Newspapers around the country — including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch — carried front-page stories last week hailing police Sgt. Kimblerly Munley as the hero who single-handedly brought down Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan in the rampage at Fort Hood.  While Munley was a hero, it turns out that the early accounts given by authorities may have been missing some key facts.

A front page story today by the New York Times‘ James C. McKinley Jr. inserts police Senior Sgt. Mark Todd into the role of the person whose gunfire ended the massacre.

From the Times:

Police Sgt. Kimblerly Munley/AP photo

But the story of how the petite police officer and the accused gunman went down in an exchange of gunfire does not agree with the account of an eyewitness who had gone to the base’s processing center, where the shooting occurred, to conduct business before being deployed.

The witness, who asked not to be identified, said Major Hasan wheeled on Sergeant Munley as she rounded the corner of a building and shot her, putting her on the ground. Then Major Hasan turned his back on her and started putting another magazine into his semiautomatic pistol.

It was at that moment that Senior Sgt. Mark Todd, a veteran police officer, rounded another corner of the building, found Major Hasan fumbling with his weapon and shot him.

The story that appeared on the front page of the Post-Dispatch Nov. 7 — “Hailed as hero: Police officer felled gunman, was shot 4 times” — quoted Chuck Medley, head of the Fort Hood police and fire departments, as its primary source.  That article — by Gary Scharrer and Scott Huddleston of the San Antonio Express-News — quoted Medley: “He went down. She eliminated the threat. She did what she was trained to do.” The Associated Press quoted base commander Lt. Gen Robert W. Cone giving the same account as Medley.

From today’s story in the New York Times:

Police Senior Sgt. Mark Todd/N.Y. Times photo

How the authorities came to issue the original version of the story, which made Sergeant Munley a national hero for several days and obscured Sergeant Todd’s role, remains unclear. (Military officials also said for several hours after the shooting that Major Hasan had been killed, although he had survived.)

Six days after the deadly shooting rampage at a center where soldiers were preparing for deployment, the military has yet to put out a full account of what happened.

At a news conference outside the post on Wednesday, Lt. Col. John Rossi refused to take questions about who shot Major Hasan or why the initial reports said it had been Sergeant Munley rather than Sergeant Todd.

“These questions are specific to the investigation and I am not going to address that,” Colonel Rossi said.

Public affairs officials also declined to make Chuck Medley, the director of emergency services at the post, available for questions. It was Mr. Medley, who oversees the post’s civilian police and fire departments, who gave the first account of how Sergeant Munley stopped the gunman.