This sailor asked for help with his struggles. The Navy didn't give it to him.
Perspective by Petula Dvorak
Columnist
November 15, 2021 at 4:13 p.m. EST
In the suicide note that Kenny Santiago posted to social media before killing himself on the National Mall last week, he said he felt alone.
In death, he was not.
Scores of people who read that story and reached out said it’s partly military culture — the suck-it-up, therapy-is-for-wusses ethos — and the dysfunctional, overburdened system that awaits those who do ask for help that is driving service members to take their own lives.
That’s the story of Brandon Caserta.
Just about everyone who knew him saw the trouble coming.
He joined the Navy right out of high school and dove into the SEAL pipeline, gung-ho, fit and ready to serve.
But a broken leg knocked him out of SEAL school and sent the high school athlete into a downward spiral that took him from high-level training in San Diego to working the candy and snack shack — the gedunk — under a belittling, abrasive officer in Norfolk.
On a humid, cloudy day in June 2018, Petty Officer 3rd Class Caserta walked out of the gedunk and onto the tarmac at a Virginia naval station, where he turned to a flight captain and said: “I’m sorry for what you are about to see,” his mom, Teri Caserta, said.
The 21-year-old sailor threw off the protective helmet everyone wears on the flight line and ran toward the spinning rear tail rotor of an HM-60S helicopter.
“He jumped not once, but twice, finally making fatal contact with the blade,” his mom said.
She sent me a copy of his handwritten suicide note and the request he made that sent the Arizona couple to Capitol Hill this year.
