Soldier turned rapist found dead in prison: Officials suspect suicide

A former soldier, sentenced to life for raping and killing a teenage Iraqi girl and using a shotgun to gun down her family, died in an Arizona prison over the weekend in what officials suspect was a suicide.

Steven Dale Green was the first American soldier charged and convicted under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act — a law signed in 2000 that gives the federal government jurisdiction to pursue criminal cases against American citizens and soldiers for acts committed in foreign lands.

The federal Bureau of Prisons spokesman John Stahley said staff members at the federal penitentiary in Tucson, Ariz., found the 28-year-old Green, of Midland, Texas, unresponsive in his cell on Saturday. Stahley said Green's death is being investigated as a suicide.

Green was a private in the 101st Airborne Division based at Fort Campbell on the Kentucky-Tennessee state line when he deployed to Iraq.

Green and three other soldiers went to the home of an Iraqi family in Mahmoudiya, Iraq, near a traffic checkpoint in March 2006. At the home, Green shot and killed three members of the al-Janabi family before becoming the third soldier to rape 14-year-old Abeer Qassim al-Janabi before killing her. He was convicted and sentenced in 2009.

Three other soldiers. Jesse Spielman, Paul Cortez, and James Barker, are serving lengthy sentences in the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., for their roles in the attack. Each is eligible for parole in 2015.

Green was discharged from the military in May 2006 after being found to have a personality disorder.

In multiple interviews from prison with The Associated Press, Green frequently expressed regret at taking part in the attack and frustration that he was tried and convicted in the civilian system, while the others involved went through the military justice system and have a chance to be released from prison.

"I was made to pay for all the war crimes. I'm the only one here in federal prison," Green said in an October 2013 interview. "I think they plan to throw away the key in my situation."

The attack on the al-Janabi family happened at a particularly violent point in the US-led Iraq war. Green and his fellow soldiers were stationed for several weeks at a traffic checkpoint near Mahmoudiya in an area known as the "Triangle of Death" when, after an afternoon of card playing, sex talk and drinking Iraqi whiskey, the four soldiers went to the al-Janabi home about 20 miles south of Baghdad.

Green shot and killed the teen's mother, father, and sister, then followed Cortez and Barker in raping the girl before shooting her in the face. Her body was set on fire. Spielman told The Associated Press he didn't know what the other soldiers had planned and merely stood watch near the front of the house.

Barker and Cortez pleaded guilty and acknowledged taking part in the rape. Spielman went to trial and was convicted because prosecutors said he knew what was planned. A fourth soldier, Bryan Howard, stayed behind at the checkpoint and later pleaded guilty to being an accessory. He served 27 months in Fort Leavenworth.

A federal jury in Paducah spared Green a death sentence in May 2009, but US District Judge Thomas B. Russell ordered Green to serve multiple life sentences.

"I was punished out of proportion to everybody else," Green said in October. "I'm not a victim, but I haven't been treated fairly. Not even remotely close. That's all I ever asked for, was to be treated the same. They just won't do it. I don't know why."

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