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Military slayings { July 26 2002 }

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Friday, July 26, 2002

Series of slayings shakes military community
By Tanya S. Biank
Staff writer

In the past six weeks, the wives of four Fort Bragg soldiers have been slain. In all four cases, investigators said, their husbands were the killers.

And in three of the cases, the men were special operations soldiers who had been deployed to Afghanistan.

No one is saying that serving in Afghanistan led to those deaths. But the killings have raised questions about whether the wartime deployments added stress to marriages already in trouble.

Fort Bragg officials say they are looking closely at the cases, trying to determine whether the hardships of military life contributed. The Army has many programs for families, but some spouses say the military could do more to help them cope.

‘‘One case of child abuse or spouse abuse or one homicide is one too many, and it’s a continuous effort on all our parts to do as much as we can to prevent it from happening again,’’ said Col. Tad Davis, Fort Bragg’s garrison commander. He’s the post’s equivalent of a city manager.

‘‘I can guarantee you that we will be looking extremely closely at these last couple of cases,” he said. “Not in a sort of vengeful way, but in a way to truly learn what occurred in the lives of these soldiers and their families so that we can take those lessons learned and improve the programs we have and do the best job we can to prevent something like this from happening again.’’

The string of family deaths started June 11.

Fayetteville police said that was when Sgt. 1st Class Rigo- berto Nieves -- a soldier in the 3rd Special Forces Group who had been back from Afghanistan just two days -- shot his wife, Teresa, and then himself in their bedroom. Police said the couple’s 6-year-old daughter tried to get into the bedroom, but the door was locked.

Nieves had requested leave to resolve personal problems.

Sheriff’s investigators said Jennifer Wright was strangled June 29. Her husband, Master Sgt. William Wright of the 96th Civil Affairs Battalion, reported her missing two days later. Then on July 19, he led investigators to her body in Hoke County and was charged with murder. Investigators said the couple’s three children likely were asleep when she was killed.

Wright, who had been back from Afghanistan for about a month, had moved out of his house and was living in the barracks.

On the same day that Wright was arrested, Sgt. 1st Class Brandon Floyd shot his wife, Andrea, then killed himself in their Stedman home. Sources have confirmed that Floyd was a member of Delta Force, the secretive anti-terrorism unit based at Fort Bragg. He returned from Afghanistan in January, officials said.

The couple’s three children were in Ohio visiting relatives at the time of the deaths.


Individual cases

‘‘It’s very much a tragedy,’’ said Maj. Gary Kolb, a spokes- man for the U.S. Army Special Operations Command, to which Nieves, Wright and Floyd were all assigned. ‘‘I wish it would be easy enough to pinpoint one thing and say, ‘This will never happen again.’

“Each one needs to be looked at individually, and we need to let soldiers know there are resources out there to help him solve his problems.’’

Kolb said the Special Operations Command will look at the programs in place to help soldiers.

‘‘We’re not looking to blame anyone for anything,’’ he said.

On deployments, chaplains provide spiritual guidance and counseling to soldiers, he said.

Before soldiers return home, chaplains talk to them about making the transition back to home life. Chaplains can also talk to spouses before their husbands come home and then can meet with couples after the homecoming.

He questions any attempt to link the family killings to Afghanistan.

‘‘Can you say that going to Afghanistan caused this?’’ he said. ‘‘It’s a reach.’’


Not deployed

In one of the killings involving soldiers, investigators know that Afghanistan had no role.

Sgt. Cedric Ramon Griffin was charged with stabbing his estranged wife, Marilyn, at least 50 times and then setting her home on fire July 9. Her two children escaped from the home.

Griffin was in the 37th Engineer Battalion, not a special operations unit. And he had never been deployed to Afghanistan.

Still, much of the attention following the string of deaths has focused on special operations soldiers and the stresses brought on by the war on terrorism. Fort Bragg is the Army’s headquarters for Special Forces and special operations soldiers, and hundreds have been deployed in the fight.

Jimmy Dean, a retired Green Beret master sergeant, said the majority of Special Forces soldiers are seasoned professionals whose wives are used to long deployments.

Under normal circumstances, Green Berets can be deployed four to six months out of a year.

‘‘There are thousands of deployments, literally thousands,’’ he said. He believes husbands and wives need to learn to work out the difficulties of separation.

‘‘If you talk to a chaplain before or after, it doesn’t do a damn thing,’’ he said. ‘‘It’s each individual, and most individuals can handle it.’’

Like today’s Special Forces soldiers, Dean was trained to be self-reliant in the field. He does not put much stock in counseling. Even without all the programs available to soldiers today, he said, ‘‘None of my team members ever came back home and murdered anybody.’’


Seeking support

But since the slayings and suicides, some families are reaching out for help.

Yvonne Qualantone, president of the 3rd Special Forces Group’s Family Readiness Group, said her phone has been ringing since the killings. The organization is a support group for families in the unit.

‘‘I’m getting a lot of phone calls, and we’re trying to make sure everyone is getting the right information,’’ she said.

She said stress levels are a little higher than normal. And since the killings, she said, some women who have been having problems with their husbands have called wanting to know to whom they should talk before things get worse.

‘‘We’re giving our chaplains a run for their money,’’ she said. ‘‘And just kind of leaving the lines open so we have people to contact.’’

Qualantone said that having husbands in Special Forces is hard on the wives, and they learn to be self-sufficient.

‘‘I think it takes a stronger woman than most,’’ she said. ‘‘Because you are on your own quite a bit.’’

Another woman married to a Green Beret, who asked not to be identified, thinks the service doesn’t do enough for families.

‘‘I firmly believe that the Special Forces lifestyle and demands have played a bigger role (in the killings) than the Special Forces leaders want to admit,’’ she said.

‘‘I don’t know what they are dealing with over there. I think they are doing a poor job of managing the stress of these deployments. Somebody dropped the ball.’’

Military officials and civilian investigators have not indicated that marital infidelity played a role in any of the recent killings, but the Special Forces wife who asked not to be identified said that it can be a problem. Men are gone from home for long stretches; wives are left alone, often in communities where they have no family.

The woman said she found out her husband cheated on her during a deployment. They are now working out their problems, she said, but not because of help from the military.

‘‘My husband had cheated, and not one person contacted us to offer support, not one person sent the chaplain over,’’ she said.

‘‘No matter what they say, Special Forces is not about family values.’’


Help available

But Fort Bragg officials can point to a spectrum of Armywide programs to help families deal with the stresses of everyday life as well as Army life.

‘‘Life itself is very stressful for each and every human being,’’ said Davis, the garrison commander. ‘‘And when you add that to life in the military with deployments around the world ... it’s a very stressful life that we lead above and beyond the day-to-day activities we go through.’’

Martha Brown, the Deployment and Mobilization program manager for Army Community Service at Fort Bragg, helps prepare units and families for deployments and reunions.

Brown said that before a deployment, couples need to discuss such things as finances, home repairs, children and medical needs.

After a deployment, couples have to work at reconnecting, she said.

‘‘Their expectations are different,’’ she said. ‘‘The service member may be expecting a nice quiet reunion when he gets home, and then the spouse may have something totally different, a big party, people staying home for a couple weeks. So what we stress is that they need to communicate.’’

Fort Bragg’s Family Advocacy program deals with domestic violence, child abuse and spouse abuse, and offers free classes on parenting, stress and anger management.

‘‘We hope they gain a lot of information and self-help for themselves in order for them to assist themselves and their families,’’ said Cherry Thompson, who works with the Family Advocacy program.

Every Fort Bragg unit also has a Family Readiness Group to help families cope, especially when soldiers are deployed.

‘‘We spend a lot of time and effort putting these family readiness groups together,’’ Davis said. ‘‘Could we do more? Could we do a better job? The answer is yes. And that’s one of the things we are continuing to work on with the units that are continuing to deploy overseas.’’

Maj. John Parsley is a Fort Bragg psychologist and the commander of the 528th Medical Detachment, which specializes in combat stress.

Most of the unit’s work is done on deployments.

‘‘Most people come out of an experience like that, and they are fine,” Parsley said. “It’s a temporary stressful situation, but it tends to get better. And most couples will deal with this, and in a lot of cases it will bring them closer together.

‘‘The ones that do the best, they find ways to communicate,’’ he said. ‘‘Whether it’s by e-mail, letters, phone calls or packages. And they work really hard to stay in touch with one another.’’

Parsley doesn’t know what contributed to the recent deaths.

‘‘If I knew the answer to that, I’d be on the talk show circuit,’’ Parsley said. ‘‘Honestly, I don’t know.’’

But, he said, “I think it probably involves issues a lot bigger than just simply something like a deployment.’’


Thousands overseas

As Fort Bragg officials look at the recent deaths, trying to assess whether the military can do more to help families, thousands of the post’s soldiers are on deployments. About 3,000 82nd Airborne Division soldiers are in or will soon leave for Kandahar, Afghanistan.

LaShawn Mercron’s husband, Capt. Robert Mercron, went a few weeks ago. Mercron knows about long separations. Her husband once spent six months in Honduras.

She said her marriage is spiritually grounded, and reconnecting after that deployment was not difficult.

But she said the stresses surrounding a wartime deployment are far greater.

‘‘Just the news that he was going,’’ she said. ‘‘Just the news of anyone who is going to Afghanistan. It’s the whole 9/11 thing.’’

Mercron said she is visiting relatives this summer and is trying to keep her children busy. She is also dealing with the daily headaches of running a household on her own. She said her water was almost turned off because she thought her husband had paid the bill before he left.

She has thought about the killings that followed deployments to the war zone.

‘‘Something was going on before they went,’’ she said. ‘‘And going to Afghanistan just increased the stress.’’


Staff writer Tanya Biank can be reached at 323-4848, extension 370, or biankt@fayettevillenc.com

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