They are ghosts. That he would take care of him permanently. Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, he says, pretty much anywhere the U.S. had anything going on between 2006 and 2018, he was there. By 2012, he had made the ultra-selective cut for Delta Force, which rejects the overwhelming majority of Rangers and Green Berets invited to try out. On February 2nd, the Charlotte field office put out a bulletin seeking assistance from the public to establish a timeline of the two mens movements up until their deaths. He is unsmiling, his eyebrows raised, his eyes intently focused on the photographer. The report, released in early 2020, was mostly a whitewash, full of vague language about improving leadership and accountability. At bars like ODonnells Pub in Southern Pines, they are easily identified by their signature off-duty style, which incorporates elements of biker culture, and is characterized by beards, tattoos, muscles, sun-faded baseball caps with tattered brims, and concealed handguns. He told the county investigator that Leshikar had come at him with a screwdriver, leaving him no choice but to shoot in self-defense, supposedly for the protection of the children. Its just wonderful, she said. View obituary. The Fayetteville Observer. Send us a tip using our anonymous form. Steve Kirsch has reported on recent deaths at Fr. Just not very well. In July 2018, around the time he and his dad had to flee from that Independence Day fireworks show, he called Mabey to beg her forgiveness for killing her son. She and her husband, a Navy submariner, were moving to North Carolina, and stayed for a time at Leshikars apartment. Enrique was blind as fuck without his glasses, Romero says. It did cite, however, what it described as an unhealthy sense of entitlement among special operators. Click the "subscribe'' link at the top of this article. He also deployed with the 2nd Brigade Combat Team in 2017 during Iraqs liberation of Mosul from the Islamic State. Its the last thing we spoke about.. He stands in front of a parking lot at night, a middle-aged, broad-chested black man with a shaved head, dressed in whiskered jeans and a shirt with vertical stripes. Sgt. Born in New York City on April 27, 1985, Boyd enlisted in the Army from Tampa, Florida, in 2004 as a psychological operations specialist. The 100 Greatest TV Shows of All Time, No narcotics were reported recovered, but for the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, which is headquartered at Fort Bragg, it had all the makings of yet another drug scandal, the latest in a string of them to hit the special-operations community. CBS News national security correspondent David Martin reports. Each death is blamed on the husband. Uh-huh., CID is aware of the deceaseds alleged drug activities, Grey, the CID spokesman, says. Around 4 p.m., they arrived at Lavignes house, a cookie-cutter tract home at the end of a blank cul-de-sac. Why did it take them till December?. Did he have demons? Zygarowski, who enlisted in the Army in 2018, was a mechanic assigned to He was from a suburb of Los Angeles called Chino. We asked and begged them so many times, Griselda says, and they just refuse to tell us who these people are. But Grey says that the Privacy Act forbids them from releasing the names. He was promoted to master sergeant in July, becoming an operations team sergeant for a Special Forces Operational Detachment-Alpha, officials said. A warrant for his arrest was issued, and this time, for whatever reason, the charge was not dropped. You got 42 confirmed kills? she says, imitating a mans deep voice. Roman-Martinezs partial remains were later found May 29, after washing up on Shackleford Banks Island, which is part of the Cape Lookout National Seashore. Three Fort Bragg soldiers died while deployed overseas in 2020, according to the Department of Defense. After completing basic combat training and advanced individual training in 2019 at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, he was assigned to the 307th Airborne Engineer Battalion, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, where he served as a combat engineer. Crime-scene technicians would have photographed it on December 2nd, when they turned aside the nylon blanket he was wrapped in and saw him barefoot and shirtless, shot multiple times in the chest. Hes one of those guys whos into nature. Governor Roy Cooper ordered all U.S. and North Carolina flags at state facilities to half-staff beginning immediately until sunset Wednesday, April 26, in honor of U.S. Army Sgt. Even if Leshikar had come at him with a screwdriver, Billy wouldnt just forget how to disarm somebody, Nicole says. Kiss Paul Stanley Has 'Thoughts' About Parents Who Support Kids Gender Identities Accidental? Cloaked in secrecy and sloshing with money, JSOC has operational control over the most elite commando units of each of the major service branches, including the Navys SEAL Team 6 and the Armys Delta Force, which it uses to carry out the nations most politically risky, no-fail missions, like the killing of Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, the emir of the Islamic State, in 2019. By the end of the year, there had been 21 suicides at Fort Bragg, more than at any other U.S. military post. They were joined by Lavigne, the girls godfather, whom she called Uncle Billy, and his daughter, who was like a younger cousin to her. Leshikar opened the hood of the car, a Honda Accord, and with the engine still hot, began to disassemble it. On a cold evening in late January, when I visit the approximate spot where he was found, the woods are perfectly still and quiet, with not even a bird chirping. Lavigne himself turned up dead a few years later, shot in the chest and left in the back of his own truck. With multiple police pistols pointed at him and officers shouting at him to drop the gun, Lewis raised his weapon and shot himself in the forehead. Thats the way I feel about it.. Keiths mom, Lynda Lewis, tells me that her son should have been expelled from the Army back in 2016, when he assaulted Sarah and got into an armed standoff with the Fayetteville police. 0:44. Here are some of the tragic deaths that have plagued the base in recent months: Pvt. Nevertheless, local officials were satisfied by Lavignes claim of self-defense. Its not even clear exactly how many soldiers died at Fort Bragg in 2020. We need answers, and we need solutions., Im calling on the Department of Defense to account for these deaths, he continued, and to give us a plan of action for safeguarding the active-duty service members who keep Americans safe.. CID rejects any notion that anything but a complete and unbiased investigation was conducted, Grey says. He was trained for that., The Army officer who did the line-of-duty investigation, a copy of which was first obtained by Jack Murphy of Connecting Vets, noted several discrepancies between the statements Lavigne gave and the evidence collected, including the absence of a screwdriver. On May 9, 2018, roughly three months after Becky Kunzes death, Sarah Hartsfield fatally shot her onetime fianc in the large home they had moved to from Texas months before. Graves was the night she died. The problems persisted. A day after the bodies were found, an unnamed Army official leaked to CBS that both Lavigne and Dumas, at the time of their deaths, were under investigation for trafficking narcotics on Fort Bragg, and that investigators suspected a double homicide from a drug deal gone wrong. Rachael Riley. Nor would the base discuss the perplexing incidence of young men turning up unresponsive in their bunks, such as 19-year-old Caleb Smither, whose body was so decomposed when they found him that he couldnt have an open-casket funeral. Her brother enlisted for a steady paycheck and for the GI Bill. FORT BRAGG A soldier is being mourned after he was killed during a training exercise at Fort Bragg, officials said Friday. Investigators identified the soldiers as Spc. He was arrested for a final time on September 17th, in Fayetteville, this time on a prostitution charge. William J. LaVigne II, 37, was found dead near a Fort Bragg training area close to the body of Army veteran Timothy J. Dumas, 44, Dec. 2. FORT BRAGG A soldier is being mourned after he was killed during a training exercise at Fort Bragg, officials said Friday. His rudeness annoyed her. This time he was charged with three felonies: breaking and entering, communicating threats, and impersonating a law-enforcement officer, but all of the charges were dismissed. Paul Allan Hartman. Editors picks According to Stars & Stripes, more than 30 soldiers working at Fort Bragg have died so far in 2020. A Fort Bragg spokesperson identified the soldier as Sgt. He was promoted to master sergeant in July 2019, becoming an operations team sergeant for a Special Forces Operational Detachment-Alpha, officials said. He was a sweet, animal-loving kid who went to Afghanistan at the age of 19 and came back a different person, she says. He was taken home that same night by some of his Delta Force teammates. Early Saturday afternoon, park rangers had approached the group from Fort Bragg to ask them to move their vehicles, which were encroaching on protected sand dunes. He was participating in an airborne training operation at Fort Stewart, Georgia. Zygarowski, who enlisted in the Army in 2018, was a mechanic assigned to Lavigne was entitled to a variety of due process protections. Most recent obituaries in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Thats when he made the statement that if I wanted my husband gone, he could take care of it, she says. Two months later, someone nearly died of a heroin overdose at Lavignes house. As she lay dying, her baby girl was born; she was going to be named Isabella, but she did not live. hree weeks before Christmas, in the piney woods outside of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, a deer hunter came across the fallout from a firefight that, to date, no one has been able to explain. Only his severed head had been found. Inside the Rash of Unexplained Deaths at Fort Hood | Vanity Fair The Army Criminal Investigation Command is investigating the death as a homicide, as an autopsy report states he was decapitated. As a psychological operations specialist, Boyd deployed eight times, including tours to Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Qatar, the Philippinesand Lithuania. The last person to have seen him alive that I could identify is a woman named Jessie Marie Patino, a tattoo artist and junkyard mechanic. Macho as Leshikar might have been, when his little girl told him that he had to wear a dress to attend her tea party, he didnt argue. Those two would always pull some shit, she says. She sent him a text message and agreed to hear him out on condition they meet at Leshikars grave site. Staff writer Rachael Riley can be reached at rriley@fayobserver.com or 910-486-3528. He was looking to be helpful and to be part of the team.. One day in late November, she says, she was working on a customers car when she turned around and there was Billy, wearing a black ski mask and carrying a crossbow. It far surpassed Fort Hood, where 28 soldier deaths in 2020 led to a congressional investigation, a sweeping indictment of the installations toxic culture, and the dismissal of most of the chain of command. Did he struggle with drugs, alcohol, cocaine, tramadol? Now no one can look away.. That the FBI has taken the lead makes me feel a little bit better, says Billys father. The last time his father spoke to him was Thanksgiving. Ari McGuire, died of a fentanyl overdose at Fort Bragg in August 2019, after he was allegedly introduced to drugs by his platoon sergeant in Afghanistan. He had been shot multiple times in the chest, wrapped in a type of nylon blanket that soldiers call a woobie, and placed in the back of his own truck, the gray Chevrolet. Mount joined the Army in January 2016 and came to Fort Bragg in June 2016. He attended Special Forces Assessment and Selection and graduated as a Special Forces engineer sergeant in October 2007, beingassigned to the 19th Special Forces Groups 2nd Battalion. All rights reserved. It went from being very rarely used to becoming, in the post-9/11 era, an organization that was running a dozen missions a night around the world., Those missions often take place in failed states or amid frozen conflicts where the United States has no acknowledged presence, and American soldiers operate in a grey zone where morality and ethics are in the eye of the beholder, and everything goes so long as the mission is accomplished and your tactics arent known to the public or explicitly to the higher-ups, as one former Green Beret writes me from federal prison, where he is doing time for smuggling 50 kilos of cocaine into Florida on a military aircraft. Lavigne was entitled to a variety of due process protections. Dumas and his dreadlocked sidekick went into the apartment across the corridor, and she went into hers. The Fort Bragg soldiers were deployed to Afghanistan and Syria in support of Operations Freedoms Sentinel and Inherent Resolve. It would be an exaggeration to say that Fayetteville must be a more dangerous duty station than Raqqa or Kandahar, and yet piecing together data provided by Col. Buccino, and previous Army disclosures to the McClatchy news agency, as well as reports in the local media, I count no fewer than 44 active-duty deaths at Fort Bragg during 2020. He tried to rationalize it, telling his mom that he and his fellow Green Berets would snort coke to stay awake on sleepless missions. She used to rent a house from him in Carthage, another little town on the periphery of Fort Bragg. Army investigators have disclosed nothing, not even the identities of the other soldiers who were on the camping trip, one of whom was a young woman. El tipo que peg el tiro aqu, she says, pointing to a small black hole in the wall: The guy who fired a shot through here., The other woman, whom Ill call Estella, tells me the story in English. In March 2018, Mark and Laura Leshikar took their daughter to Disney World to celebrate her fifth birthday. User may use CAC to register and log in. But neither JSOC nor USASOC responded to repeated requests for comment. George Allen taught Villalon at East Aurora High School. The militarys overdose crisis, though most severe at Fort Bragg, affects the entire Army and every other service branch, too. According to officials, 33 of the fatalities are of undetermined causes. In 2016, he was assigned to the 307th Airborne Engineer Battalion, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, where he served as a horizontal construction engineer and later as a squad leader. Succession Recap: Logan Roy Makes Shock Return, Shiv and Tom Get Kinky Sens. A celebration of life will be held on Saturday, May 13th 2023 at the Veteran's Hall (360 N Harrison St, Fort Bragg, CA Image in illustration by Alamy. In total, a staggering 83 active-duty soldiers stationed at Fort Bragg died in the 18 months ending June 2021, according to data obtained by Rolling Stone. David Bragg. He sincerely felt it was the key to mental illness, a cure for depression, PTSD., Roman-Martinez had poor eyesight and wore thick glasses above a friendly smile. He kind of represented himself as an SF operator, she says, though he was just a logistics guy. Master Sgt. Thirteen U.S. service members were killed in the attack and 45 were wounded. Hed read an article about hallucinogenic mushrooms, she says. She also retrieved her Glock from the bedroom and stuck it under a couch cushion. Everybody seemed to know the same people. Virtually everything to do with this organization is classified, says Sean Naylor, author of Relentless Strike, a history of JSOC. At least 44 Fort Bragg soldiers died stateside in 2020 several of them were homicides. Pvt. Fort Bragg, North Carolina, is a military installation of the United States Army in North Carolina, and is one of the largest military installations in the world, with around Matthew Disney, 20, of Aberdeen, Maryland. July 17, 2021 (83 years old) View obituary. The autopsy showed that he had been shot from multiple angles, including from behind. On-post deaths or off-post accidents and incidents: Officials released information throughout the year about the deaths of other Fort Bragg soldiers who either died on post or in off-post inicidents. Sgt. Lewis followed her outside, holding their three-year-old daughter on one hip and a gun in the other hand. Roman-Martinezs partial remains had washed up on Shackleford Banks a few days later, but in the six months since then, few details had been forthcoming. In 2015, former SEAL James Matthews got pulled over in New Jersey towing a trailer loaded with $1.4 million worth of marijuana. The Navy SEALs have been seared by repeated scandals in recent years, but until Lavignes mysterious death in December, Delta Force had been spared accusations of drug use in its ranks. People who knew him tell me that in life, he fit a certain kind of American archetype: the wannabe special-forces guy, a fake operator who, in order to impress people or intimidate them, passed himself off as an ex-commando. Command Sgt. Even though some people use the term interchangeably, they are The 50 Worst Decisions in Music History The young soldier who called 911 also told the dispatcher, unprompted, that Roman-Martinez had suicidal tendencies, which his sister strenuously disputes. Such a pigheaded, egotistical man was the first impression he made on his wife, Laura, a 39-year-old paralegal from Hawaii whose dad was a Marine. I could never take anything serious.. Related A memorial service today at Fort Bragg makes 25 years since the 82nd Airborne Division suffered its biggest one-day loss of life since World War II.The She had called his unit because he had been drinking real bad and using steroids, and asked that he be moved back into the barracks, says Phillips. Jessica Donati, the author of Eagle Down: The Last Special Forces Fighting the Forever War, tells me that since 2014, the burden of maintaining the United States never-ending war in Afghanistan has shifted almost entirely onto the Green Berets, who have been used by successive administrations as a political tool to plug holes in policies that dont work, and to maintain the fiction that the United States has withdrawn from combat operations. A $25,000 reward is being offered for information leading to the apprehension and conviction of the person or persons responsible for Roman-Martinezs murder. July 15, 2021 (24 years old) View obituary. The Army said two soldiers stationed at Fort Bragg died Monday in unrelated deaths that shook the community at the North Carolina base. The man on the ground, who had been dropped by a single bullet to the right temple, was 44-year-old Timothy Dumas. He wasnt looking for another rank or another award, Allen said. In May of that year, he met Mark Leshikar, another stubborn, hardheaded country boy from way up north. They say get a lawyer., I just dont know whats going on with our military right now, says Mabey. Details of Smithers death have not been released. Fish ate them, says his sister (above at her brothers funeral and on the beach where his remains were found). The next day around 7 p.m., one of the campers called 911. I dont know any soldier who has done the tours he had done that doesnt., That was certainly the case with Lavigne. An orange sun is setting behind row upon row of monotonous pines. The FBI is also investigating the deaths of Dumas and Lavigne, and has taken the lead in the case, according to CID. Spc. Staff Sgt. July 10, 2022 (65 years old) View obituary. On June 20th, in Carthage, he was arrested at a McDonalds for striking a woman with a bag of food. Absolutely. Joseph Zygarowski, 25. I would see him staring off in space a lot, thinking. On the Fourth of July, he took his son to see the fireworks at Fort Bragg. When Marky would spiral was when he drank too much. He would turn to his wife and say things like, You know Im a bad person, right? A Dallas County jury awarded more than $860 million to the parents of a woman killed in 2019 when a 200-foot steel crane toppled onto her apartment building from an adjacent construction site. One minute after midnight on February 17th, 2020, Lavigne crashed his truck into a womans vehicle in Fayetteville. McLaughlin and Villalon were soldiers who were part of the B Company, 307th Airborne Engineer Battalion, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division. Appropriate adverse action, which was previously initiated in response to substantiated misconduct, was being finalized at the time of Master Sgt. Over the next year, Leshikar moved on to benzodiazepines, then MDMA, then cocaine. Barry Recap: A Tragic Death Shakes Up Bill Haders Dark Satire What substances were involved in both fatal and non-fatal overdoses? Fort Bragg is the largest military base in the U.S. and the command post for the Armys most elite units, such as Delta Force and the Green Berets, which have borne a disproportionate burden of Americas never-ending wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, undergoing not just combat trauma and moral injury but a lot of traumatic brain injuries as well.
