“He was truly depressed,” said his sister, Heather Lake, “because he wanted nothing more than to be in the military.”
The 27-year-old soldier arrived at the emergency room at the Dayton Veterans Affairs Medical Center about 1 a.m., April 16, seeking immediate help because he was “paranoid someone was after him” according to Scott Labensky, the father of Jesse’s half-brother Dalton.
At 2:45 a.m., Huff walked out of the ER “against medical advice,” investigators wrote in a Montgomery County coroner’s report.
Not even those closest to him know what happened during the next three hours. But at 5:45 a.m. Huff walked to the front steps outside the VA’s Patient Tower dressed in full Army fatigues, toting a backpack and an M-1 rifle racked with nine additional bullets in the magazine.
He rested the M-1 rifle under his chin and pulled the trigger. When that didn’t kill him he pointed the gun near his temple and pulled the trigger again.
Jesse Huff fell near the feet of a Civil War soldier statue, his blood staining the front steps. Hours later, police blew apart his large backpack with a water bomb because it was unclear what was inside.
There turned out to be no danger, only private papers and a few personal items.
The VA grounds crew quickly swept up the items, including the scattered fragments of his suicide note.
‘A typical little boy’
Huff’s early life had many of the trappings of an all-American childhood, from Nintendo games to BMX bike riding. “He started that love affair early, real early,” said his older brother, Charles Huff Jr., recalling a Polaroid their father had snapped of the boy jumping his first ramp at 5 or 6 years of age.
As a teen, he placed in a National BMX Racing Championship.
Heather Lake was only two years older than the half-brother with whom she played endless hours of Nintendo. “We would get so involved with the game and so angry when we lost that we would spit on the TV,” Lake said. “He was a typical little boy who would throw my Barbies out the window. He loved to crash my red Barbie Ferrari. He wanted to be a dump truck driver when he grew up.”
In other ways, their childhood was anything but typical. They didn’t have the same father, and Jesse has three half-brothers from his parents’ complicated web of relationships. Both of his parents battled drug addiction. Observed Lake: “He saw things that children should never have to see.”
‘A calling’ to military service
Huff, a 2001 Patterson Career Center graduate, entered the Army on April 15, 2003. He felt a calling to be an infantryman, said Charles Huff Jr., a staff sergeant who joined the Army Reserve a year later and is a nurse at the Dayton VA. “It was something he just felt inside him.”
Jesse didn’t talk a lot, but for years he jotted his private thoughts in pocket-size notebooks. The sporadic writings, often undated, captured his mood swings.
“He’d be up, he’d be down, then up again,” Charles Huff Jr. said. “You could see that in him as well. Some days were great, some not so good.”
The journals’ recurring themes included his love for the Army and the brotherhood he found in the infantry. “He really felt like he belonged,” his brother said.
Huff deployed to Mosul, Iraq, from 2005-2007 with Bravo Company, 1-17 Infantry Regiment, 172 Brigade out of Fort Wainwright, Alaska. His unit received the Valorous Unit Award for extraordinary heroism in action, the third-highest honor that can go to an Army unit.
He told family members about rescuing his best friend when he was shot in the hip. “He was the first to run in,” Charles Huff Jr. said. “In retrospect he confessed it was kind of dumb because he could have gotten himself killed.”
Huff doesn’t believe his brother lost any friends in the war, but said his unit saw a lot of action.
“It was not unusual for them to be ‘blown up’ as he would say,” he said, referring to roadside bombs.
Huff sustained a back injury from a roadside bomb while he was riding in the gunner hatch of an eight-wheeled armored Stryker.
He was honorably discharged on June 15, 2007. A year later, he had back surgery at Fort Lewis, Wash. Coincidentally, his brother was finishing Army nurse training at the base at the time.
The surgery initially went well, ending the “excruciating leg pain” he experienced due to a bulging disk in his back, Charles Huff Jr. said. But the pain returned.
Doctors prescribed Oxycodone for the pain, but Huff “would sometimes check himself into the VA because he thought he was getting (addicted) and needed to detox,” Labensky said.
A devastating loss
On Oct. 1, 2008, Huff’s mother, Sharon Nales, died at 45 from an accidental drug overdose.
He took the loss hard. “They were extremely close,” Lake said. “After the war he opened up to her. She was more like a friend than a mother. I think he confided in her.”
He didn’t try to emulate her, however. “Jesse was never the drinker or drug-doer. We both told ourselves, ‘I am not going to be like my mom,’” said Lake, an ER nurse.
After his mother’s death “he didn’t talk about her,” Lake said. “That was his way of coping.”
Huff tried to find new direction after leaving the Army, attending classes in engineering and science at Sinclair Community College from fall 2008 through summer 2009, Sinclair spokesman Natasha Baker said.
Shannon Foster of Kettering dated Huff for roughly the first half of 2009. “He was very sweet,” she said. “He would give somebody his last five bucks.”
Huff told her about his war injuries and his PTSD. He showed her a book, reminiscent of a school yearbook, with photos of fellow soldiers. “He told me there were a lot of things he saw over there that you could never even imagine,” Foster said. “He was in a lot of pain from his injury. He talked about that a lot.”
Foster said Huff didn’t complain to her about the services he received at the Dayton VA.
Huff was accepted as a student at Wright State University last fall, but instead entered the 90-day PTSD residential treatment program at a VA hospital in Martinsburg, W.Va., completing the program in January.
Foster spoke to him for the last time around Christmas. “He knew he needed help, and I was very proud of him that he was pursuing that,” she said.
Michelle Cooke, chief of the Martinsburg center’s PTSD Domiciliary, said participants receive an individualized treatment program that includes group and individual therapy. Often they talk about their experiences in combat. “We find a lot of camaraderie that tends to occur in the program,” she said. Added Lake, “I could tell by the sound in his voice that he felt at home there.”
Huff’s depression seemed to lift briefly after he returned from West Virginia. He moved in with his half-brother, Dalton, 19, who was living with Labensky.
Huff took Dalton skateboarding despite his chronic back pain and Labensky was pleased to see the brothers growing closer.
The living arrangement ended, however, when Huff bought an M-1 assault rifle about a month ago.
Labensky gave Huff an ultimatum: Either the gun goes, or you go.
“Jesse wasn’t doing well,” Labensky explained.
Huff moved out and went to live with his father in an apartment on King Avenue in Dayton.
‘He was my hero’
Huff maintained close connections with his Army friends in Alaska, where he was stationed late in his enlistment. “He loved the nature there, the mountains,” said childhood friend Amber Kramer of Xenia. “He found solitude there.”
Kramer last saw Huff in the early morning of April 14, two days before his violent death, when he returned from a trip to Alaska. “He smiled. He hugged me and told me he loved me,” she said. “He was loved by so many and had so much love to give. He was my hero. He loved his country and he loved being in the Army.”
Charles Huff Jr. said he has reviewed his brother’s medical records and was impressed with the level of care Huff received right up until his death.
But Kramer said she feels her friend was “sending a message” by killing himself so publicly at the VA.
She said veterans sacrifice their lives and well-being for the American people. “Where are we at when they need us? If he had received the care he needed, he wouldn’t be in a box today.”
Dayton VA Medical Center officials worry that Huff's high-profile suicide will send the wrong message to other veterans. "That's a big concern of mine," said suicide prevention coordinator Sandy Coleman. "If a veteran is feeling suicidal, they are not going to be turned away. I want to stress that we want them to come, and we can give them assistance."
Since August, 2008, she said, more than 150 local veterans have been monitored as being high-risk for suicide.
As a nurse and soldier, Charles Huff Jr. said he has gone through training on how to recognize the common signs of suicide.
That training also has taught him that those signs often aren’t obvious.
Though he didn’t see him for three weeks before his death, he never saw any indication that his brother was planning to take his own life.
“I just accept that we will probably never know all the details.”
Lake knew her brother was depressed but still can’t understand why he chose to kill himself in such a public manner. “I can’t put together the puzzle of his trying to make a statement,” she said. “I can’t fathom what was going through his head at all.
“Growing up, we all had it rough, and Jesse always coped and kept a smile on his face,” she said. “But I think that through it all, Jesse felt that he never had a place in this world.”