B4 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SATURDAY, MAY 28 , 2022
Walsh recalls the devastation she
felt after learning of Harrington’s
murder.
“Gosh, she would give you the
shirt off her back; she would do
anything for you,” she said. “And
I just, I couldn’t believe this.”
Walsh said she learned about
Chabrol’s burial circumstances
10 or 15 years ago. “At first I
thought he was buried in the
same cemetery that she was
buried in — that really made me
cry,” she said. “But then they told
me it was Arlington and I was
like, wait a minute, how can you
deserve that?”
In another unit, Harrington
served with Kevin Gouveia, an
enlisted sailor to whom she con-
fided her fears about Chabrol’s
intentions.
Gouveia helped her report
Chabrol, he said, and was dis-
mayed when the Navy did little
to address the situation, calling
the burial at Arlington “a slap in
the face.”
“It took a long time for me to
try and move on with this, be-
cause the death of Melissa, I
really took it very, very hard,”
Gouveia said. “I was very upset at
the time for not doing more to try
to protect her.”
Farmer said she hopes that
going public with Harrington’s
story will inspire those with
influence to take interest in her
cause. “Maybe there’s a rule or
something in our way,” she said.
“Usually, we try to find a solu-
tion: Okay, how can we do the
right thing?
“But there doesn’t seem to be
any appetite here to do the right
thing.”Forest Lawn Cemetery, near her
Norfolk home — now support a
review of Chabrol’s case. Joe
Harrington, Melissa’s widower
and a Navy veteran, did not know
the killer’s burial circumstances
until he was approached last
year by the co-author of a forth-
coming book about death-row
inmates.
In “Crossing the River Styx,”
co-written by Todd C. Peppers,
death-row chaplain Russ Ford
calls Chabrol “fundamentally
evil and beyond redemption.” He
describes observing Chabrol
beam with pride and satisfaction
when he received word from the
Navy, shortly before his 1993
execution, that he would be bur-
ied in Arlington.
“The national honor elated the
demoniac,” Ford wrote. “This
monster would rest among he-
roes.”
Joe Harrington said he was
stunned to learn where Chabrol
was buried. “A good friend of
mine, who was also my division
officer years ago, was over in
Vietnam and got shot,” said Har-
rington, now 63. “He was a hero.
He was a warrior. And he’s in
Arlington, and it just pisses me
off that Chabrol could be there.”
Navy veterans who knew Me-
lissa Harrington remain haunted
by her death. Nancy Walsh, who
served with her onboard the
submarine service ship L.Y.
Spear before Harrington moved
to a Navy testing unit in Norfolk,
described how they looked out
for one another in a place where
sexual assault was so rampant,
she said, that women often
walked around in pairs for safety.their ashes inurned at the cem-
etery.
Historically, efforts to restrict
eligibility for an Arlington burial
have been narrowly drawn. A law
barring veterans who committed
federal capital crimes from being
interred there wasn’t passed un-
til 1997, following the 1995 Okla-
homa City bombing perpetrated
by Army veteran Timothy Mc-
Veigh.
The 2013 review law, known as
the Alicia Dawn Koehl Respect
for National Cemeteries Act, was
passed with a specific provision
allowing for the exhumation of
Michael L. Anderson, a veteran
who had been accused of killing
Koehl in 2012 but not convicted
before his burial in Michigan’s
Fort Custer National Cemetery.
A spokesman for Arlington
National Cemetery, John David
Harlow, affirmed that the Army
lacked the authority to disinter
the remains of those buried there
before the law’s passage, saying
only close relatives of the de-
ceased may make such a request.
It’s unknown, he added, if any of
the other 250,000 individuals
interred in Arlington before De-
cember 2013 also committed cap-
ital crimes.
Robert Taber, Chabrol’s broth-
er-in-law and one of his last
surviving family members, said
in an interview that he had no
plans to seek disinterment. “I
like where he’s at, myself,” Taber
said, “and I don’t want to change
anything. Because he earned that
with his service in the military.”
Even without a clear path
forward, more people who knew
Harrington — she is buried inremove Chabrol, Farmer and
others are unsatisfied with that
answer. She hopes the military’s
most senior leaders — or even
the commander in chief — will be
compelled to intervene. And in
support of those efforts, Navy
veterans who knew Harrington
are sharing her story for the first
time in more than 30 years.
Harrington was 27 years old
when her lifeless body was dis-
covered rolled up in a rug inside
Chabrol’s Virginia Beach home.
According to news reports from
the time and subsequent histori-
cal accounts, the 34-year-old har-
bored a grudge against Har-
rington for having complained to
superiors about his intimidating
and unwelcome behavior.
Despite the accusation, Navy
leaders allowed Chabrol to leave
military service without facing
any serious professional conse-
quences. He immediately got to
work plotting what was de-
scribed in journal entries as
“Operation Nemesis,” according
to trial testimony, and on July 9,
1991, he brought Harrington to
his home and tied her to a bed.
She managed to free one of her
hands and, in a final, desperate
bid for survival, clobbered Cha-
brol as hard as she could. He
“went berserk” and strangled
her.
Farmer had served as an advo-
cate for sexual assault survivors
in addition to her other military
duties. She learned about Cha-
brol’s case in 2018, several years
after retiring from the Navy and,
even though they did not know
one another, she said that for her
the case feels personal.
Farmer first started an online
petition to have Chabrol’s re-
mains exhumed. When it failed
to gain traction, she wrote to
Arlington National Cemetery.
The Army, which operates the
facility, never responded.
The 2020 killing of 20-year-
old Vanessa Guillén, an Army
specialist, renewed Farmer’s re-
solve, she said. Guillén, who
reported being sexually harassed
before her disappearance from
Fort Hood in Texas, has become a
symbol of the military’s broader
failures in supporting sex assault
victims and ensuring their per-
petrators are held accountable.
Earlier this year, in response
to a new letter, Farmer was
contacted by Renea C. Yates,
director of the Office of Army
Cemeteries at the Pentagon.
Yates informed her that a law
allowing the Army and the De-
partment of Veterans Affairs to
reconsider interments applied
only to those occurring after its
enactment in 2013.
Farmer bristled at the expla-
nation. “If the [defense secre-
tary] is a sexual assault preven-
tion advocate, would he be able
to find a solution to honor the
hundreds of thousands of wom-
en that have served, that have
been victims of sexual assault, so
that perpetrator is not buried on
our grounds?” she said. “Because
those are our grounds.”
While Arlington National
Cemetery is running out of
space, and eligibility for burial is
limited largely to military retir-
ees, recipients of certain awards
and those killed while conduct-
ing duties, most veterans with at
least a day of service and an
honorable discharge can have
CEMETERY FROM B1
Veteran aims to get killer’s ashes removed from Arlington National Cemetery
SALWAN GEORGES/THE WASHINGTON POSTTODD PEPPERS
TOP: The section of Arlington National Cemetery that holds the
remains of Navy Lt. Andrew John Chabrol, who was executed for
the 1991 abduction, rape and murder of Petty Officer 2nd Class
Melissa Harrington, above. A cemetery spokesman said only
relatives of the deceased can ask for disinterment of remains, and
Chabrol’s brother-in-law said he has no plans to make that request.“The most important thing to
remember is that we have the
tools to fight this,” Dzirasa said in
a statement Friday. “Vaccines,
tests, and masks coupled with a
solid hygiene routine are enoughum spread, and doubled down on
the message as the city moved into
the high category. Howard and
Anne Arundel counties also re-
corded high levels of spread, ac-
cording to the CDC.“Vaccines, tests, and masks coupled with a solidhygiene routine are enough to keep many healthypeople out of the hospital.”
Baltimore Health Commissioner Letitia DzirasaInova Health System recom-
mends Paxlovid, an oral medica-
tion approved for people 12 and
older, as a therapy for outpatients
at high risk of developing severe
covid cases, said John Paul Verder-
ese, an Inova physician who said
the latest surge is the first time the
treatment is widely available.
Patients can start taking it
within five days of symptom on-
set, after ruling out adverse drug
interactions, and it is widely avail-
able for free at pharmacies across
the region. The drug is easier to
administer and can be more effec-
tive than intravenous monoclonal
antibody treatments, even with
reports that some have had a re-
surgence of symptoms, Verderese
said.
“It is a good thing we have this
available to us and hopefully there
will be more therapeutics avail-
able to us as time goes on,” Verder-
ese said. Although Inova is far
below its peak covid patient count
of more than 425, he said, there
were 64 patients in the system on
Thursday, about a third of that a
month ago.
“I’ve seen folks get less vigilant,”
Verderese said. “We’re humans,
that’s human nature. There is a lot
of fatigue that is setting in but at
the same time we have to live our
lives. People have to make their
own decisions, and be better at
protecting themselves, especially
if they are high risk.”to keep many healthy people out
of the hospital as we work to
determine whether we are at the
end, middle, or launch point of
this surge in cases.”
Part of the challenge of re-
sponding to the coronavirus at
this point in the pandemic is un-
derstanding the risk when public
health agencies have moved to
less frequent data reporting and
people increasingly rely on home
test kits to know their status but
fail to report positive cases.
Public health officials are using
wastewater surveillance to gauge
coronavirus levels in a community
days before people develop symp-
toms. In Maryland, the Depart-
ment of the Environment is moni-
toring more than two dozen
wastewater treatment sites for
trace amounts of the virus and
sharing the data online.
Virginia officials plan to launch
a website by August and have
applied for additional federal
funding to expand 25 sites to 40,
said Rekha Singh, a wastewater
surveillance program manager.
In the meantime, the data is
available from the CDC, and it
shows large concentrations of vi-
rus in populous Northern Vir-
ginia, mirroring testing data. “It
can fill the gap and is a really
promising public health tool,”
Singh said, adding that plans are
in the works to add more sites in
Southwest Virginia.is to it,’ ” he said. “A lot of people
decided to make the same calcula-
tion.”
Kelen said he understands that
perspective but also sees the con-
sequences of fewer regulations, as
the number of deaths in the Unit-
ed States resulting from coronavi-
rus cases surpassed 1 million this
month. “Covid is on a pretty ma-
jor uptick,” he said. “What is a
little bit obscure is hospitaliza-
tions are also going up.” He added,
“We’re seeing a lot more people
both in the emergency depart-
ment and being admitted. And
not a trickle.”
The Hopkins emergency de-
partment at the flagship Balti-
more hospital saw coronavirus
patients dwindle to about one at a
time but are back up to six to eight
at once, not near the peak of 30 but
is still elevated, Kelen said.
Hospitalizations, a lagging in-
dicator after infections rise, have
been up across the region for
weeks, federal data show. Balti-
more had more than 280 cases per
100,000 people over the last seven
days, and hospitalizations grew to
nearly 12 admissions per 100,000
cases, according to the city health
department.
Starting more than two weeks
ago, Baltimore Health Commis-
sioner Letitia Dzirasa urged resi-
dents to wear masks indoors re-
gardless of vaccination status, as
the city moved from low to medi-transportation and indoors and
when distancing is not possible, as
recommended by the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention.
A federal judge last month
struck down a federal mask man-
date on commercial flights, buses,
ferries and subways, prompting
several airlines to make face cov-
erings optional on domestic
flights. By that time, most local
mandates had been lifted.
Baltimore City had recorded
high levels of community spread
by Thursday evening, federal data
show. Arlington County officials
reminded residents to social dis-
tance and wear masks as the posi-
tivity rate hit its highest level since
January.
In the District, the average daily
caseload was up to about 48 this
week, nearly double the total from
three weeks ago. Cases are also
surging in Virginia. A a steady
increase across the region fol-
lowed a lag after record numbers
associated with the omicron vari-
ant.
Kelen noted many people are
simply not masking indoors now
that it is not required and it ap-
pears that vaccinations and a past
infection protect most against se-
vere disease. “A lot of people psy-
chologically said, ‘I can’t live the
same way. If I get covid, hopefully
I’ll do just fine and that is all there
COVID FROM B1
Health officials urge caution with coronavirus risks for Memorial Day weekend
ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES
Travelers walk through Ronald Reagan National Airport on Friday
as experts warn the holiday weekend will lead to more covid cases.