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“I wish we had known more so that we could have helped him better. “No one from the Army told us about PTSD or anything like that,” Ernesto Sr.

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“I told him, ‘Son, don’t talk to him like that.’ It really worried me.” The change in Alberto’s behavior worried everyone, but they didn’t know how to deal with it. I had never seen him do anything like that before,” he said. remembers the shock he felt when he saw Alberto yell at one of his children. “Normally he would always be asking you how you’re doing and a million other questions.” Alberto was irritable too, prone to snap at the slightest aggravation. “That just wasn’t like him at all,” his older sister, Patti, told me. But now he seemed dazed and lethargic, lying on the sofa at his father’s house on Tigris Drive. “He never wanted to be sitting still,” said his father, Ernesto Sr.

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While he was deployed, Alberto spent much of his free time either talking to or trying to get through to Nicole and the kids on his outpost’s spotty internet connection.Īlberto and his family left Fort Campbell and returned to El Paso, and it soon became clear that war had changed him. Their daughter was born at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, in December 2009, just months before Alberto shipped out to Afghanistan.

While Nicole was pregnant, Alberto was accused of physically abusing her on at least two occasions, according to court records. Three months later, Nicole became pregnant with their daughter. In December, Alberto and Nicole married while he was home on leave from basic training. Alberto’s family had never had much money, and the pressures of supporting a growing family drove Alberto into an Army recruiter’s office in October 2008. But the two were inseparable, and in short order, Nicole was pregnant. They argued almost as hard as they partied. Nicole already had a four-year-old son, and she was five years older than Alberto. From the start, Alberto’s family had concerns about the relationship. He’d met Nicole through friends in 2007, when he was only nineteen. “I wanted to be with my wife and kids.”Īlberto had grown up in El Paso, in a trailer on the East Side with his parents and three siblings. “I just missed my family,” he would later tell me. He started his car and drove to Nicole’s house on Warcloud Avenue. He texted Sachie, asking her to leave with him, but he got no response. Alberto eventually ducked out the door and headed to his maroon Ford Focus. He didn’t feel like socializing, though, and stood off by himself drinking a Dos Equis while Sachie shot pool with her friends. That Friday night, Alberto and Sachie had ended up at a place called House of Rock.

He was living alone in a barely furnished apartment, estranged from his wife, Nicole, who still lived with their three children and his stepson in the house they’d rented together. He couldn’t, or wouldn’t, hold down a job, and he’d been collecting disability from the Department of Veterans Affairs for post-traumatic stress disorder for about a year. Now it was a Friday in March 2014, three years since he’d returned from the war, and his life was in shambles. A sniper had shot King in the head, and Alberto volunteered to take his place in the tower, where he spent the next few hours standing on the blood-soaked floorboards, keeping a watchful eye for the Taliban in the pomegranate orchards beyond the outpost walls. She called him Horse, a nickname from happier days, when he played drums in an El Paso rock band, back before he joined the Army and left for Kentucky and then Afghanistan, and wound up standing in a guard tower, his boots soaked in the blood of his friend Brandon King. Alberto Mendiola was standing off by himself, bored and anxious. He was in a bar on the East Side of El Paso just before midnight, the end of an aimless day he’d spent fooling around with a girl he’d known since high school.