A Fort Hood victim’s brother is urging President Trump to scrap the planned livestream of Nidal Hasan’s firing-squad execution, calling it a public spectacle that dishonors the dead.
Kristopher Craig, whose younger brother was among the 13 soldiers murdered at Fort Hood, is drafting a letter to President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth asking them to reverse course on broadcasting the execution. The Army has set the date for 1 p.m. on December 3 at the Texas post where the 2009 massacre happened.
Newsweek reported that a Pentagon official confirmed Friday the execution would be livestreamed. Trump told reporters the same day he had personally authorized the proposal.
Craig, a 48-year-old Army veteran, lost his 22-year-old brother, Pfc. Michael Pearson, when Nidal Malik Hasan opened fire inside a medical building on November 5, 2009. Hasan, then an Army major and psychiatrist, shouted “Allahu akbar,” killed 13 people, and wounded 32 more before law enforcement shot him. He has been paralyzed from the waist down ever since and uses a wheelchair.
A military jury convicted Hasan on all 42 counts in 2013 and sentenced him to death. He admitted he was the shooter and said he had “switched sides.” The Supreme Court denied his final review request in March 2025, clearing the way for the sentence to be carried out.
Trump approved the firing-squad method on October 2 and gave the Army authority to set the date. On Friday he left no doubt about his support for the death penalty in this case.
"Did I approve? Absolutely."
He added that Hasan “will be killed” by firing squad and said, “I really don’t care how he goes, as long as he goes. And I think that the death penalty is a very worthy way of going for him.”
Hegseth had already made the public nature of the execution plain. In an interview aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, he said soldiers with rifles would carry it out and that the public would be able to watch “because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things.” The military has not executed a service member by firing squad since World War II. The last military execution of any kind was the hanging of Army Pvt. John Bennett on April 13, 1961.
Vice President JD Vance struck a more cautious note Friday. He said he did not know whether the livestream would actually happen, reminded everyone that Hasan “brutally murdered a lot of innocent people,” and added that if it is livestreamed, “I’m not going to be watching it.”
Craig began writing after learning of the livestream plan. He intends to submit the letter through the White House online contact form and mail physical copies. He opposes the death penalty himself but makes clear he is not defending Hasan and does not speak for every family.
"I am writing to ask you to reconsider the decision to livestream the execution of Nidal Hasan."
He wrote that for nearly seventeen years he has lived with grief, anger, forgiveness, and justice, and now faces the chance that his brother’s death becomes “part of another public spectacle.”
"He was not trying to become a symbol or a political statement. He was trying to live, and he never got the chance."
Craig told Trump and Hegseth that when they speak of justice for Fort Hood victims they are speaking about people whose lives were larger than the way they died. He said he understands many families see the execution as justice and respects that view. He simply asks that his own be respected too.
He addressed Hegseth’s stated goal of deterrence head-on.
"You want people who might contemplate committing an atrocity like the one at Fort Hood to understand that there will be consequences. But I ask you to consider whether broadcasting an execution actually accomplishes that. Does witnessing another person's death make someone less likely to commit violence? Does it make our communities safer? Or does it simply give the public another act of violence to watch, this time carried out by the government?"
Craig drew the distinction he wants the administration to hear: “There is a difference between accountability and spectacle, and there is a difference between honoring the dead and inviting the public to watch someone else die in their name.”
"Do not livestream this execution. Do not make the deaths of our loved ones the justification for turning another death into a public event. Whatever happens to Nidal Hasan, let it happen without an audience assembled by the government to witness his final moments."
He closed by saying he has lived long enough with what violence took from his family and does not want his brother’s memory used “to give violence an audience.” Michael deserved a full life. “The least we can do now is remember that his life was worth more than the way it ended. We should not have to watch another human being die to remember the value of the lives we lost.”
Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, told reporters the group has no record of any U.S. execution ever being livestreamed. “Our records indicate the last public execution was in the 1930s.” She added the center knows of no regulation or precedent for a military execution to be livestreamed or made widely available online.
Amherst College professor Austin Sarat, who has written extensively on capital punishment, said livestreaming “will turn that brutality into a spectacle of cruelty” and “will not educate. It will terrorize, and is beneath the dignity that we owe to anyone, even those who commit the kind of horrific crime that Nidal Hasan did.”
Archbishop Paul S. Coakley, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, condemned the livestream decision as “a barbaric promotion of a culture of death and must be reconsidered.” Lawmakers from both parties have also urged the Pentagon to reverse course. A Pentagon spokesperson offered only, “We have nothing to provide.”
Hasan’s own stated motive remains on the record. He said he acted to stop soldiers from going to Afghanistan and killing his fellow Muslims. He shot fleeing soldiers in the back. The man who murdered 13 Americans in uniform is scheduled to face a firing squad on the same post where he carried out the attack. The only open question is whether the government will put cameras on it.
Justice for the Fort Hood dead is overdue and earned. Turning their memory into the backdrop for a government-produced death show is a choice the country does not have to make.
