Alonzo Lunsford was shot seven times by Nidal Hasan at Fort Hood in 2009. He survived. On December 3, 2026, he intends to watch the U.S. government execute Hasan by firing squad — and he has a message for the millions of Americans expected to tune into the livestream.
It's a smell you will never forget. It's a taste that you will never forget."
He didn't stop there. "That's not something you sit around and say, hey, let's get some popcorn and look at this execution," he continued. "We as a people, we're better than that. This ain't no country where we do public beheadings and stonings and think it's fine."
The Day That Changed Everything
On November 5, 2009, Hasan — then an Army psychiatrist — walked into the Soldier Readiness Processing Center at the Texas Army post and opened fire on unarmed soldiers. He killed 13 people and wounded 32 others in the deadliest mass shooting ever carried out on a U.S. military installation.
Lunsford was working at the center that day. He recalled watching Hasan gun down a colleague before turning the weapon on him. Shot above his left eye, Lunsford collapsed to the floor and played dead. He eventually escaped outside — where Hasan shot him again.
"I've accepted the fact I'm gonna live with the pain for the rest of my life," Lunsford said, according to Fox News Digital. "I don't really have any sympathy for him as far as firing squad vs. lethal injection, hanging or gas chamber, because he didn't have that same compassion when he did the deed on 5 November," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
A Firing Squad — and a Livestream
Hasan's execution, scheduled for December 3 at the same facility, follows years of appeals that kept him alive long after a military court sentenced him to die. It will mark the first military execution in decades and the first by firing squad in modern U.S. history.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has announced that the American public will be able to view a livestream of the execution, saying it was important for people to see the consequences of this kind of crime.
Lunsford agrees the method fits the crime. "The method is befitting for him because the lethal injection — that's doing him a favour. Gas chamber? Is doing him a favour," he told the BBC. But the same man who wants closure for the survivors and the families of the fallen won't advocate for turning a killing into a spectator event.
"To show the whole thing without it being censored for the general public, for me personally, I don't agree with that, but it's not about my personal belief," he said.
Forgiveness — Without Exemption
What makes Lunsford's position distinct from the fury of so many others who have followed this case for 17 years is that he forgave Hasan. Not from leniency — from faith.
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But forgiveness, for Lunsford, does not mean sparing Hasan from punishment. He supports the execution. He wants to be there for it. He has said he would even prefer that a surviving victim or a family member of the deceased be permitted to pull the trigger.
And he intends to make sure Hasan knows who is watching. "I want him to look at me in my eyes and I look at him in his eyes and I want him to know: 'Dude you failed, I'm still here,'" he told the BBC.
Lunsford has said his concern about the livestream is the message it sends to younger viewers — not whether survivors should have access. Those families, he told the BBC, "should be able to look at it."
It is not yet known what broadcast or platform the government will use for the December 3 livestream, nor what safeguards — if any — will be placed on public access.
Our Take
Seventeen years. That's how long thirteen American families have waited for the man who murdered their loved ones at Fort Hood to face the end of a sentence ordered by a military jury. And in all that time — through every appealling court, every procedural delay, every academic argument about PTSD and religious radicalization — the story never quite closed for the men and women who walked into that Soldier Readiness Processing Center on November 5, 2009 and never walked out the same.
Alonzo Lunsford took seven bullets. He has had to rebuild a body and a life around them. And he is still the grown-up in this room: he can say, out loud, that he forgave the man who tried to kill him, and still expect the state to do what the state is supposed to do. That is not softness. That is the exact blend of mercy and justice that the political class in Washington long ago forgot how to produce.
The livestream, of course, is the flashpoint. You don't have to agree with Lunsford's reservations about it to respect them. The man has earned the right to be heard on this, and the people who spent the last decade arguing that Hasan's life should have been spared are suddenly the loudest voices demanding he be killed quietly and off camera. Read that again. They do not get to lecture anyone about the dignity of a public death.
What's clear is that the American people have a right to see their laws carried out — not because it is entertainment, but because the state should never be allowed to kill a man in a shadow where the public can't see it. If the government wants to execute someone on American soil in the name of the American people, then the American people can watch.
What Lunsford is asking for is something smaller and more difficult: a little decorum. A little respect for the memory of the dead. And a little awareness that the man you're watching bleed out on a live feed is the same man who put a bullet above Alonzo Lunsford's left eye and then went looking for more.
So here's the question, Patriots: if twelve years of appeals couldn't deliver justice for those thirteen soldiers and thirty-two wounded, can a firing squad on December 3 — and the cameras that will inevitably be pointed at it — finally hand it to them? Or is the answer one that only the survivors, and the families, get to decide?
