Only then did Scanlon learn the real identity of the man she knew as Cris Valley. Court documents state that Dumas broke into an apartment in Walkertown with the intent to terrorize and injure an occupant of the building, on April 11, 2020. Scanlon agreed to go on the record again, in greater detail, if you would be willing to reiterate that my perpetrator was Delta Force. Sgt Lavigne was a Green Beret and Delta Force member. First Class Mark Leshikar were best friends. Scanlon began to cry, he wrote in his report, as she pointed out the building., Matrafailo obtained a warrant, took DNA samples from the hood of the Saab, reviewed security footage, visited Macs, and interviewed Tina, among other witnesses. In his statement to police later that day he said that Leshikar was acting paranoid and believed that they were being followed, and that their conversation was being listened to by a third party. I know this was specifically Delta Force, but its like this across the whole of USASOC, using an acronym for the U.S. Armys Special Operations Command. A source familiar with Army Special Operations told Connecting Vets that Delta Force operators use proprietary encryption software on their phones for day-to-day work related calls and text messages. They lived like there was no tomorrow., The relentless physical drive that she describes is part of what made these men the very best at what they did. Years of proximity to military violence, as well as a culture of functional alcoholism and casual sex, left Jane feeling unworthy, damaged, and lost. Jane has dated multiple men on Delta Force at various times in her life. Poppe does not find it remarkable, he says, that he simultaneously represented two members of the most elite military unit in the United States, one suspected of murder, the other accused of rape. Though attorney-client privilege normally protects the SVC-client relationship, Judge Nance found that Scanlon had waived the privilege by including the prosecution in the supposed conversation with her SVC. soldier who had been accused of rape, and published his photo. Reached through his lawyer, Vallejo declined to comment for this story. In September 2015, he went on the Fox affiliate in Colorado Springs, Colorado, with a military dog named Gunner. The case is being investigated as a homicide, a spokesperson for Army Criminal Investigations Division told Connecting Vets. I was with them for years, constantly, she says. Once out of uniform, Scanlon began to meet advocates, lawyers, and people knowledgeable about sexual assault in the military. He gave me his card and invited us to go to the next bar with everyone., They exchanged phone numbers, and a group of about nine, led by Vallejo, relocated from Macs to a bar called Paddys, an over-the-top Irish pub out on Raeford Road that has a metal detector at the front entrance, bartenders in Scottish kilts, brass bathroom door handles cast with anatomical exactitude in the form of male genitalia, and urinals shaped like a womans mouth. Though open to the public, no reporters were in the courtroom. Spouses, children, grandchildren, and on and on.. It had been, in retrospect, a dark period in her life, she says, a damaging, booze-soaked run of years in her twenties. Guys like Vallejo and Lavigne are constantly told that theyre the elite, the best of the best, the ultimate badasses, and when it comes to killing and capturing people overseas, they are. Rolling Stone is a part of Penske Media Corporation. Taught the SF Q course for a bit, met an amazing woman through non army friends, decided one purple heart was enough, retired E7 (offered E8 to stay in). Ill have to refer you to Army CID, Shelley Lynch of the FBIs Charlotte, North Carolina, office writes in an email. Justice is a very elusive thing, it moves around like air. According to Lavigne's statement to police, Leshikar began acting irrationally on the car ride back to Fayetteville, North Carolina. So who did, and why? "Hard drugs and murder in JSOC: "'We have a lot of Delta Force members in our community,' says Ballard, the police detective.'Some of them are really . She vividly recalls the day that one Delta soldier, a Coast x Coast guy (neither Vallejo nor Lavigne), came in from an operation outside the wire. After taking her statement and reviewing her text messages, Detective Matrafailo drove her the three blocks to the warehouse in an effort to identify the precise location. Because otherwise I would not be using a port-a-potty., She went outside and crossed the blacktop to where the toilet was set up against the exterior wall of a metal building. RIP, bro., One year later, the authorities have identified no suspects, arrested no perpetrators, and disclosed nothing about the evidence theyve gathered to date. Calls to Cumberland Country Sheriff's Office detectives to ask specific questions about the investigation went unanswered and the Sheriff's Office did not respond to requests for further comment. And I was in law enforcement for all of the years that he was growing up so I was very hard on my kids, tried to make them strong and independent. There are no coincidences in life like this. Training program helps transitioning service members build their VA careers, 2 US Army helicopters crash in Alaska, killing 3 soldiers, Japanese Breakfast's Michelle Zauner tells Glennon Doyle she is 'afraid of her mental health', Half million PACT Act claims have been filed at VA as budget battle looms, Honoring survivors of military sexual trauma. The Special Forces of the U.S. Army are based out of Fort Bragg, as is the powerful and secretive Joint Special Operations Command, making this spot, inland of the Eastern Seaboard, the central node in the United States global special-operations complex. They might have noticed that the shooter was a witness for the alleged rapist, and that they both belonged to the same motorcycle club, made up of soldiers from the Armys most elite unit. As of 2010, the document shows, he was a TEAM MEMBER/OPERATOR in the organization demarcated 1ST SFOD-D (DELTA FORCE)., Like SEAL Team 6, its sister unit and only military peer, Delta Force is whats known as a Special Mission Unit. I represented him in Cumberland County.. On Sept. 30, he arrested Vallejo on a felony warrant for second-degree rape, second-degree sex offense, and sexual battery. The nurse who did the rape kit noted in her report that Scanlons eyes were red and her makeup was smeared. Even if she werent actually barred from the trial by order of the court, she believed that she had to stay in the witness room until called, and according to Scanlon, the SVC did nothing to correct the misapprehension. A guy whos in Delta Force would not be flashing his name around and having a nonprofit and partying at a bar. Alycia Stokes written testimony read. But Scanlon was in the courtroom on the first day of trial, and Rolling Stone obtained the trial record, which includes a list of witnesses, the lawyers written motions, the judges orders, his instructions to the jury, and other documents that make it possible to reconstruct much if not nearly enough of what happened. Were not staying more than 20 minutes, they agreed. It was the last conversation he would have with his mother. Its not going to be good for you., For the jury, it must have been a somewhat close call, because they submitted at least 18 questions to the witnesses. Officials have identified Master Sgt. Im not doing this., She remembers being pinned against the grille of a vehicle, Vallejo putting his hands up her dress, into her underwear, and penetrating her with his fingers. A third juror asked the nurse who did the rape kit, In your experience, is it abnormal for the victim to smile in an exam photo?, Scanlon was called in for the reading of the verdict. A CID investigation reached the same conclusions as the sheriff's office, that Leshikar's killing was deemed justifiable. He is courteous, with an iron handshake, and gives his name as Joe. Leshikar began working on his car out in the driveway. At one point the Green Berets widow, a red-haired woman, came around the corner and saw what was going on. When questioned about the apparent inconsistencies in the Army's investigation and the Cumberland County Sheriff's investigation, USASOC spokesmen Col. Tage Rainsford said: It is my understanding that the CID investigation of MSG Lavigne came to the same conclusion as the Cumberland County Sherriffs Office in that it was justifiable and no charges were filed. In a motion dated June 12, the defense stated that one of the civil-affairs officers was expected to testify that she had observed close, friendly, and flirtatious interaction between Vallejo and Scanlon all night. However, documents say that Leshikar's wife Laura spoke with him that day and he sounded lucid to her. This would have been in violation of regulations that prevent the military from excluding crime victims from the trials of their alleged perpetrators, and USASOC says it didnt happen. Joseph Morman, Scanlon says. Sketchy-looking, Scanlon describes it, comparing it to a rundown CrossFit gym, with a roll-up garage door, by a railroad track and a junkyard.. After that, she put up no more physical resistance. On the way to the staff sergeants house, where shed spend the night, she looked at her phone and saw that Vallejo had sent her a text: How are you? This is a very secluded parcel, the fire marshal wrote in an email to the zoning department. William Billy Lavigne II, whose violent life and cryptic death in the woods outside of Fort Bragg I wrote about for Rolling Stone last year. One penetrated his neck and lodged in his back. LaVigne also was involved in other Cumberland County cases that never resulted in charges, records show. He had been in Delta Force. Scanlon lived off-post in an apartment in Fayetteville, a moody military town in the North Carolina pines just outside of Fort Bragg, the biggest Army base in the U.S. On the evening of Sept. 9, 2016, a friend of hers from the gym, a military wife whom Ill call Tina to protect her privacy, invited her to a charitable event at a barbecue restaurant and bar called Macs Speed Shop. Cris came up with the idea for getting this warehouse, she says. A spokeswoman for the Forsyth County Sheriffs Office said the 911 call for the Walkertown incident came it at 12:54 a.m. April 11, 2020, as an anonymous assault in progress. She filed a FOIA request for the transcript in 2019, and the Army gave her the trial record instead. They only stayed that long because Tina was famished and there was a Crock-Pot of food on a folding table. At one point, while posing for a group photo, Vallejo grabbed my ass, Scanlon claims. What the defense has to say, you dont want to hear. The Cumberland County Sheriff's Office told Connecting Vets that it will not release the police report itself, which was written by police Sgt. I said no over and over.. Leshikar's family allege evidence was tampered with and that Lavigne called another Delta Force Operator to come to the scene Credit: Facebook. But the instructions to the jury show that the judge, Col. Jeffrey Nance, allowed the panel to consider Scanlons relationship with the staff sergeant insofar as it was probative of her motive, if any, to fabricate her allegations against the accused. The judge cautioned the panel that they were forbidden to conclude that Scanlon, having willingly slept with one enlisted man, was likely to do it again; but to use an old legal clich, that was a bit like throwing a skunk into the jury box and instructing the jurors not to smell it. It was him and Maj. Stacey Cohen.. She says she didnt tell her lawyer about it till months later. Law enforcement later told Leshikar's family that they had found a screw driver, not at the scene of his death, but outside near his car where he had been removing the battery. She still didnt know that Vallejo was an active-duty soldier, much less that he was on Delta Force. Master Sergeant. I also recently reported on a very dark story, about a Delta Force operator named William Lavigne shot and killed his best friend, a Green Beret named Mark Leshikar. Consider the bombshell testimony that relieved ex-SEAL Eddie Gallagher of murder charges in 2019 or Trumps intervention in the Fort Bragg court-martial of Mathew Golsteyn, a Special Forces officer who admitted on live TV to killing an unarmed man. Dumas was an Army veteran who previously served as the property . Delta Force operator Lavigne had claimed that 33-year-old Leshikar, with whom he had been good friends, came at him with a screwdriver. As a senior non-commissioned officer of Delta Force, the most elite and secretive special operations unit in the U.S. military, Command Sergeant Major Tom Satterly fought some of this country's most fearsome enemies. . The LaVigne and Leshikar familes had just returned from a trip to Disneyland. William LaVigne II, 37, and Army veteran Timothy Dumas Sr., 44, is. Sad as it is, that happens a lot. As soon as it concluded with an acquittal, the Army deleted the audio recordings. There might be a good reason for Vallejo to avoid the spot where, almost five years ago to the day, he met Scanlon. Editors picks He was host of the event at Macs that night. Connecting Vets contacted Cumberland County Sheriff's Office to obtain a copy of the full incident report, but was told that it will only be released with a court order from a judge. Around the same time, he went on a cross-country ride with the Coast x Coast motorcycle club, starting out of Los Angeles and bound for Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. But it was a disheartening conclusion, she says, to a difficult and drawn-out ordeal that she insists was not my fault.. The body of Master Sgt. When her contract was up in 2019, she resigned from the Army. I asked him if I could take a picture in front of their logo to send to my instructor, she says. The certificates dont indicate how long the bodies were in the woods. Leshikar's daughter said that, Uncle Billy was acting strange and that's why I let my daddy in, to the house. 2023 Audacy, Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. William J. Lavigne II, 37, was one of two men found dead Dec. 2 in a training area on Fort Bragg, N.C., the Army said in a statement. The doctrine, long a target of legislative reform, bars soldiers and sailors and Marines from recovering damages resulting from wrongful acts by the military. Once people started getting drunk, they would bust it out, and drunk girls would try it and get all hornied up. 2023 Audacy, Inc. All rights reserved. The DA treated the killing as a justifiable homicide and Lavigne was not charged with a crime. The body of Master Sgt. A major weakness for the defense was Scanlons apparent absence of a motive to fabricate a rape claim, complete with a trip to the hospital and all. Once at Lavigne's residence, Leshikar's family say the friend took Leshikar's phone. When Scanlon learns that the audio was destroyed, she unexpectedly breaks down in tears. On one occasion, she says, she had to hide in the bathroom after he walked into a tavern in Southern Pines. Anecdote, family member was [redacted] group, got recruited to Delta, turned them down. Only 11 of the deaths were determined to have been from natural causes. The rest of the court-martial is a black box to her, because she spent it sequestered in the prosecutions witness room, which she says she was not permitted to leave. William Lavigne and Timothy Dumas were found dead at a training site on Fort Bragg, North Carolina. It appears that a lot goes on here.. As soon as it was over, Scanlon says, I jumped up and grabbed my shoes and ran inside to get my stuff. Rick described her brother's friend as a good and honorable man, although she is concerned with some of his actions that day. According to him, agents initiated a collateral investigation with Fayetteville police. Because every man with a dark beard or a hat terrified me., But, the statement continued, I am strong. SUBSCRIBE Today!Also available everywhere you listen to podcasts!The recent deaths of Army Delta Force member William J. Lavigne and Army Veteran Timothy Dum. As a result, she says, she had to retell her ordeal to five different SVCs, some of whom were unprepared or missed meetings. We all knew him, says Roy Lynn Parker, 35. He took that and he always was the one who would protect people who were being bullied in school because he was a big man.. Lavigne was a member of the Coast x Coast club and a good friend of Vallejos. For reasons that remain a mystery, Lavigne had pulled out the .40-caliber sidearm he carried and double-tapped his best buddy right in front of two horrified little girls, his daughter and Leshikars. A Delta Force operator known to be good friends with both Lavigne and Leshikar was allegedly the first person Lavigne called as things deteriorated with Leshikar the day he died. He was originally set to be tried in civilian court, but Army prosecutors assigned to Special Forces swooped in at the last minute and caused the Cumberland County district attorney to drop the charges so that Vallejo could be tried by the military. Reach Jack Murphy:jack@connectingvets.comor@JackMurphyRGR.Want to get more connected to the stories and resources Connecting Vets has to offer? In the event of a terrorist strike, international hostage situation, or loose nuclear weapon, its Delta or Team 6 that the president will call on to respond. Scanlon never knew Lavigne, not by name. A spokeswoman for the FBI confirmed this month that the homicide investigation into the shooting deaths of Master Sgt. At the time he met Scanlon, who was nearly 10 years his junior, Vallejo was a sergeant first class. Thereafter, things moved very slowly toward a trial. On the point of leaving, Scanlon says she asked Vallejo where she could find the restroom. Scanlon claims that Vallejo raped her that night, and says that the trauma still haunts her to this day. The jury panel of nine included two women and was a mix of colonels, majors, and senior sergeants, all of whom served in the Special Forces. The latter was for firing shots at a guy outside a crack house on Enloe Street in Fayetteville, a very serious offense, but Lavigne was not prosecuted for any of these crimes. Im still spooked. She read USASOCs statement in The Fort Bragg Murders that some unspecified adverse administrative action had been pending against Lavigne at the time of his death. Because she was already guilty of one instance of fraternization, with the staff sergeant to whose house she had been headed to that night, she had a motive to lie and pretend that the encounter with Vallejo was nonconsensual, in Poppes theory of the case. William J. Lavigne II and Timothy Dumas, a veteran previously stationed at the post, were found dead at a training site on the base Wednesday afternoon. According to the Leshikar family, the investigators said they had no real jurisdiction over Lavigne since Leshikar was killed off post. It seems he crashed there from time to time. Its the first time during many hours of interviews that she has lost her composure, and I can understand why. A subsequent SOFREP investigation. The girl then mimicking how her father collapsed to the floor. He busted a few rounds in the direction of Ian Detar, an inveterate burglar who has no fewer than 29 mug shots on file with the county. On deployment, they literally go around blasting peoples brains out, she says. Over the course of twenty years and thousands of missions, he's fought desperately for his life, rescued hostages, killed and . But that didn't happen before his death this month. Lavigne and Vallejo were on an altogether different level, one rarely touched by scandal. You get everyone in for a forensic interview, get emails, social media and everything else in the next 48 hours. Vallejo is considered a ladies man and groupies hang out at the ware house [sic] looking for an opportunity to sleep with Mr. Vallejo. This, the detective noted, was according to an employee of the Fayetteville Police Department who had to recuse herself from the case because she herself had once spent the night at Vallejos apartment. If he didnt have a knife, he would be toting around, like Rambo, some bow-and-arrow-type shit.. She passed a covered motorcycle trailer with a looming portrait of a slain Delta Force soldier printed on the side. The nurse took swabs from Scanlons vagina and cervix, and collected as evidence her soiled underwear. In February 2019, Lavigne had another brush with the law. Dumas, an ex-soldier with a shady past, was found murdered along with Lavigne in the woods outside Fayetteville in December 2020. Over those five years, it paid out grants totaling $187,143. He was the foundation of my family, Leshikar's mother, Tammy Mabey said of her son. LaVigne was supposed to be in Cumberland County District Court on Jan. 15 for a Feb. 17, 2020, hit-and-run charge, court documents say. Both men were on active duty in Delta Force at the time. On Sept. 8, 2021, the Coast x Coast club holds a public event in Fayetteville, at their usual haunt, Macs Speed Shop. Lavigne retained him while still under Army investigation into the shooting death of Leshikar, he says. The staff sergeant had invited her over to his house earlier in the evening, but she and Tina hadnt wanted to leave the party. Since learning of Lavigne's death, Leshikar's daughter has opened up about it, saying she was previously afraid Lavigne would kill her mother if she spoke of it, Rick told Connecting Vets. She said she tried to get them to stop using narcotics. That is not accurate, a spokesman for Army CID, Jeffrey Castro, writes in a statement.
Origin Energy Retention Team, Aetna Market Fee Schedule 2021, Smyth County News Obituaries, Canandaigua Recycling Schedule, Meyer Lansky Nephew Robbie, Articles W