Family seeks answers in death of diver trainee

Joe Gould - 

It was the third day of Special Forces pre-scuba training and Capt. Juan E. Lightfoot was exhausted.

He gripped the edge of the pool and refused to let go. But an instructor peeled his hands from the edge of the pool and another dragged him away from the wall.

Lightfoot went limp and sank to the bottom of the 11-foot, 6-inch-deep pool. Despite efforts to revive him, Lightfoot never woke up.

Four days later, his family had him removed from life support.

The armed forces medical examiner ruled Lightfoot’s death a homicide. The medical examiner, Mark Shelly, said Lightfoot, 34, died of complications from a near-drowning. He noted that Lightfoot, who was “anxious and hyperventilating,” tried to exit the pool, “but the instructors did not allow him to do so.” When the instructor pried his hands from the wall, he “immediately sank to the bottom,” Shelly wrote, adding that Lightfoot “would have survived if he had been able to exit the pool.”

Investigators with Special Forces Command (Airborne) said instructors failed to heed signs that Lightfoot was not aerobically fit for the course and to remove him.

So far, multiple investigations have stopped short of accusing anyone in the cadre of criminal negligence.

Lightfoot’s adoptive parents, Denise Carter and Damien Gennino, both New York City schoolteachers who live in Elmont, N.Y., insist that the instructors in his Special Forces pre-scuba training course should face criminal prosecution and that their commanders should be fired.

“My son’s death, in my opinion, was a murder,’ ” Carter said. “It was not an accidental thing.”

“These guys were overzealous, pushed him to the limit. He wasn’t thinking properly; he was physically exhausted and mentally exhausted after five days of brutal training,” Gennino said. “They knew he was exhausted and they pushed him off the side of the pool and into the water, and he was dead in three seconds.”

On Dec. 8, 2010, at the pool on what is now Pope Army Airfield, N.C., one student reported hearing Lightfoot ask, “Please let me hold the gunnel,” referring to the pool’s edge. On a video that was originally intended to be a training aid, investigators said, a voice is heard on the tape saying, “Say the word.”

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