PDA

View Full Version : Soldier’s lies unravel after he kills himself



thedrifter
02-24-08, 09:36 AM
Soldier’s lies unravel after he kills himself


By Nancy Montgomery, Stars and Stripes
European edition, Sunday, February 24, 2008

HEIDELBERG, Germany — Spc. Brenden Teetsell stood out. He was 6-foot-6 — but it was more than that. He was talkative, enthusiastic, smart and likable.

But Teetsell, it turned out, was also deeply troubled.

The 20-year-old satellite operator with the 5th Signal Command hanged himself Feb. 7 in his Mannheim barracks. He used bedsheets and a stairwell to end his life, just after Criminal Investigation Command investigators had spent the morning questioning him for apparently impersonating an officer.

He had been claiming to be a captain and that he’d been shot in the leg in Iraq, pastors at a California church told CID after the pastors decided to check up on him.

That long-distance telephone call was to be the first thread in the rapid unraveling of Teetsell’s life.

“It went from zero to 60 that morning,” said Lt. Col. Jay Chapman, commander of the 72nd Expeditionary Signal Battalion.

“We didn’t see symptoms. We’re really upset with ourselves. Nobody would have considered him to be feeling the way he was inside.”

Teetsell, who enlisted in 2006, had never been to Iraq. He hurt his knee before his unit deployed last fall and was reassigned to a different unit.

His death comes at a time when Army officials are grappling with a record number of suicides, even as they’ve stepped up suicide prevention efforts.

One major contributor to the increase in soldier suicides is thought to be the disruption to intimate and family relationships caused by long, repeated deployments.

But Teetsell had never deployed. He did not appear depressed, Chapman said his commanders told him. He was not aware he was being investigated until the day he died, Chapman said.

When he met Teetsell months ago, Chapman said he thought, “We had a nice, young soldier here — he seems to be really happy and proud to be doing what he’s doing.”

But all along, Teetsell had a secret, embellishing details about his life, say friends who only discovered the fabrications while grieving Teetsell’s death.

“None of this makes sense,” wrote acquaintance Gloria Robison in an e-mail. Teetsell spent Christmas in California with Robison’s family.

Robison had taken in Teetsell, as a sort of adopted son, more than three years before. He told her that his father had disowned him because he was a Jew who had converted to Christianity. He also told her that his father had died, she said.

“None of this is true,” Robison wrote. “He is French, and his father lives in Sacramento.”

“I could write a book on all the lies, but we choose to remember our ‘soldier’ as kind, fun, loving.”

Teetsell told people he earned a master’s degree at the University of California at Davis. “He told me he’d gotten a master’s degree when he was 16 or 17,” said Eric Bufford, who met Teetsell at a Christian youth group years ago.

But the UC Davis registrar said this week there was no record of Teetsell ever having attended.

Teetsell told Bufford, a 35-year-old Army veteran, that he’d been commissioned. When a skeptical Bufford asked to see his ID card, Teetsell handed it over.

“He had an ID card that said he was a captain,” Bufford said.

“It’s almost like he had a web of lies. The last time I talked to him — the last part of January — he said he was getting ready to redeploy.

“My wife said, ‘I bet you feel really duped.’ I don’t. Because I knew him for what he was. God measures the heart.”

Teetsell in his teens acted in local theater productions and was a graduate of a charter high school. A former teacher told the Appeal-Democrat newspaper of Marysville, Calif., that he did so well that “whenever we need to show success all we need do is point to Brenden.”

But his peers, more than authority figures, recognized something amiss.

“This isn’t surprising, given the stories he started telling at a very young age … mostly about his health and achievements, really anything to receive sympathy or praise,” a former classmate wrote in an online forum after Teetsell’s death was reported and local California media erroneously credited him with his fabricated honors and awards.

Army Spc. Jason Usry, now in Iraq, wrote that Teetsell’s “quirks” were well known by most soldiers who knew him.

“He endured a lot of ridicule when we were in [Advanced Individual Training], and it always struck me as odd that one soldier would be the object of so much hatred,” Usry wrote on his MySpace page. “My guess is that it was a combination of his outward religious zealotry, and the fact that he was liked by the drill sergeants.

“I’m not excusing what he said or did, but I’ll remember him as a guy who just wanted to be liked by everybody and hated it when somebody didn’t like him.”

Teetsell’s unmasking came ultimately at the hands of fellow Christians.

On Sept. 23, Teetsell was introduced to the congregation of Paradise Alliance Church near Yuba City, Calif., as Capt. Brenden Teetsell.

Teetsell can be heard on audio on the church’s Web site saying that he carried a cane because of an injury incurred in Iraq, and that he and his troops were grateful for the church’s prayers.

But as time went by, church leaders became suspicious.

“A lot of things just didn’t add up,” said Larry Shelton, Paradise’s head minister. “The primary thing was the rank. We started to say, ‘Does this make sense to you?’ ”

Another pastor called military authorities in Mannheim after Teetsell’s last visit at Christmas.

“It seemed like the best course at the time,” Shelton said. “Out of a sense of concern for others, you need to find out who he really is. Part of my responsibility is to make sure we walk in truth and dignity in front of each other.”

After being questioned by CID, Teetsell was released to a sergeant in his unit, sources said. Teetsell said he wanted to get something from his room, and the sergeant waited for a few minutes.

When the sergeant went to find him, Teetsell was already dead.

Teetsell had called his mother five days before and told her how much he loved the military, according to the Appeal-Democrat.

And Robert Hechtman, who had directed Teetsell in local theater productions, told the paper he’d spoken with him just weeks before.

“He had a lot of pain,” Hechtman said Teetsell told him, from the leg wounded in Iraq.

“I had the feeling it was excruciating pain.”


Army learns to watch for trouble in young GIs



Suicide rates have increased among middle-aged Americans by almost 20 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. No one’s sure why.

So in a way, it’s not surprising that despite Army efforts to stem an increase in soldier suicides, last year’s number was the highest level since the Army began keeping such records in 1980, according to an Army study released recently.

As many as 121 soldiers took their own lives last year, nearly 20 percent more than in 2006. The number of attempted suicides in the same time period jumped sixfold since the Iraq war began, according to the study.

“I think that it is a marker of the stress on the force,” Col. Elspeth Ritchie, the Army’s top psychiatrist, said last month at a Pentagon press conference.

She said that failed personal relationships, legal and financial problems and the stress of their jobs have been main factors in soldiers’ suicides — and that many of those things could have been worsened by long, repeated deployments.

The Army has traditionally had a lower suicide rate than that of male civilians in the same age group. The 2006 toll of 102 suicides translated to a rate of 17.5 per 100,000, still lower than the 19.9 for 100,000 in a comparable civilian sector. The lowest in the Army, in 2001, was 9.1.

U.S. Army Europe’s rates have been lower than the Army as a whole, and they have decreased further. Last year, three were confirmed.

In 2003, nine USAREUR soldiers took their own lives. Subsequent years saw a decline, to five suicides in 2004 and 2005, six in 2006 and three last year.

The 2006 rate of 6.7 per 100,000 soldiers is nearly one-third lower than the Army as a whole has ever recorded. It’s even lower than that of the civilian population.

Despite an increasing understanding of the dynamics of suicide, it remains complex and mysterious.

“We don’t know why that is,” said Laura Mitvalsky, chief of the Department of Health Promotion and Wellness at the Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine.

“It could be the high op-tempo. When people are constantly busy, that tends to keep numbers down.

“Or it could be we have a stronger sense of community over here, or perhaps we can find resources here more easily.

Col. John Read, U.S. Army Europe’s deputy command chaplain, offered a possible explanation.

“Because we’re an Army that’s already deployed, there’s a premium on quality of care,” Read said. “There’s the compelling sense we lean on each other more.”

As a chaplain, Read is at the forefront of Army suicide prevention. He said that the approach has changed over the years from one that concentrated on data collection and “awareness” to one that emphasizes intervention.

That meant that not only leaders were responsible, but that privates on up were also supposed to be keeping an eye on their comrades.

“It’s the classic battle buddy concept — they’re the ones that are going to look at me and say, ‘You seem really depressed. Are you thinking of killing yourself?’” Read said.

Asking that difficult, specific question is important, he said.

“The person at risk is ambivalent, sitting on the fence between life and death,” he said. “They’re wanting desperately for someone to ask them the direct question.”

But identifying the person at risk isn’t always easy, despite best efforts.

Lt. Col. Jay Chapman, commander of the 72nd Expeditionary Signal Battalion, for instance, keeps a “High-Risk Soldier Spreadsheet” updated weekly. The spreadsheet is designed to track anything that could cause problems — family issues, drug issues, even a new motorcycle, to help Chapman “keep an eye on people who might be in a fragile state.”

— Nancy Montgomery


Ellie