[Leland Pate]

This is one part of my life I will not miss one BIT. As an investigator for the USAF, I was involved in more suicide investigations than I care to remember. Suicide in the military is very common and one year in MT we had 6. Holy crap that's an aweful lot of people taking their own life. Each was horrible. I had to contact families, sometimes within hours of their initial notification, and it ripped my heart out each time.

Some of them had the usual factors and circumstances... some of them were completely unexplainable and if it weren't for the GSR and stippling on the hands we would have suspected foul play.


I was the agent assigned to a suicide case of a dependent spouse (14 yr old girl) at a NATO base in Holland a couple years back. I drove up to do the interview of the parents and there on their couch they told me that this was their second girl to kill herself. Her older sister, 16 I think, had taken her own life two years prior.

That was the only time in my 6 yrs as an Agent that I asked to be excused during an interview to pull myself together.

I left the AF with an absolute hatred for two things: suicide and child porn.

Sorry for your loss, Mike.