The Navy’s investigation into a cluster of four suicides in the span of a month at one East Coast maintenance center found the command was not well suited to managing the sailors, who were all evaluated for medical issues.
The latest investigation, which was released alongside a report on USS George Washington carrier suicides, noted that all of the deaths at the maintenance center were among first tour sailors who were at various stages of the disability evaluation process and “suffering from a confluence of external stressors.”
All four also had unrestricted access to personally owned guns — an issue that goes largely unaddressed in the report.
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The report investigated four sailors who killed themselves between Oct. 29 and Nov. 26, 2022. Three reported some form of anxiety or stress related to their Navy service, but some also had serious medical issues. One sailor was being evaluated for seizures; another obesity; and one had “debilitating back pain.”
The command the four sailors were assigned to is the Navy’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Maintenance Center, or MARMC, a massive unit that manages the maintenance needs of the many ships in the Norfolk, Virginia, area. The command has around 3,000 people, and half are active-duty sailors.
About one-third of those sailors at any time are assigned to the unit because they are undergoing some sort of…
