We've had a very difficult journey, and it's been a very long one. We were initially notified of our son's death by phone. It was actually a telephone message that was left. We returned a call to the base and were told that Stuart had died. Later on that evening, a padre and an officer came to our home and spoke to us.
Our first reaction was that we'd told them this would happen. We knew Stuart was in trouble. We knew he needed help. We knew he wasn't getting the appropriate help. We knew that when he left the hospital the base didn't have a plan for him. It turned out that he was living in his car in the parking lot at the base. Eventually, he ended up at the duty room and had a further hospitalization. There were a lot of things that happened in succession. When we were notified, the first words out of my mouth were, “I told them this would happen.”
I think that because we wanted to know why this could have happened when everyone was aware of how much trouble he was in, we asked questions. The more questions we asked, the more the military closed in. I think, to be honest, they recognized that they'd messed up. They had a soldier who was dead and really didn't need to be. The more they closed up, the more questions we asked.
We went through a very painful funeral. We weren't given his suicide note for 15 months. We'd asked if he'd left one, and they said no. They designated someone else as his next of kin, and when we looked at the paperwork, it turned out that the person was definitely not his next of kin. It was a series of events that just kept piling on and piling on. Of course that made us angry, and in a way it almost helped put the grieving process on the shelf because by then we were asking, “What's going on here?”
We ended up having a board of inquiry that didn't really answer our questions and was definitely designed to have an outcome that protected the military. From there, eventually, as some of you may know, it ended up being a military police complaints commission inquiry that went on for some time and cost the military a tremendous amount of money. We became very vocal advocates.
There's nothing we can do to bring Stuart back. We recognize that, but we came to know a lot of serving members and people who had been released who were really at risk and were going through comparable situations. We would get phone calls. We became this very informal family whom they knew they could call. We still get calls from soldiers, sometimes in the middle of the night. Sometimes they've had a few drinks or whatever. We will always make time for them because our job is never to have another Stuart again.
We also have a secondary purpose, in that military people are really smart. When someone is seen to be struggling, they start walking this walk of shame, and they're disenfranchised and all the rest of it. They're not stupid. They know that if they put their hand up, this is not going to go well for them. Eventually they'll be released. They'll lose everything in life that's important to them.
Our goal now is for every single one of these soldiers.... They didn't die on the battlefield. If they die in an airplane between Dubai and here, their name is on a wall. If they come home and they're on sick leave and they die, for whatever reason, their name goes up on a wall. There is a recognition of their service. It's really important to this family, and I think it would send a really good message to other military serving members and their families that their service was important as well.
Sorry. That was a very long answer.