A former Pearl Harbor sailor who bashed in his wife’s head with a cast-iron skillet and repeatedly stabbed his Parkinson’s disease-afflicted mother-in-law in his military family quarters is free on parole after serving 13 years in custody.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons inmate locator, David DeArmond, 46, a former petty officer second class, was released from custody Oct. 23 in Fort Worth, Texas.

A military jury sentenced DeArmond to 22-1/2 years of confinement in 2003 after he pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter for killing his wife, Zaleha, and to murder for killing his mother-in-law, Saniah Binte Abdul Ghani. The court-martial plea deal allowed DeArmond to avoid the death penalty, and it guaranteed him a prison sentence of no more than 30 years.

Unlike in the federal court system, which ended parole for defendants convicted of crimes committed after Nov. 1, 1987, military defendants can still get parole. Prospective parolees become eligible after completing one-third of their sentences and are mandatorily released after completing two-thirds. Their time behind bars can be further reduced by any good-behavior credit they earn in military confinement or federal prison.

Some of the conditions to which DeArmond must abide while on parole prohibit him from having any contact with his wife’s and mother-in-law’s surviving family members; his biological children, who were 5, 3 and 2 years old at the time of the killings; and the children’s adoptive parents. They also require DeArmond to live with his mother in Portland, Ore., and prohibit him from traveling to Hawaii, where the children and their adoptive parents live.

Zaleha DeArmond’s brother and sister, who live in Singapore, the children and the children’s parents want further protection and have asked Hawaii courts to prohibit David DeArmond from entering the state.

According to legal papers filed in support of the requests, the oldest DeArmond child has told others he remembers being at home on the day his mother and grandmother died, sitting on the steps, which were covered with blood, and watching his father hit his mother on the head repeatedly with a kitchen pan. He also told others that his father forced him to clean up the blood and that he is afraid DeArmond will locate him and his siblings and “finish the job.”

Military authorities found the bodies of Zaleha DeArmond, 31, and Abdul Ghani, 66, in separate bathtubs in the DeArmonds’ Hokulani Housing unit near Pearl Harbor’s Nimitz Gate on June 10, 2002. They went to the home after David DeArmond confessed and turned himself in at least seven hours after the slayings.

A state temporary restraining order prohibiting DeArmond from contacting his wife, except to arrange visitation with his children, was in effect at the time of the slayings.

According to their autopsies, Zaleha DeArmond suffered multiple skull fractures, including some that connect ear to ear along the back of her head, and Abdul Ghani suffered 14 stab wounds to her chest and abdomen.

Both women were from Singapore and practicing Muslims.

David DeArmond’s plea deal and sentence outraged Hawaii’s Muslim community. Representatives and Zaleha DeArmond’s brother accused the Navy of discriminating against Muslims and of protecting one of its own.