Suicides In Groton CT

by **Camino Real** » Sat May 21, 2005 2:56 pm

something sinister bout this: <a href="http://www.courant.com/news/local/hc-navydeaths.artmay21,0,4134786.story?coll=hc-big-headlines-breaking">www.courant.com/news/loca...s-breaking</a> Suicides In The Ranks Stun Groton Deaths Of 4 Sailors In 13 Months Leave Naval Base Shaken By JOSH KOVNER Courant Staff Writer May 21 2005 DiAnn Flies was proud of the life she'd fashioned for herself and her four children in Wakefield, Neb. She was a widow who worked full time at the local egg factory, and her children learned by necessity to be supportive and helpful. She and her younger son, Adam, had a particularly close relationship. When he joined the Navy right out of high school, without her knowledge, she felt betrayed. Then she realized he wasn't doing it to hurt her. He was good with math and computers. He wanted to see the world. Let him go, she thought, he can't stay home forever. Six months later, she was at work at the plant when she saw a Navy van pull into the parking lot. A breath escaped her. "Two gentlemen got out. I knew something was wrong," said Flies, 44. "They took me to a room. They told me what happened, that he was no longer with us. I fell apart." Her good-hearted boy, her smart, slightly devilish son with the big imagination, the boy she nicknamed "Rowdy" when he was 2, was dead. Adam Lachlin Flies, 19, shot himself in the head with his 9mm duty pistol around midnight on Feb. 24, 2004, outside the security building at the Naval Submarine Base in Groton. He'd just finished working a security shift. Investigators found a book near him. It was opened to a page with a sentence underlined: "I'm not afraid to die." Flies, pronounced "flees," was the first of four Groton-based sailors to commit suicide in the 13 months from February 2004 to March of this year. No one at the base can recall another such cluster. On the morning of July 3, 2004, Elvridge McShane Wallace III, 29, a 12-year veteran from Clyo, Ga., who worked in supply, parked his car on the Gold Star Bridge, climbed over the railing, plunged into the Thames River and drowned. On Sept. 7, 2004, the body of David J. Klieves, 23, of Stockton, Calif., a member of the crew of the submarine USS Jimmy Carter, was found next to railroad tracks near the train station in Providence. He bled to death from self-inflicted cuts to his arms, said the Rhode Island medical examiner's office and Providence detectives. On March 24, Petty Officer Phillip Jeffrey Nisevich, 22, who grew up in Indiana, shot himself in the head with his 9mm duty weapon while on watch aboard the submarine USS Seawolf. Nisevich and the rest of the Seawolf crew had been deployed in support of the global war on terror, returning to Groton in November 2003. The sub had been berthed at Electric Boat, undergoing repairs. The deaths seared the servicemen and women who were close to the sailors, but were invisible to the larger Groton community surrounding the base. After Nisevich died, the Navy cautioned some of his friends and acquaintances about speaking publicly, including those who had posted messages of condolence and prayer on an on-line guest book linked to his hometown newspaper in Indiana. A civilian counselor in Groton who counted Navy parents among her clients, and a pastor with a handful of Navy families in his Gales Ferry parish had not heard a word about the deaths. The four sailors were in different commands and did not know one another. There were no obvious connections, but still, young men were dying at an alarming rate in this self-contained world where 7,500 sailors prepare submarines for war. The top brass had to find out whether something in the culture of the base was driving sailors to kill themselves. "We've looked with fine granularity at training- and command-climate issues. It's the first place we looked," Rear Adm. Mark W. Kenny said in a recent interview. Kenny, based in Groton, commands all the attack submarines and ballistic missiles on the East Coast. He was joined during the interview by Capt. Jane Vieira, head of Navy chaplains in the Northeast region, and the two men who are the link between Kenny and thousands of enlisted personnel, Master Chiefs Morris E. Pollard and Steven Juskiewicz. "In all four of the cases, it was not an issue that they hated the Navy or had a problem with the Navy," Kenny said, adding that the deaths appear to have stemmed from "personal circumstances in the lives of the sailors." After the first three deaths, Kenny reminded commanders to intervene in the lives of the sailors at the first sign of a problem. Crisis workers counseled the crews, classmates and co-workers of each of the dead sailors. In each case, sailors themselves organized the basewide memorial service, Vieira said. "Is there something in the Navy community in Groton that's behind this? I'd say unequivocally no," Kenny said. "Are there things we could have done better? Sure. We learn each time by putting the pieces together and interviewing people. We are a close-knit band of brothers. We are a family. That's why it's so painful to lose just one sailor." Ongoing suicide prevention programs have been intensified at the base. These programs are centered on outreach work by counselors and chaplains, and depend largely on sailors watching out for one another and letting superior officers know when one of their mates is in distress. A few months after Flies' death, a sailor on the base reported that a roommate who was having problems with a girlfriend had mentioned suicide. The sailor immediately received counseling: Another suicide may have been averted. `It Wasn't Him' Like DiAnn Flies, James Tavella, the father of David Klieves, is having difficulty accepting that his son committed suicide. Klieves was student body president at his high school in Stockton. He led Bible classes among his crew in Groton. Shortly before his death, he assured his father that he would soon be sending him a car insurance payment. He was excelling in submarine school and eager to get underway on the newly built Jimmy Carter. "David told me about the young sailor [Adam Flies] who shot himself in the parking lot. `This poor guy,' he said. `We went down and prayed for him.'" On Sept. 6, 2004, Klieves, on a Labor Day break from the base, drove his Mazda pickup to Providence. In heavy traffic on I-95 north, near Route 146 in Providence, he rear-ended a Jeep driven by a 33-year-old Cranston woman. No one was injured. Klieves' truck was damaged enough that repairs were expected to take several weeks. He rode with the tow-truck driver to a repair shop in the city. Once at the shop's yard, he gathered his Bible, cellphone and a couple of other belongings from the truck. He was last seen walking away. In the early evening of the following day, Sept. 7, his body was found beyond the passenger platforms at the Providence railroad station. His body was near freight tracks, separated by a wall and gully from the more heavily used passenger lines - which may explain why it wasn't discovered sooner, said Lt. Paul Campbell of the Providence Police Department. The items Klieves took from his truck were never found. He did not leave a note. The exact time of death is not known, and, Campbell said, police aren't sure whether Klieves went directly to the rail station from the repair shop. "It began as an investigation into a death that could have been a homicide," said Campbell, then a detective sergeant. "Crime scene tape, the bureau of criminal identification - we did a comprehensive investigation. The medical examiner found the injuries to be self-inflicted. The death has been ruled a suicide." Klieves' father cannot fathom this. "There's just no way he would do it," Tavella said. "It wasn't him. He was so jazzed about getting on the ship. He was jacked. All this training he was doing. He'd gotten all his clearances to go on this boat and he was one of the top people in his class." Tavella traveled from California to Groton to speak to people who knew his son. "He had talked to his girlfriend the night before and told her to send him some music tapes. I spoke to people who had been with him the previous week. They said, `That's not David.'" A Navy official who went to Klieves' apartment after his death told Tavella "there was a pizza box on the table. His clothes were laid out. It looked like he left to go to the 7-Eleven," Tavella said. The family groped for answers. Klieves' mother went to Providence and walked around the area of the train station, Tavella said. Twenty-five minutes into a phone conversation with The Courant, Tavella, his voice breaking, said he wanted to speak with his wife before talking more. "We're trying to heal. We have to think about whether we want to rehash this further." Tavella did not return a subsequent voice-mail message. The families of Wallace and Nisevich declined to be interviewed. "We just don't want to talk anymore about Shane," said a brother of Wallace, referring to his sibling by his nickname during a phone call from Georgia. But DiAnn Flies opened the door to her home on Winter Street in Wakefield, 100 miles north of Omaha. "If I could help others to just get help," she said. "Four deaths are just too many. I'm not here to degrade the Navy, but maybe there's something else we can do that no one's thinking about." Stretching His Wings Adam Flies seemed to stretch his wings in his senior year at Wakefield High School in Nebraska. He dyed his hair DayGlo colors. He got caught speeding (his mother took away the Dodge Neon for that). And after graduation, he went off to Sioux City, Iowa, 36 miles from Wakefield, and joined the Navy. DiAnn Flies hit the roof. Since her husband, William, a long-distance trucker, died in a motorcycle accident in 1991, she'd been the center of her children's lives. She worked second-shift at Michael Foods, the huge egg-processing plant that employed 800 people, nearly one-fifth the population of Wakefield, and her daughter, Arica, and sons, Adam and Aaron, would take turns caring for their little sister, Ayshia. When Arica had a baby at 16, everyone pitched in to help her and her future husband raise their daughter, Mariah. Arica finished high school and went on to college. This was a close, supportive family. "I didn't want Adam joining the Navy. I thought it was dangerous," DiAnn Flies said. "We were terribly close. I wanted to keep him home as long as possible - and he kind of did it behind my back. But he had wanted to go into the military for years. He was on the Internet all the time, researching the different branches of the service. He was real good at computers and math. He chose the Navy. He wanted to see the world and do good." A recruiter from Sioux City visited DiAnn and assured her that her son would receive the best training in the world and be as prepared as anyone could be to face whatever came his way. Her objections began to ease. She trusted her son. She had watched him grow up into a teenager who marched to his own drummer, who liked playing Dungeons & Dragons and other computer fantasy games, who liked to collect swords, and occasionally dressed all in black. She watched this, but didn't worry too much, even when he colored his hair blue or orange or red, because he never stopped being warmhearted and friendly and obedient and plugged into his surroundings. He disdained drugs and alcohol, she said. "He was certainly an individual," said Michael Moody, principal at Wakefield High School. Asked if he thought that Adam, a B-student, had ever become too immersed in the fantasy games, Moody said: "In these things, you look for a dark side, a melancholy, a chip on the shoulder. I just didn't see any of that in Adam. "Sometimes he looked the part, but he never really played it," Moody said. "He was a special kid, fun to be with. If I jabbed him about his colored hair, he'd jab right back. He was fine with it." Fast forward to the Groton base, in the late fall of 2003. Adam Flies is leaner, not a trace of DayGlo in his closely cropped hair. He had completed basic training in Great Lakes, Ill. He'd been homesick big-time during basic training and hated his commander, but he sucked it up after his mother told him in a letter not to quit, and he graduated. Now he was going to be a submariner. He was in basic enlisted submarine school in Groton and doing extra duty as part of a security detail on the base, packing a 9mm sidearm. He lived in a room in the barracks with three other sailors. They got along well, spending down time playing DVDs on PlayStation. Adam's closest friend at the base, Josh Nordyke, lived down the hall in the barracks. The pair would often walk to the Dunkin' Donuts on Route 12 near the base to talk and unwind. Shortly before Thanksgiving 2003, Adam met a woman at the Dunkin' Donuts. At 27, she was eight years older than Adam. Records show she was convicted of larceny in 1999 and 2003, possession of drugs in 2001, and criminal trespassing and interfering with police in 2000. The two became intimate, DiAnn Flies said. After a sexual encounter, the woman experienced bleeding and went to the hospital. Apparently, hospital officials questioned whether a sexual assault had occurred and notified police, who notified Adam's commanders at the base. The woman, with past addresses in Groton and New London, could not be located. Adam denied ever being rough with the woman and said nothing unusual had occurred during the encounter, DiAnn Flies said. Weeks went by, and Adam heard nothing more from his commanders about the questions raised at the hospital. "He had a very difficult time telling me," his mother recalled. "It took a week, but he did tell me in detail what happened with that girl. I asked him, `Are you leaving anything out? Were you rough with her?' He told me `no,' and I believe him. When we didn't hear anything further from the military, we figured there was nothing to pursue." William Kenny, public affairs officer for the training command at the base, said he was unaware of any pending legal issues for Adam. In the late afternoon of Feb. 23, 2004, Adam called a former classmate at Wakefield, Tabitha Barge. She was pregnant and Adam wanted to know how she was feeling and whether the father of the baby had come back into her life. "He cared about her as a friend and wanted to support her and help her. That was Adam," said his sister Arica Tello, who lives in Texas with her husband and daughter and works as an X-ray technician at a hospital. "And he knew what I went through as a young mother." Later, Barge would report that Adam sounded upbeat and clear-voiced. And she said that he told her he was looking forward to coming home to Wakefield for Arica's surprise birthday one week hence, on March 1, 2004. About six hours after that phone call, Adam shot himself. More than 600 people attended his funeral service at Salem Lutheran Church in Wakefield. It was said to be the second largest funeral the town had ever seen, behind the service for Dan Gardner, co-founder of the egg factory. "Adam was the first young person we've lost," Moody said. Several busloads of students from the high school attended the funeral. A scholarship was established in his name. After the funeral, DiAnn Flies, Arica Tello and her husband, Miguel, traveled to Groton to attend a memorial service for Adam and speak with Navy officials about his death. The family was shown the book that was found next to Adam's body. The book was opened to the page that Adam had chosen. Arica recalls that it may have been a computer-game book, part of the fantasy series that Adam and his friends followed. Not Statistically Unusual The Groton deaths "have everybody's attention on the base," but are not statistically unusual, said Cmdr. Anthony Doran, manager of the Navy's Suicide Prevention Program. "Every year, there are one or two commands nationwide that have multiple suicides," Doran said. The suicide rate in the Navy peaked in 1995 at 17 per 100,000 and has dropped in recent years to an annual rate of about 11 per 100,000. The civilian suicide rate remains about 19 per 100,000. Historically, suicide rates in the military are lower than in the general population. "The reason is we have a captive audience" of screened and trained personnel, Doran said. Since 1999, the prevention program, based at the Navy's Bureau of Personnel headquarters in Tennessee, has tracked suicides and compiled the data in an effort to devise better detection and prevention methods. "We'd like to get down to eight [per 100,00<img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/alien.gif ALT="0]"> or even six," Doran said. Next month, Doran will participate in a suicide symposium at the Groton base. "We're going to brainstorm to see if we can improve and develop better ways to reduce vulnerability to suicide," said Vieira, the Navy chaplain. "We want to do better at recognizing those silent indicators, in those sailors who hold everything inside." Bad Days, Better Days DiAnn Flies took a leave of absence from her job at the egg factory after Adam died. In August the company let her go. "They couldn't hold it forever," she said. She has been drawing from her 401k and seeing a counselor. She feels she may be ready to go back to work, but still is haunted by the memory of the day the Navy van pulled up. She has bad days and better days. "Holidays are tough. I'm still recuperating from Mother's Day. I'm just really missing him a lot right now." She racks her brain. Did she miss a sign? She does not believe she did. "See, he loved his family so much. That's why I can't imagine him not calling and letting me know something was wrong - or saying goodbye. "We don't think the Navy would hide anything. But it's just so hard to accept that he's gone." Copyright 2005, Hartford Courant

Suicides In Groton CT

Suicides In Groton CT

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