Former Xe guard from Beach ordered jailed without bond

NORFOLK

A former security contractor charged with killing two Afghan civilians in an alcohol-fueled attack was ordered jailed without bond Tuesday as emerging details portrayed the Virginia Beach man as a rogue who joined the firm once known as Blackwater after getting booted from the Marine Corps.

Christopher Drotleff, 29, could face the death penalty if convicted in the May 5 incident in Kabul.

“He’s shown himself to be someone whose word can’t be trusted and is prone to going rogue,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Randy Stoker told U.S. Magistrate Judge Tommy E. Miller.

A second man charged, Justin Cannon, 27, was arrested in Texas and is awaiting extradition.

At Drotleff’s bond hearing in U.S. District Court, Stoker laid out the defendant’s military record, showing that he repeatedly disobeyed his command, disappeared without authorization, and stole from the government before finally receiving an other-than-honorable discharge in 2001, after about two years into his service.

Drotleff then returned home and repeatedly met trouble with Virginia Beach police, getting arrested several times on charges of resisting arrest, assault and drunken driving, Stoker said.

But Drotleff’s lawyer, and his wife outside the hearing, painted a different picture: of a man who simply wanted to serve his country and who once became a police informant, going undercover wearing a hidden microphone to catch four individuals selling illegal guns.

Beach attorney Lawrence H. Woodward Jr. also presented a vastly different portrait of the incident in Afghanistan from what prosecutors allege. Woodward told the court that Drotleff and Cannon acted in self-defense when the Afghan civilians tried to plow them over while they stopped to help their partners, who had driven off a road.

At the time, Drotleff was working for the security firm Paravant, a subsidiary of Xe, the Moyock, N.C.-based company once known as Blackwater. He and his partners were transporting interpreters when one vehicle with them ran off the road and flipped over, Woodward said. When Drotleff and Cannon got out to help, Woodward said, the civilians came out of nowhere and tried to run them down.

Drotleff, carrying a 9mm pistol, and Cannon, with an AK-47 assault rifle, fired at the vehicle, which then sped off. The two men helped the accident victims out and sought medical help, not knowing that any civilians had been struck by their bullets.

But Stoker told a different story. He said Drotleff had been consuming alcohol, against Paravant and Department of Defense policy, when he and Cannon left a military base without authorization. Stoker says they were involved in a crash with two Afghan civilians, then became “agitated” and opened fire on them.

The Afghan driver was wounded. The passenger died from a gunshot wound to the back. A third man – a bystander who happened to be walking by – died from a gunshot to the head, Stoker said.

Drotleff’s wife, in an interview Tuesday, described her husband as a devoted family man.

“He’s a great man, a wonderful father, a great husband and a patriot,” Gina Drotleff said just before Tuesday’s bond hearing. "We’ve known each other for 11 years and been married for nine. I wouldn’t be with someone who wasn’t a good person.”

The couple met while Drotleff was stationed in Hawaii. Gina Drotleff was there on vacation when she spotted the Marine while rollerblading near the beach in Waikiki. She approached him and asked for a date.

“The main thing that attracted me to him was that he was a gentleman,” she said. “It took him a month to even hold my hand.”

The couple married in 2000 and have two children, a 3½-year-old son and a 7-week-old daughter.

She said she had no idea her husband might be facing murder charges.

“It’s a shock,” she said.

Tim McGlone, (757) 446-2343, tim.mcglone@pilotonline.com