The brother of a soldier killed in the 2009 Fort Hood shooting has appealed to US President Donald Trump to reconsider plans to livestream the execution of the convicted gunman, Nidal Malik Hasan, saying the broadcast would turn the deaths of the victims into a public spectacle.
Kristopher Craig, 48, whose younger brother, Army Private First Class Michael Pearson, was among the 13 people killed in the attack, said he began preparing a letter to Trump and Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth after learning that Hasan’s execution could be broadcast live.
According to Newsweek, Craig intends to submit the letter through the White House’s online contact form and send printed copies to Trump and Hegseth by post.
A Pentagon official told the publication on Friday that Hasan’s execution would be livestreamed. This followed Hegseth’s earlier statement that the execution would be made “public”.
Trump also confirmed on Friday that he had personally approved the proposal to livestream the execution, which is scheduled to take place by firing squad at Fort Hood, Texas, on December 3.
Hasan, a former Army psychiatrist who held the rank of major, was convicted in 2013 of killing 13 people and injuring 32 others during the shooting at the military base on November 5, 2009. He was sentenced to death after a military jury found him guilty on all 42 counts.
In his letter, Craig asked the president to reconsider the planned broadcast, reflecting on the nearly 17 years his family has spent dealing with the loss of his brother.
“I am writing to ask you to reconsider the decision to livestream the execution of Nidal Hasan,” he wrote.
“For nearly seventeen years, I have lived with the consequences of what happened that day. I have spent those years thinking about grief, anger, forgiveness, justice, and what it means to lose someone you love to an act of violence that becomes part of our nation’s history,” he added.
Craig said the announcement had confronted him with the possibility that his brother’s death would become associated with another public event involving violence.
“Now, after all this time, I find myself confronting something I never expected to confront: the possibility that my brother’s death will become part of another public spectacle,” he wrote.
Describing Pearson, Craig said his brother was “a good kid” and “one of the best people I have ever known.”
“He was young and still trying to figure out his place in the world. He joined the Army because he wanted opportunities and a better future for himself. He was trying to make something of his life, as millions of young Americans do,” he said.
Craig added that Pearson had not sought to become a symbol or a political statement but had simply wanted to live his life.
“He was not trying to become a symbol or a political statement. He was trying to live, and he never got the chance,” he wrote.
He urged Trump to remember the victims as individuals whose lives extended beyond the circumstances of their deaths.
“When you speak about justice for the victims of Fort Hood, I ask you to remember that you are speaking about people whose lives were much larger than the circumstances of their deaths,” he said.
Craig, who opposes the death penalty, acknowledged that some relatives of the victims believe Hasan’s execution would represent justice. However, he said he hoped his own position would also be respected.
“I understand that Hasan was convicted of terrible crimes and sentenced to death,” he wrote.
“I also understand that many people, including some of the families affected by that day, believe his execution represents justice. I respect their feelings and would never presume to speak for them. However, I am asking you to respect mine as well.”
He also questioned whether broadcasting the execution would discourage future acts of violence, as Hegseth suggested when explaining the plan.
“Secretary Hegseth, I understand the message you are trying to send,” Craig wrote.
“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 said he was “deeply troubled” by the prospect of the government deliberately turning an execution into something people could watch on television, phones or computers.
He noted that the United States had moved away from public executions partly because of the implications of making the taking of human life an event for spectators.
“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,” he wrote.
He stressed that his appeal was not intended to defend Hasan but to question whether the government should make the execution a public broadcast.
“I cannot help but wonder what purpose this broadcast is intended to serve. Will it bring my brother back? Will it restore the futures that were stolen from thirteen people? Will it ease the grief of families who have lived with this loss for nearly seventeen years?” he asked.
Craig acknowledged that some families might find closure in the execution but said the prospect of a livestream brought him sadness and anger rather than comfort.
He concluded by calling on Trump and Hegseth to abandon the proposal.
“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 wrote.
“I have lived long enough with the knowledge of what violence took from my family. I do not want my brother’s memory used to give violence an audience.”
Craig added that Pearson deserved to live a full life and that his memory should not be reduced to the manner of his death.
Trump, speaking to reporters on Friday, confirmed that he had approved the execution by firing squad and the proposal for a public broadcast.
“Did I approve? Absolutely,” he said.
Asked whether he wanted the execution livestreamed and whether the footage could be used as propaganda, Trump replied: “Well, they’re making a determination about that, but he will be killed.
“He will be through firing squad… 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.”
The president did not answer questions about whether he intended to watch the broadcast.
Vice President JD Vance, however, expressed uncertainty about whether the livestream would take place.
“I don’t know that that’s actually going to happen,” Vance told reporters on Friday.
He said the controversy surrounding the execution method should not overshadow the severity of Hasan’s crimes.
“So whatever the controversy is about the method of the execution, I hope that people don’t forget that this is a guy who brutally murdered a lot of innocent people,” he said.
Vance added that he would not watch the execution if it were broadcast live. His comments came after Archbishop Paul S. Coakley, president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, condemned the proposal as “a barbaric promotion of a culture of death and must be reconsidered.”
Lawmakers from both the Republican and Democratic parties have also criticised the plan and called on the Pentagon to reverse its decision.
Hasan carried out the attack after entering a medical building at Fort Hood where soldiers were waiting to receive medical clearance for deployment. He shouted “Allahu akbar” — Arabic for “God is great!” — before opening fire.
Before the shooting, Hasan exchanged emails with Anwar al-Awlaki, a US-born cleric later identified as an al-Qaeda figure who praised him after the killings. During his court-martial, Hasan said he had been on the “wrong side” of what he described as America’s “war on Islam” before he “switched sides”.
Hasan was shot in the back by law enforcement during the attack and was left paralysed from the waist down. He now uses a wheelchair.
The Army said his appeals process ended after the US Supreme Court rejected his request for review in March 2025. Trump authorised the firing-squad execution on October 2, allowing the Army to set a date.
If the livestream proceeds, it would be the first known broadcast of an execution in US history.
Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, told Newsweek that the organisation had no record of an execution being livestreamed in the country.
“Our records indicate the last public execution was in the 1930s. We have no record of any execution being live-streamed,” she said in an email.
“We are not aware of any regulation or precedent for a military execution to be livestreamed on the internet or otherwise made widely available to the public.”
Austin Sarat, an Amherst College professor who has written extensively about capital punishment, also criticised the proposal.
Sarat described death by firing squad as “always brutal” and said livestreaming it “will turn that brutality into a spectacle of cruelty.”
He added: “Livestreaming 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.”
