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A year before he entered the Army, police removed WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning from his father’s home after he allegedly threatened his stepmother with a knife, according to a news report Tuesday.

The revelation comes from a 911 call the stepmother made to Oklahoma dispatchers in 2006, after Manning, then 18, argued with his father and stepmother. Audio of the call was obtained by PBS Frontline for a 10-minute segment that will air Tuesday evening.

According to a transcript of the call, the father — after making a move to intervene — slipped and fell to the floor, prompting his wife to call 911.



When asked by the dispatcher if the teenager still had the knife, the stepmother replied that he’d put it down somewhere.

“He’s standing here. He won’t go away. I told him to get out of this room. He won’t leave,” she told the dispatcher, who replied that he would send a police officer to the house.

Manning’s father, Brian Manning, told Frontline that his son was “yelling and, you know, kind of tossin’ some stuff around and … it just reached a point where my wife felt vulnerable. And she just was, you know, was scared. And so she called 911….”

The teenager was escorted from the house but was not arrested or charged with a crime. The following day he moved out of his father’s house and never returned, according to Frontline.

The incident would not be the last time Manning allegedly exhibited violent behavior. When he was arrested last year for allegedly leaking classified information, he had recently been demoted from specialist to private first class for punching an Army colleague in the face, according to transcripts of an online chat he had with former hacker Adrian Lamo.

“It was a minor incident, but it brought attention to me,” he allegedly told Lamo. His life, which was already in turmoil, began to unravel at this point, as his career began to implode.

“I had about three breakdowns, successively worse, each one revealing more and more of my uncertainty and emotional insecurity,” he told Lamo.

Prior to his deployment to Iraq, Army commanders had been warned against sending Manning to Iraq, because of disciplinary problems. Manning’s supervisor at Fort Drum in New York had told his superiors that Manning had thrown chairs at colleagues and shouted at higher-ranking soldiers, according to an Army investigation.

Manning was deployed to Iraq anyway, because the Army needed his skills and was short-staffed with intelligence analysts. Manning’s superiors believed his discipline problems could be addressed in Iraq, but then they failed to properly monitor him once he got there.

Manning’s aggressive style had caused him problems in his civilian life as well, according to his father, who told Frontline that his son had lost his job at a software company after his behavior became increasingly erratic and he was involved in a heated confrontation with his boss.

After he left his father’s house following the knife incident, he wandered aimlessly from Oklahoma to Illinois and Maryland, never holding a job for more than a few months. His father urged him to join the Army to put some structure into his life, which he did in the summer of 2007.

The former Army intelligence analyst — charged in connection with all of WikiLeaks’ high-profile U.S. leaks — is being held in the Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Virginia. His attorney has requested a “706 board” inquiry to determine if he suffered a “severe mental disease or defect” at the time of his alleged leaking. If he’s found to have been mentally fit, the case will proceed to the military equivalent of a grand jury to determine if Manning will undergo a court martial.

Frontline is working on a longer documentary about Manning and WikiLeaks to air in full in May.

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