enforcement and their local military installations that provide revenue to these towns. The suppression of negative publicity has clearly benefitted both the local law enforcement and the local military. Compounding this is the reluctance of elected officials to pursue issues that cause discomfort to local officials. Investigations conducted by local law enforcement into the deaths of military personnel must also be scrutinized by a third party.

When requesting information under the Freedom of Information Act, Number 552, from the military or civilian law enforcement agencies, we, as citizens of the United States and as parents, should not be denied information pertaining to the determination of cause and manner of death, including photographs. But we and our members of Congress have been denied this information. As parents, have we not struggled enough to overcome loss? Must we also struggle to get answers to our questions?

The review of investigations that has been conducted to date by the OAIG-CIPO branch of the Department of Defense did not answer the questions of the families of our deceased children. Rather, the reviews sought to appease. Reiterations of sections of the JAG reports were sent to us, the parents. The greater number of our requests for reinvestigation into these cases have been denied.

When deaths occur to active duty military in civilian jurisdictions, many problems have been identified. Some of these problems are: families are refused information held by the civilian authorities, including information that is provided to military officials by the civilian authorities, including but not limited to crime scene photographs; military reports clone civilian police reports without conducting their own investigation or verification review; civilian medical examiners rely on statements of witnesses to determine the manner of death; frequently, there is no autopsy or there is a partial autopsy directed only at the cause of death, therefore neglecting examination of body fluids and tissue, omitting reference to breaks, abrasions, cuts, and bruises; the crime scene is frequently not secured, nor is evidence gathered and analyzed; frequently, potential evidence is destroyed; conflicting reports by witnesses are not subject to scrutiny, and are never resolved; background investigations are not conducted on witnesses from whom statements are taken, who are closely tied to the victim, and these background investigations in some cases provide startling information; suicide, or self-inflicted determinations made immediately upon arrival on the scene; families discover and report inconsistencies which investigators and reviews do not resolve in any way; inconsistencies and lack of factual verification of psychological autopsies; extreme delays in interviewing key individuals; the use and reference to records that become lost or withheld.

You, members of the Armed Services Committee, must be instrumental in providing the structure in which noncombat violent deaths of active duty military can be investigated. The organization, Until We Have Answers, will not rest until justice is served and change is implemented. We will not stop writing letters, we will not stop asking questions, we will not stop marching, we will not go away until we have answers and change.

Thank you.

Senator KEMPTHORNE. Ms. Alleyne, thank you very much.

Now, Mr. Christopher Rush.

STATEMENT OF CHRISTOPHER RUSH

Mr. RUSH. Mr. Chairman and members of the subcommittee, my name is Christopher Rush. I am a retired New York City police officer, and former Special Deputy United States Marshal. Since my retirement from the New York City Police Department in July of 1982, I have worked as an investigative consultant. Since that time I have either personally investigated or consulted on approximately 100 cases involving unattended death and homicide. I come before this subcommittee today because over the past 4 years I have been retained by families of deceased military personnel, and in this capacity I have reviewed dozens of cases in which members of the United States armed forces have died in noncombat situations. The families ask that I present the problems I have repeatedly identified.

I have personally witnessed the distress these families have suffered. I have never refused a case. In some instances, I have been compensated for my services, and in others I have worked on a pro bono basis. Each of the cases I have investigated or reviewed have been closed and deemed suicide or accidental death by the branch of military law enforcement charged with conducting the investigation.

As a former law enforcement officer, it pains me to testify before you today with respect to these cases, because I have uncovered significant deficiencies in the manner in which the armed forces have conducted their investigations; however, I believe that the interests of the families involved and the principles of justice on which American society is based compel me to disclose the unsettling information that I have uncovered. Please understand that while my testimony will focus on a number of cases in which the investigations were at best incompetent, I do not wish you to draw the inference that all military investigations are substandard. In some cases, the officers who conducted the investigations did so in an exemplary manner. In other cases, poor communication between the armed forces and the individual family member led to the mistaken impression that an investigation had been mishandled.

I am fully aware that in some instances a surviving family cannot or will not accept the fact that a relative has committed suicide. I have advised the families that retained me of this consideration, and informed them that a thorough and completely objective review of the cases would be conducted, and have tried my utmost to meet this standard and maintain objectivity. In some cases I have been compelled to inform families that I concurred with the military investigators, and was convinced that their losses were indeed the result of suicide.

As a former police officer and an experienced investigator, I have not approached these cases with the expectation that any investigation will be perfect. However, in a significant number of the cases reviewed, it is my professional judgment that the minimum standard of professionalism was not attained, and in some instances murder went unpunished as a consequence. According to generally accepted principles of police procedure, an officer called to the scene of a death is expected to treat the scene and the death as

a crime, and to conduct the investigation accordingly. Only after the possibility of homicide has been eliminated should the officer proceed to an investigation of whether the death was suicide or accident. In the vast majority of cases I have reviewed, the officers called to the scene proceeded from the assumption that the death was either suicide or accident, and thereby compromised the investigation from the start.

The cases that were mishandled suffered from a startling array of deficiencies. Crime scene management and the collection and preservation of physical evidence were often perfunctory. In some cases of hanging, ligatures were destroyed within 30 days, thus foreclosing the possibility of future review. Too often, contemporaneous witness statements were poorly documented, if they were taken at all. Sometimes it was evident that the interviewer intended to lead the witness into making statements that would lead to death by suicide. In many instances little or no attention was paid to such basic procedures as the taking of fingerprints; crime scene photography was often inadequate and unprofessional; first officer response to and protection of crime scenes and the documentation of first officer observations were frequently inadequate; there was no collection of trace evidence such as blood, hair, fibers, et cetera. In one instance, a defective, blood-stained firearm was returned to the family without any indication that the branch in question was aware of the defect or that the firearm had been properly tested.

These are just a few of the examples of the problems that have been identified. But rather than provide you with an exhaustive list, I will do my best to answer your questions later. Thank you. Senator KEMPTHORNE. Mr. Rush, thank you very much. Now, Dr. Sabow.

STATEMENT OF DR. JOHN SABOW

Dr. SABOW. Good afternoon, Senators. My name is Dr. John David Sabow, and I appear before you today in three distinct capacities. First, I am the brother of United States Marine Corps Colonel James E. Sabow, the 51-year-old commander of all Western Air Operations for the United States Marine Corps, who was found shot to death in the back yard of his home on the United States Marine Corps base, El Toro, in California on January 22nd, 1991. In this capacity, I share with the other men and women sitting here before you the profound anguish of having been informed by my Government that one of our loved ones committed suicide under very suspicious circumstances while in the military service of their country.

In my second capacity I appear before this respected body as a Board-certified neurologist, also Board-qualified expert in internal medicine, with over 25 years of professional experience. In this second capacity, I am professionally capable of testifying to my own personal professional certainty that the initial United States military investigative service investigations into the cause of noncombat in-service deaths of our U.S. servicemen and women are presently conducted in a medically absolutely incompetent manner. The entire pattern of conduct which characterizes such military investigative services seems to be, as has been recently defined by the

U.S. court of appeals on August 28th, 1996, and I will quote: an alarming pattern of instances of poor judgment which display a general disregard for sound investigative practices and procedures, which are therefore both unprofessional and ineffective.

I have just received a favorable decision from the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the 9th Circuit in California, and this was their statement, not mine.

In my third and final capacity, I appear before you today as a battle-weary veteran of 6 long years of constant administrative struggle, in which I have attempted, as have many of the other men and women here, to make use of every avenue of Defense Department administrative review which the United States Congress has made available to the families of servicemen and women to review the initial incompetent military death investigations of their loved ones. In this final capacity, I am here today to inform you that the system of internal military administrative review procedures of such in-service death investigations presently made available by Congress is absolutely insufficient, as a matter of practice, and as a matter of law. No confidence whatsoever on the part of the American family, to whom Congress asked us to loan our loved ones is given us.

In the brief comments which I shall make here today, I shall confine my statements to facts which I hope will assist you as United States Senators in performing your specific constitutional function of drafting and enacting specific concrete legislative procedures and reforms which will restore the initial military in-service death investigation process and the Government review process to the proper position of trust and confidence to which such procedures must be restored if Congress is again to ask us to give our loved ones to the service of their country in the military.

By way of specific example, I will inform this body of four specific issue areas in which I know to my own professional personal certainty that our present initial original military in-service death investigations are as a matter of regular practice completely incompetent, and are therefore entirely incapable of generating objective, reliable, physical medical evidence which is adequate to support a trustworthy medical conclusion as to the manner of death of a serviceman or woman at this time.

Second, I will set forth facts which demonstrate that the present internal military review process presently in place is functionally nothing more than a pro forma rubber stamp of whatever determination was arrived at by the initial military in-service death investigation conducted in that case, no matter how professionally incompetent that initial military investigation was. I will testify that this rubber stamp attitude within the military rises all the way into the Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Defense.

Finally, I will propose to this body two specific concrete legislative proposals which I and my counsel, here with me today, believe will substantially restore to the entire field of in-service military death investigations the degree of public and private confidence to which such investigations must be restored if we again are to be asked by our Congress and our President to place the lives of our

loved ones in the custody and care of the military services of this country.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am here today because of the noncombat violent deaths of over 3,000 young men and women over the past decade, while they were serving their country on active military duty. All of these deaths were ruled by the United States military investigative services to have been self-inflicted, every one. The deaths among these 3,000 which bring us here today occurred under very suspicious circumstances. But all of them were ruled by the military to have been self-inflicted.

I am only one of those who appear before you today who question the military about their investigations which determine the official conclusion. I have not contacted every one of those, but with whom I have spoken, all have expressed profound disappointment in their Government. There is disappointment in the military service that was supposed to take care of these servicemen and women; disappointment in military investigative agencies that were required by law to conduct professional, objective investigations into the manner of death; disappointment in many of our elected representatives who, rather than personally get involved, have assigned these investigations to aids who seem to be more interested in protecting their Senator or their Congressman from a controversial issue if circumstances and the truth would become public and well known.

But the greatest disappointment that I have, and is shared by others, is in our country whose leaders plainly have an agenda that values the establishment over the individual, form over fact, expedience over truth. All of us morn the loss of our loved ones, but we also morn the loss of respect that we all have had for our country. In our search for the truth we have been overwhelmed by the lack of sensitivity shown by the military, and the arrogance of the DOD investigators, but most of all by the perception that our Government is attempting to hide the truth and obstruct justice. Indeed, many of these American families have been forced to the conclusion that agents of our own Government have played some active role in the deaths of our loved ones, and not simply a passive role after the fact.

Senator KEMPTHORNE. Dr. Sabow, I do not wish to interrupt, but in looking at the length of your statement, which again we have made copies available to all members of the committee, and which I think many of us have read, I want to be sure that we allow time for everyone, and I want to make sure that we allow you time to make the key points, including your conclusion. So again, with all due respect, I do not wish to deny you the opportunity, but if you could summarize some of this so that we would be sure to get your conclusions, it would help.

Dr. SABOW. Let me just discuss a little bit of the evidence that certainly raises the suspicion that these were totally incompetent investigations or purposefully incompetent investigations.

Colonel Sabow was supposed to have committed suicide, sticking a 12 gauge shotgun in his mouth, holding it in his left hand, with the butt of the gun lateral on the ground to his right foot, reaching down with his right hand, depressing the trigger with his thumb and index finger. The wound was a contact wound. That meant the