Army vet killed, officer wounded in SLC shootout

He was dressed for war. And he died in a hail of gunfire. But the battlefield upon which Brandon S. Barrett waged his final fight was not in a distant, dangerous place, but rather, it would appear, in his own mind. In a situation that has become disturbingly frequent across the United States, an armed soldier squared off against a police officer in downtown Salt Lake City on Friday afternoon. Barrett, a 28-year-old U.S. Army veteran recently home from Afghanistan, was in full battle dress, armed with an assault rifle and dozens of rounds of ammunition. It took four minutes from the moment that a frightened witness called 911 to the time that Barrett's bloodied body lay on a small patch of grass behind the opulent Grand America Hotel. The soldier was dead. A police officer wounded. And the fog of war was thick.