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Dear Doug Collins

Brandon Caserta: His Name Is Now the Way to Ask for Help

Brandon Caserta did the things a trapped junior sailor is told to do. He earned evaluations that called him a proven self-starter, highly recommended for retention and advancement. He applied for the transfer that would take him out of Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron 28 and into the aircrew rating, and he was accepted. What he could not do was get out from under a lead petty officer whose public berating of the sailors beneath him was known inside the command, or find a confidential door to mental health care that did not run through the chain of command he feared. On June 25, 2018, three days after his command recommended him to a disciplinary review board over a driver's license he said he effectively did not have, and while his father was on the telephone with the command master chief asking for help for his son, the twenty-one-year-old walked onto the flight line at Naval Station Norfolk, apologized to the plane captain, and died by suicide in the spinning tail rotor of an MH-60S helicopter. The Navy's own command investigation concluded that his lead petty officer's "noted belligerence, vulgarity and brash leadership was likely a significant contributing factor" in that decision — and then recommended against punishing him. This page is the record of Caserta's service, of what his command did and did not do, and of the statute his parents built out of his name.

The service and the promise

Brandon Caserta grew up in Peoria, Arizona, in a Navy household. His father, Patrick Caserta, served twenty-two years in the Navy, retiring as a senior chief and naval counselor — a career that included recruiting — and, by his own account, advised his son against following him. Brandon insisted. “He wanted to be a SEAL,” Patrick Caserta told reporters. “He was so adamant about it… there was nothing we could do.” Arizona State University’s account adds the longer plan: Brandon joined to become a SEAL in order to gain the skills for police work afterward. He was an athlete from childhood — karate, swimming, and football at Liberty High School in Peoria — and the kind of junior sailor commands say they want: first to volunteer for cleaning duty or aircraft wash, and, his parents learned only after his death from the texts on his returned phone, a sailor who spent his final weeks counseling other struggling sailors through their own crises.

The SEAL pipeline ended in Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training. On how it ended, the record carries two versions, and this page keeps both labeled. The family’s account, set out by Teri Caserta on the Brandon Caserta Foundation’s site, is that Brandon developed pain in his tibia, asked for an X-ray, was told twice it was shin splints and sent back to training, and collapsed under a boat carry two weeks before Hell Week; Military.com’s summary is that he broke a leg at BUD/S. The Navy’s command investigation, by contrast, recorded that he had “dropped on request from Special Warfare training” and carried “a feeling of worthlessness since” that drop — a phrasing the family has never accepted, because in their account the exit was medical and the medicine was refused. What is not contested is what followed: Brandon went through the re-rate process and, with his father’s help, selected aviation electrician’s mate from what he experienced as a limited list of options, and reported to Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron 28 at Naval Station Norfolk, Virginia, as an aircrew aviation electrician’s mate striker — an E-3, designated AEAN — in a squadron whose helicopters he would service on the flight line rather than fly in.

The promise that applies to a sailor in that position is not complicated: leadership that does not abuse him, a transfer process that works when he qualifies for one, and a way to ask for help that does not require confiding in the people he believes are harming him. HSC-28’s own paper shows the sailor the Navy said he was: “Airman Caserta is a dedicated individual who shows great ability and initiative,” one 2017 evaluation reads. “Highly recommended for retention and advancement.”

What happened

The center of the record is a lead petty officer — an aviation electrician’s mate first class, Brandon’s LPO — whose conduct was not a secret discovered after the fact. According to the command investigation as reported by Military.com and Stars and Stripes, he had already been counseled as a detachment leading petty officer for “intolerable and unprofessional” behavior toward subordinates, and relieved of that role when his behavior did not change. The Navy’s response was to send him to anger management classes and give him another shop to lead — Brandon’s — as “a leadership challenge,” with chiefs directed to visit more often and ensure the junior sailors had a way to raise concerns. Naval Air Force Atlantic spokesman Cmdr. David Hecht defended the decision: the LPO “was counseled on leadership techniques… and given another opportunity to lead.”

Under that second chance, by the investigation’s own findings, the conduct continued. The LPO berated sailors publicly, cursed at them frequently, called Brandon a “BUD/S dud,” and once, shipmates said, deliberately dropped one of Brandon’s care packages in front of him to watch his reaction. An unsigned message sent to the squadron commander, Cmdr. Duane Whitmer, on June 18, 2018 — a week before Brandon’s death, and included in the command investigation — reported that the abuse had not stopped: the LPO called his subordinates his “bitches,” referred to the chiefs behind their backs as “douchebags” and “dumbasses,” and “treated his workers worse than garbage” and “like dogs.” Hecht told Military.com that after the initial counseling, “no concerns meriting his removal from his position were ever brought to the awareness of HSC-28’s leadership” — a statement the June 18 message, sitting in the command’s own investigative file, is difficult to square with. The investigator’s conclusion about this petty officer is the sentence the Navy has never withdrawn: his “noted belligerence, vulgarity and brash leadership was likely a significant contributing factor in AEAN Caserta’s decision to end his own life.”

While that was the daily environment, Brandon’s one documented exit closed. He had applied to transfer into the naval aircrewman rating and had been accepted — the move that would have taken him out of HSC-28 and into the flying job he wanted. Then he broke his collarbone riding his bicycle. His orders were canceled, and he was sent back for months to the gedunk, the squadron canteen. The injury also wiped his progress: the qualifications record he had built — 72 percent complete toward plane captain — reset to zero while he was on limited duty, and his chiefs told him he could not reapply for aircrew until he had completed them again from the start. Military.com’s later summary of the investigation states the conclusion plainly: the unit “not only did little to stop the abuse but also actively prevented him from transferring out.” Patrick Caserta reads the record the same way — a master chief told him other sailors “had to do two deployments because [Caserta] didn’t have his quals.” Hecht’s answer, also on the record, is that HSC-28 “wanted AEAN Caserta to be successful.” Both accounts agree on the mechanical facts: accepted, injured, canceled, reset to zero, and still at HSC-28 in June 2018.

The last requirement the command added was a driver’s license. Brandon did not drive. He had never owned a car, relied on Uber, friends, and his bicycle, and his parents say he had a phobia about driving and had not been behind the wheel since a teenage driving course; he had obtained a license as identification and for emergencies. The command searched Arizona motor vehicle records, found he had once held a valid license, directed him to pay twelve dollars for a duplicate, and told him he would be cycled into the duty-driver schedule — driving the command’s eighteen-person van on the flight line — and sent to a disciplinary review board for having said he was not a licensed driver. His counseling record of June 22, 2018 states it in the command’s language: “You have not performed your required duties as a watchstander (duty driver) like your peers and superiors since your assignment to HSC-28 due to the fact that you stated you are not a licensed driver… Recommend Disciplinary Review Board.”

In his last weeks, by his parents’ account, Brandon was home in Peoria in May 2018, happy, making plans for Christmas — and confiding to friends by text that he was depressed about BUD/S and hated his rating. His parents grew concerned enough that Patrick Caserta, the retired senior chief who had conducted Navy investigations himself, began telephoning the command. At the moment Brandon walked out to the flight line on June 25, his father was on the phone with the command master chief, saying he planned to fly to Norfolk to take Brandon to base legal and the equal opportunity office. Brandon died before the call ended. He left six notes, including letters to his parents, in which he blamed the Navy and HSC-28, asked his parents to “go after the re-rate process” and to expose the command, and wrote the sentence his case is filed under: “I want to see as many people fired, kicked out or, at the very least, lose rank.” His death was one of sixty-eight Navy suicides in 2018 — the service’s worst year since it began tracking closely after September 11, 2001 —

What the institution did afterward

The Navy investigated, and the investigation is the strongest document in the case — which is why its ending matters. The investigating officer found “sufficient evidence to take [the LPO] to captain’s mast for violation of UCMJ Article 93, Cruelty and Maltreatment” in his treatment of Brandon. The same officer then recommended against mast, reasoning that the petty officer could refuse captain’s mast and demand a court-martial, “further extending the timeline and exacerbating the healing process for all effected [sic] personnel,” and proposed instead that the AE1 be transferred with a “declining” evaluation. That is what happened, and the timing is in his counseling record: on June 27, two days after Brandon’s death, the LPO was heard making “derogatory and inflammatory comments concerning the deceased” — Patrick Caserta says the family was told he had bragged about driving Brandon to suicide — and on June 28 he was transferred. The counseling record notes the transfer was “not punitive” and “was going to happen anyway.” As of Military.com’s June 2019 reporting, the petty officer remained in the Navy, in Norfolk, never having received punitive action; Military.com did not name him, because he was never charged, and neither does this page. Whitmer completed his command tour in 2019 and moved on.

The wider accountability review ended the same way. A U.S. Fleet Forces Command Inspector General preliminary inquiry report, dated April 4, 2019, examined the allegation that Whitmer had been derelict under Article 92 for failing to act on the abusive behavior; its finding was “Not Substantiated,” on the analysis that the commanding officer “was unaware that a subordinate Sailor was creating an active hostile work environment.” The same document carries, in a footnote, the fact that frames the Navy’s handling of Brandon Caserta’s rank: “AEAN Caserta was posthumously promoted to AE3” — petty officer third class — “for the sake of consistency the decedent will be addressed as AEAN throughout this report.” He had died a striker, E-3; the petty officer title in the law and in DoD’s releases exists because the Navy conferred it after his death. The family also disputes how they were treated afterward — a memorial service held four days after his death that they say they were not invited to, though Navy policy provides family travel to command memorials. A text a junior sailor sent them on May 31, 2019 sits unresolved between their account of a command-ordered silence and the investigation’s note that shipmates limited contact because it “wasn’t helping the grieving process”: “We are all scared that we will get into trouble.”

Congress was the institution that acted, because the Casertas made it act. They took Brandon’s letters on a cross-country drive from Peoria to Washington and walked the House and Senate office buildings for a week, meeting any lawmaker or staffer who would sit down. In December 2019, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand raised Brandon’s case at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, pressing the Pentagon on the rule requiring many mental health concerns to be reported to a member’s command — which, she argued, “creates mistrust and acts as a barrier to treatment” for a sailor whose problem was his command. The Pentagon’s mental health director, Capt. Michael Colston, answered that hazing and bullying, where they happen, are “leadership failures” — the first such admission, Patrick Caserta noted, anyone in the Navy had made regarding his son. On June 25, 2020, the second anniversary of Brandon’s death, Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts introduced the Brandon Act, modeled in part on restricted reporting for sexual assault: a safe phrase that would trigger an immediate, confidential mental health evaluation. It passed the House in its fiscal 2021 defense bill and was removed in House–Senate negotiations. Reintroduced on June 16, 2021 — by Moulton and Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks in the House and Senators Mark Kelly and Kevin Cramer in the Senate, with the Casertas standing with them at the Capitol — its language was folded into the fiscal 2022 National Defense Authorization Act as Section 704. President Biden signed the act, Public Law 117-81, on December 27, 2021. “We cannot bring Brandon back, but the Brandon Act will honor our son in the way he would want,” his parents said.

What the enacted provision requires is narrower than the family’s original design. Section 704 directs DoD to establish a phrase that triggers a referral for a mental health evaluation, requires the supervisor to make the referral as soon as practicable after the member uses it, and requires the process to protect the member’s confidentiality. The Casertas had also sought provisions the final law does not contain — a right to transfer out of a command found to have driven a member to suicidal ideation, outside investigation of such commands, and command accountability when a command’s actions lead to a suicide. Those asks, USNI News reported, “did not end up in the final language,” and accountability remains, in Teri Caserta’s words, what the family is still fighting for: “Not that we are after revenge, we just want accountability.”

Where it stands now

The statute was signed on December 27, 2021. Through 2022 — a year of Navy suicide clusters aboard USS George Washington and at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Maintenance Center — the Pentagon had issued nothing, and in December 2022 Moulton said “it is beyond me why this policy has yet to be implemented.” Patrick Caserta said the family was told the holdup was how to include Reserve and National Guard members. The policy finally came on May 5, 2023 — sixteen months after enactment — when Under Secretary Gilbert Cisneros Jr., with the Casertas beside him, signed Directive-type Memorandum 23-005. “It should not have taken this long for something that can save lives,” Teri Caserta told Military.com, “but we are very excited that the DoD is finally going to implement the Brandon Act.”

Under that memorandum, the process works as follows — the operative answer to how a service member uses Brandon Caserta’s name today. A member may initiate a referral by requesting one from a commanding officer or supervisor in grade E-6 or above — for any reason or on any basis, at any time, and in any environment, including deployed. The member does not have to give a reason, does not have to answer questions about it, and may ask more than once; there is no limit. The supervisor must ensure the evaluation is scheduled as soon as practicable and follow up so the member knows the date, time, and place. Confidentiality is protected to the maximum extent practicable under health privacy law and DoD policy — a real protection with stated limits, not the absolute anonymity of the early bill’s “safe word” design — and the member also keeps the older option of contacting a provider directly, with no command involvement at all. The memorandum set a forty-five-day deadline for the services to issue their own active-duty policies; every service missed it. The Navy and Marine Corps announced theirs on July 11, 2023 — the Navy first, with Secretary Carlos Del Toro telephoning the Casertas as he signed — the Air Force followed on August 7, and the Army, after the Casertas publicly accused it of not taking suicide seriously, on August 29. On September 28, 2023, DoD announced all three military departments had implemented phase one.

Phase two has no such date. It — the same referral right for members not serving on active duty, including reservists and guardsmen on shorter orders — was left for later policy, and on Military OneSource, the Defense Department’s own benefits site, it is still described as in development: phase one “in progress,” the department “actively working to develop policy applicable to Phase Two.” That is the department’s current public accounting, years after the phase-one deadline came and went. It is also why the With Honor advocacy organization’s claim that the act was “fully implemented across the U.S. military” as of May 2023 cannot stand. A second gap is harder to measure: whether members know the right exists. The Casertas say they continue to hear from service members never told about the Brandon Act, and no public DoD usage count has been located for this page — so the reach of the right Brandon’s name created cannot be verified from the open record, only its existence can.

The deaths the law was written against have not stopped. In the year Brandon died, 325 active-duty service members died by suicide across the force. The Defense Department’s Annual Report on Suicide in the Military for calendar year 2024 recorded 471 service member suicides in 2024: 302 active component, 64 Reserve, and 105 National Guard, down from 531 in 2023, with the Navy’s active count at 60, against 68 in 2023 and 71 in 2022. The same report holds the longer line the one-year drop does not change: active-component rates increased overall from 2011 to 2024 for every service, and most active-component members who died in 2024 were, as Brandon was, enlisted men under thirty. The individual account in HSC-28 remains where the 2019 inquiry left it: no punitive action against the petty officer, no substantiated finding against the commanding officer, and no public Navy finding beyond the command investigation’s own conclusion — one the service endorsed, quoted, and then declined to act on punitively. The Casertas’ work continues through the Brandon Caserta Foundation and, since 2023, the Brandon Caserta Memorial Scholarship at Arizona State University’s College of Health Solutions, to which they have pledged a third of their estate. If you or a service member or veteran you know is in crisis, the Veterans Crisis Line is available around the clock: dial 988 and press 1, or text 838255.

The ledger

The accounting, in three lines — what the record shows has been done, what it shows has not, and what is still being sought.

What has been done

What has not been done

What is being sought

The record, on video

Brandon Caserta’s case was told on the record three ways: by the Norfolk station that reported his death the next day, in June 2018; by the Phoenix station that sat with his parents in his Peoria bedroom a year later; and by the Norfolk station that filmed the family’s turn toward legislation in the fall of 2019. Three films, in that order.

The first report. WAVY News 10 at Midday reports the death on the Norfolk flight line, June 26, 2018 — the day after Caserta died. (WAVY TV 10.)

The family. Teri Caserta in her son's bedroom in the family's Peoria home, a year after his death. (ABC15 Arizona.)

The push for law. Patrick and Teri Caserta in Norfolk, October 2019, asking Congress for legislation to protect the sailors behind their son. (13News Now.)

Sources

Part of Betrayed, Not Forgotten — this site's accounting for the service members and veterans their own institutions failed. Videos are embedded from their publishers; nothing here is re-hosted.