This is a previous edition of the Homicide Tracker. The DAs office did not respond to multiple requests for more information. In the bed of the truck and on the ground beside it were two dead men. The two were found dead on the same day in June 2021, just two weeks after airborne master sergeant Martin Acevedo III was caught trafficking cocaine. Why in the hell would you just let some guy off on murder?, A waste of paper is how Nicole describes CIDs report, which she received in heavily redacted form. Him and my brother had similar features., Leshikar, bearded and scowling in most photos, was six-foot-four, with a square jaw, a head of light-brown hair, and tattooed shoulders. Both girls witnessed what happened next. The Armys Criminal Investigative Command, or CID, also concluded that the homicide was justified, likewise for reasons that it refuses to make public. Absolutely. Fish ate them, Griselda says, and begins to cry. Feb 9, 2022 . 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. Why is Fort Bragg less safe than it was before the mask, testing and vaccine mandates? Recent surgeries to his legs had left him unable to run well. Sept. 26, 2022. To date, the House Armed Services Committee seems not to have noticed the similar pattern at Fort Bragg. Personnel numbers are also kept secret, but two years ago, a retired Delta Force colonel, a veteran of the Iraq War, told me that the unit is made up of about 250 operators, plus another 2,000 support troops. We have a lot of Delta Force members in our community, says Ballard, the police detective in Vass. According to Sarahs mother, Rhonda Phillips, on at least two occasions in 2020, the last being December 11th, Sarah reported Lewis to his unit, and informed them that she feared for her safety. They might have spent a hundred days where they did 40 raids, and in 15 of the raids they were within 10 yards of a breach explosion. Most of Billys friends or associates, Ive talked to or met, says his father. 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. It makes me feel great, said Carole De Nola, when she learned of the letter. Taking part in and witnessing violence, being away from home for long periods of time, and disillusionment with the mission can put special operators at heightened risk, Donati says, of divorce, alcoholism, substance abuse, and anger issues. His death was ruled a homicide. Fort Bragg needs to be blown up, that is, exposed to scrutiny, says Tammy de Mirza, Sarahs aunt. Could these deaths indicate a surge in suicides and overdoses? Since then, the military has administered more than 6.4 million doses, fully inoculating 90.1percent of active-duty service members with the two-dose protocol. The Army is failing to keep soldiers combat-ready, and this is evidenced by the militarys own medical surveillance system. 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 getting into all kinds of legal trouble, says Tammy Mabey, Leshikars mother, hanging out with bad people, deep into drugs, and nobody said or did anything. Send us a message on Facebook. Absolutely. Find service information, send flowers, and leave memories and thoughts in the Guestbook for your loved one. Her son, Spc. When I ask if his best friend ever took LSD, Romero says, Yeah. Over the past 20 years of continuous war, from the snowy passes of the Hindu Kush to the desert scrublands of Somalia, JSOCs budget and autonomy have continuously grown, and so has the scope of its mission. At least 44 Fort Bragg soldiers died stateside in 2020 several of them were homicides. Find an obituary, get service details, leave condolence messages or send flowers or gifts in memory of a loved one. According to military records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, a hard-to-believe 105 soldiers assigned to the base died stateside in 2020 and 2021. Estella thought he was joking. Smith, Mary Jane ~ 01 March, 2023. Harpwrote: Fort Bragg soldiers have been turning up unresponsive in their barracks on a disturbingly regular basis since the beginning of 2020, including Caleb Smither, Terrance Salazar, Jamie Boger, Joshua Diamond, Matthew Disney, Mikel Rubino, Michael Hamilton, and numerous others who have not been named.. He left the military in 2016, and for a time operated a nightclub in Fayetteville, which evidently brought him legal troubles. By Seth Harp September 29, 2022 Logan Mock-Bunting/Getty Images Congress has finally taken notice of an unprecedented wave of fatalities at Fort Bragg, some 17 months after Rolling Stone. Fort Bragg, CA Fort Bragg High School Chapel By The Sea Thursday, January 12, 2023 Add Photos 1 Memory David Laurence Gross David Laurence Gross 1941-2022 The Mendocino Coast community. Nicole and her husband also had small children. These are highlights of a significantly lengthier list. The things that have happened with special forces are outside the purview of the Fort Bragg command, he says. JANET BARON OBITUARY. Maj. Dan Lessard, a spokesman for Lewis unit, the 1st Special Forces Command, says Cumberland County declined to prosecute and that there was insufficient evidence for a court-martial, but that Lewis did receive non-judicial punishment and was directed to receive substance-abuse and marriage counseling. Congress has finally taken notice of an unprecedented wave of fatalities at Fort Bragg, some 17 months after Rolling Stone first brought attention to an apparent drug crisis at the base. He expressed political disagreements with Leshikar, who was of the opinion that the United States ought to nuke the Middle East and be done with it. William Edward Lemos June 2, 2022 (72 years old) Ed Markey, Elizabeth Warren, and three other senators are demanding answers from Defense Sec. We want to hear it. Hearing her father call her name, she went and let him inside. Yet their names and faces, as well as the oversize trucks they tend to drive, are well-known to plenty of ordinary people who live around Fort Bragg. No one I spoke to had any clue, or even a theory, who the surviving shooter or shooters were. Words his sister uses to describe him include gentle, spiritual, and feminist. He was a hippie, a believer in crystals, she says. The camera flash has rendered his retinas red. Thats when he made the statement that if I wanted my husband gone, he could take care of it, she says. On top of the sort of training that all Rangers, Green Berets, and Navy SEALs have to go through, he had been schooled in sabotage, demolition, hostage rescue, tactical driving, lockpicking, and spy-trade craft such as how to shadow people, use dead drops, and live under a cover identity. The letter, sent to Defense Secretary . How To Get Back 100% Vision At Any Age? Then 9/11 happened, touching off the longest period of war in U.S. history. But he scared me., a copy of which was first obtained by Jack Murphy of. He kind of represented himself as an SF operator, she says, though he was just a logistics guy. We look to the Greatest Commandment as our Powering force. She has photos of a tub of used syringes found in Lewis closet, including vials of drostanalone propionate and trenbolone acetate, both of which are illicit anabolic steroids that can cause severe mood disturbances. 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. For the Vaccinated: NANO SOMA* Through the intercom she says that she is just as clueless as anyone else and that she and Dumas led separate lives.. Shipping Policy The man in the bed of the truck, by contrast, didnt have to inflate his military credentials. April 29, 2022, 6:09 AM PDT. A spokesman, Chris Grey, writes in an email that Cumberland County had investigative jurisdiction over the case but that CID thoroughly reviewed all the evidence and interviewed witnesses. But neither JSOC nor USASOC responded to repeated requests for comment. And there have been several murders in the last few years around Fort Bragg with apparent links to drug-trafficking by elite soldiers, or distribution networks run by ordinary enlisted men in the 82nd. At no time during that interaction did they mention a missing person, a spokesman for the National Park Service told ABC11. Her husband and Lavigne remained with the other car, bound for Fayetteville, with the girls in the backseat. When they were doing cocaine, Mabey says, he always acted perfectly fine. Daddy started walking towards Uncle Billy, and Uncle Billy started shooting him. Everything thats happening at Fort Bragg is horrible, says Lynda Lewis, mother of the Special Forces medic who murdered his pregnant wife. He was just a boy, she quotes him as saying. Estella called the Fayetteville police, who filed an incident report. Privacy Policy - Page 2 . As she lay dying, her baby girl was born; she was going to be named Isabella, but she did not live. Multiple people who knew Lavigne tell me that he regularly snorted cocaine, took MDMA, popped pills, and drank heavily. He tells me I should go smoke in the back because theres going to be a shooting.. He fell in love with what he was doing and decided he was going to make a career out of it, says his dad, who still lives in the remote Upper Peninsula of Michigan where Billy grew up skateboarding and riding motocross. Many of the issues are directly related to the covid-19 vaccines, including Bells palsy, myocardial infarction, pulmonary embolisms and neurological disorders. Cumberland County sheriffs deputies responded to the scene. Finally, one womans face lights up. Fort Bragg stops reporting soldier deaths after dozens found dead in their bunks An investigative reporter for Rolling Stone Magazine, Seth Harp, has been looking into this medical anomaly. And I looked at Daddy and it was like he was dancing. This led to a physical fight, a wrestling match on the driveway. It was his last hoorah, says Nicole, who spoke to her brother for a final time on St. Patricks Day. Lavigne himself turned up dead a few years later, shot in the chest and left in the back of his own truck. Almost every time I saw Billy, he was strung out on something., 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.. Leshikars mother, Tammy Mabey, knew her son had a substance-abuse problem. The Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) is used to detect surges of injury and illness in the military to make sure that all individuals are combat ready. On June 20th, in Carthage, he was arrested at a McDonalds for striking a woman with a bag of food. At the relatively young age of 37, after a full 20 years in the military, he would be entitled to a substantial pension and lifelong benefits. In just18 months, Fort Bragg lost over 80 soldiers from sudden and unexplained causes. One minute after midnight on February 17th, 2020, Lavigne crashed his truck into a womans vehicle in Fayetteville. A small boy about waist high is dancing next to a laundry hamper to music from the television. He was planning on coming home and building a log cabin on our property, says his dad. Leshikars killing was ruled a justifiable homicide, but Swain declines to say on what grounds investigators came to that conclusion. More like brothers, says Leshikars 31-year-old sister, Nicole, who spent three weeks hanging out with them in February 2018. He didnt respond, she says. On a half dozen occasions since 2014, a Navy SEAL or a Green Beret has pleaded guilty to heavy-duty narcotics charges. Maybe. The Commander-in-Chief, the Secretary of Defense, the Department of Defense(DoD) and the highest-ranking commanders are culpable for unlicensed medical malpractice and mass murder, and must be held responsible for their unethical actions of coercion and discrimination, which were used to force dangerous experiments on soldiers that injured, sickened, disabled and killed many. Image in illustration by Alamy. He was deployed to Saudi Arabia when he read on Facebook that Roman-Martinez, whom hed known since middle school, had gone missing. The next day, he was indicted on two felony charges: harboring an escapee and maintaining a vehicle or dwelling place to manufacture a controlled substance. Leshikar was a native of rural Idaho and had lived in Washington state, near the Canadian border. The Commander-in-Chief, the Secretary of Defense, the Department of Defense(DoD) and the highest-ranking commanders are culpable for unlicensed medical malpractice and mass murder, and must be held responsible for their unethical actions of coercion and discrimination, which were used to force dangerous experiments on soldiers that injured, sickened, disabled and killed many. I dont get intimidated by people easily, she says. Lavigne was entitled to a variety of due process protections. We would appreciate anyone, says Shelley Lynch, an FBI spokeswoman, who may have information about where the men were in the hours before their bodies were found to contact us. The FBI released a photo of Dumas truck, a dark-blue 2015 Dodge Ram, which was found abandoned in another location. They also released a better photo of him. Its real strange, says Bill Lavigne Sr., father of the slain Delta Force soldier, that something like this can go on at Fort Bragg, and nobody seems to know nothing. The justification was unconvincing on its face. But he had a gun. There was another vivid memory that particularly bothered him: walking through the rubble of a demolished city with a Belgian Malinois, a service dog, and allowing the animal to eat the brains from a dead mans broken skull as a treat.. At least 36 of the victims were children. Five were murdered. Thirteen killed themselves. I think Billy was dealing with his own demons, she says. Joshua Diamond, 35, and Pfc. HomicideTracker (2022) At least 360 people were killed in 2022. in the St. Louis area through Dec. 29. One of the largest military installations in the world, Fort Bragg is home to approximately 54,000 military personnel and includes the Special Forces, the Airborne Corps, and the Joint Special Operations Command. 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.