Colfax sailor admits killing infant son

A 21-year-old Navy seaman from Colfax has pleaded guilty in a court-martial to murdering his 28-day-old son in Japan to keep the baby from interrupting a video game.

“He was making some noise. He was a little fussy,” Robert Howard told a military judge this week, according to the Stars and Stripes newspaper for military personnel. “I wanted complete concentration for the game.”

Howard testified Sept. 20 at the Yokosuka Naval Base in Yokosuka, Japan, about 40 miles south of Tokyo.

The base is the home port of the USS Kitty Hawk, the aircraft carrier on which Howard had served as a medical corpsman.

He joined the Navy in 2001, just after graduating from Colfax High School. The picture of Howard emerging from the military court proceedings is not the Robert Howard some people in Colfax remember.

“I found him to be very caring and considerate, and very helpful to me as a student,” said one of Howard’s teachers, who declined to be identified. “I’m at a loss for words.”

Principal Michael Morgan said Howard had no record of disciplinary problems.

“He had a reasonably good grade-point average,” Morgan said.

“He took fairly competitive classes, as far as chemistry, upper-end English, economics, and business and marketing. He took two years of Spanish.”

Howard’s parents, John and Pat Howard of Colfax, declined to comment on his case. John Howard said his son Robert attended middle school and high school in Colfax, but previously grew up in Lewiston and Sacramento, Calif.

According to Stars and Strips, documents read in court last week indicated that Howard completed his medical corps training in 2002. That’s also when he married another sailor in the medical corps, a woman he’d known for a month.

His wife, who told Stars and Stripes she is seeking a divorce, worked in the base hospital at Yokosuka.

Their son, Logan, was born at that hospital in February this year – part of what was described as a local baby boom resulting from the Kitty Hawk’s deployment to the Persian Gulf last year for the war in Iraq.

Robert Howard reportedly said in court that he sat on his son Logan’s chest on March 9 to silence him, and performed CPR when he noticed the infant had stopped breathing, Stars and Stripes reported. The child’s mother, who had been sleeping, called an ambulance, but it was too late.

Stars and Stripes said in its Sept. 22 edition that Howard testified he had sat on the newborn child’s chest once before, to practice wrestling moves he had seen on TV, apparently without harming the boy.

In a deal in which some charges were dropped, Howard pleaded guilty to a type of murder that military law associates with acts “inherently dangerous to others” or “in wanton disregard of human life.”

Howard also pleaded guilty to assault and aggravated assault for two previous incidents.

In one case, according to Stars and Stripes, Howard said he used his hand to smother Logan for 90 seconds to three minutes – until the color drained from the baby’s face – in an attempt to cure a case of hiccups.

The newspaper said the other assault occurred the day before the murder. In that case, Howard testified that he angrily grabbed his son’s collar and twisted it until Logan passed out.

“I started yelling at my son, ‘You won’t eat. You don’t want to sleep. I need to really use the toilet, but you won’t let me,’ ” Stars and Stripes quoted Howard.

Reporter Nancy Montgomery described Howard’s testimony as calm, unemotional, without tears.

Howard’s plea bargain spells out a maximum penalty that wasn’t disclosed. First, military Judge John Maksym will conduct a sentencing hearing on Nov. 17 to form his own view of an appropriate penalty.

Maksym will sentence Howard sometime after the Nov. 17 hearing.

The murder charge to which Howard pleaded guilty carries a maximum penalty of life in prison without possibility of parole.