SHE WANTED OUT
According to Navy Spokesman Capt. Bill Fenick, most of the sailors and other personnel who were implicated in hazing a
nd other misconduct had been reassigned from Bahrain by the time the investigation closed. They went on to serve under new commanders. Unless the case led to court martial, it would be left to the commanders' discretion to decide whether and how to discipline the sailors found responsible for the abuse.
But in December 2006, as the hazing investigator began writing up his report and commanders began their initial review of what he found, Valdivia was still in Bahrain, leading her canine unit – and still under the authority of Bahrain’s command. That’s when Valdivia started to plan something she’d been thinking about for months: leaving the military.
She attended a Transition Assistance Placement course and told her father that she wanted to buy a house in Dallas. Valdivia, who was petite, but athletically built and an avid runner, told him she wanted to be a physical trainer.
“She even had a ticket booked,” Young said. “I had a ticket confirmation on the computer. She was set up. I liked that she would be closer to home.”
Then, on the morning of January 11, 2007, Valdivia was called into the legal office on base and told that she had been placed under administrative legal hold. The order meant she was not permitted to leave the Navy or the island without the approval of her commanders in Bahrain.
Navy Spokesman Fenick says he doesn’t know of any other sailors or officers involved in the hazing investigation being placed on hold.
Valdivia met with two of her supervisors later that afternoon and they told her that they were taking an additional step—by removing her from her position as Kennel Master. Navy documents say she reacted to the news with “a slight jolt,” and that she kept saying, “I do not understand why I have to be removed from the kennels.”
She urged the more senior supervisor to rethink the decision. He agreed to give her a final answer after the long weekend. But later he reported to investigators that he had no intention of changing his mind.
JENNIFER VALDIVIA’S FINAL DAY
The night she got the news of her legal hold, Valdivia called two friends from the base and invited them o
ut to dinner. They drank wine, smoked sheesha pipes and took photographs, which Valdivia posted that night to her MySpace page.
“She did not make a big deal of the situation,” one of the friends later told investigators. She said even after Valdivia told them about that she was barred from leaving the Navy as planned, she was still “very upbeat and full of life.”
But investigators would later find that when she returned to her house that night, Valdivia had other thoughts on her mind. She logged on to her computer around 11 o’clock and spent the next hour searching the Internet for ways to end her life. The search terms included potassium cyanide, arsenic poisoning, sleeping pills and carbon monoxide poisoning.
Security tape captured at the Navy commissary the next afternoon shows Valdivia buying a bottle of vodka, a bag of charcoal, a fire starter kit, and a grill. She then went home and updated her MySpace page for the last time.
“Tired of being blamed for other people’s mistakes,” Valdivia wrote. “Carry on smartly now.”
Later in the afternoon of January 12, Valdivia locked herself into a room at home that adjoined her housing unit. As the charcoal burned and filled the room with smoke, she kept handwritten notes, which she entitled “The Suicide Journal of Jennifer Valdivia.” One of her first entries reads “It only takes one smile to hide a thousand tears. I’m tired of pretending.”
Her final entry reads, "I love the military, I just wish the Navy was still part of it.”
LOST
Three days later, on January 15, Chris Young received a phone call from the Bahrain base: his daughter was missing. “They were thinking she got on a plane and gone home,” Young said. “Jennifer would not go AWOL,” he insisted, “that’s just not the way she was brought up, the way she was trained.”
After Chris Young got that phone call, he said he tried contacting the military again and again to find out what had happened to his daughter, but nobody answered the phone. Then, on January 16, he got a phone call from a Casualty Assistance Calls Officer, which is “never a good sign,” Young knew. The officer was lost.
“He called me for directions to get here,” Young said, “and then he told me they had found her deceased.”
[PART FOUR: A FRIEND REMEMBERS]
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