield.
De’Minka Spaulding was one of the women who witnessed the incident, and she was interviewed by a local NBC affiliate.
Spaulding said the altercation began because she and her friend were waiting for a parking spot and the soldier then accused them of blocking his car in.
“He kept throwing up the race card and being disrespectful and ‘b---- that and b---- this,'” she told the media outlet. “So, we start arguing back and forth, I didn’t know what else to do because he started taking his anger out on his wife.”
“He was like, you know ‘f— this uniform, f— this country’ and I am just like, I can’t believe he said that,” Spaulding said. “This is the person that is supposed to representing this country, who is supposed to protect me.”
Kyle Rempfer was an editor and reporter who has covered combat operations, criminal cases, foreign military assistance and training accidents. Before entering journalism, Kyle served in U.S. Air Force Special Tactics and deployed in 2014 to Paktika Province, Afghanistan, and Baghdad, Iraq.
