Young veteran's suicide shatters air of stability
by JOHN C. ENSSLIN
Source: North Jersey
Published: Sunday 24 March, 2013
Bergen County Freeholder David Ganz had a habit over the last two years of giving his colleagues brief updates at their public meetings on his son Scott, a soldier serving with the Army Reserve.
His updates were at times a welcome respite from some otherwise tense political arguments. After one particularly long and heated debate in August, Ganz announced: “My son Scott is home. He’s back from Afghanistan.”
The room broke into spontaneous cheers and applause.
But in late February, the same room turned somber as Ganz disclosed that his son had committed suicide in his apartment in Orlando, Fla. Scott Ganz was 30 years old.
“The sad fact is that a veteran commits suicide every 65 minutes, 22 veterans a day,” David Ganz told the hushed chamber.
“This is not something that this board can do something about,” he added. “But it is something that, as a matter of policy, we need to address with our own veterans, and it’s something the U.S. Army and Congress have to address.”
No one knows why Scott Ganz decided to end his life. His family and friends and investigators with the Army are left with more questions than answers. His death, however, comes at a time when the military has reported a record number of suicides among soldiers returning from combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.
There were 349 suspected suicides in the military in 2012, the most since the Pentagon began keeping track in 2001. And that number does not include veterans like Scott Ganz, who took their lives after being discharged. The military suicide rate has continued to increase while combat deaths have declined as the United States continues to wind down its operation in Afghanistan. Military suicides last year surpassed the 295 combat fatalities in Afghanistan.
There is also recent research indicating that soldiers who, like Scott Ganz, return home with closed head injuries — particularly those with mild forms of traumatic brain injuries or concussion — are at increased risk for suicide. But Scott Ganz also had a history of substance abuse problems, and there is no way of knowing whether the head injury that he suffered in a bomb blast in 2011 played any role in his decision to kill himself.
Punk rock, pyramids
Before there was the band of brothers that Scott Ganz found with the Army, there was Witch Moon, a North Jersey-based punk rock band that styled itself after the shock-rocker Marilyn Manson.
Scott Harry Ganz grew up in Fair Lawn. He was a bright, inquisitive child who impressed family friends with his knowledge of the Mesoamerican pyramids on a trip to Mexico. When he was at home, his father recalls that he loved to sit on the porch at night and watch the fireflies.
As a teenager, Scott spent a summer working at his father’s Manhattan law office. But as Scott grew older, his relationship with his father became strained. He stopped going to school at 15 and “took to the hills,” his father said.
Kraig Marshall doesn’t remember the details of the first meeting that he and his friend Dan Kennedy had with Scott Ganz, but he knows it was in 1998 at the Land & Sea Restaurant in Fair Lawn. Ganz used to hang out there, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes.
“As soon as we met him, we hit it off,” said Marshall, who, with Kennedy, was in Witch Moon. Ganz joined the band as a guitarist. The three of them would take long bicycle rides through Fair Lawn, talking all the while about what they wanted the band to be.
Marshall summed it up this way: “Let’s look as crazy as we can. Let’s sound as crazy as we can. And Scott was totally interested.”
He created a band persona, taking the stage name “Burn” and braiding his long brown hair in Rastafarian-style locks that he wrapped with electrical tape, shaving the rest of his head.
“It was so original. It was so cool,” said Marshall, who was 19 at the time; Scott was 15.
The band was playing to packed clubs in New York and New Jersey when they landed a gig in London, Ontario. They loaded up Marshall’s Ford Aerostar van and headed north.
Marshall said he and Kennedy thought of Scott as their kid brother, one who they teased endlessly — like the time they wrapped Christmas lights around him as he slept.
A video from that trip shows Scott looking directly into the camera, his lip pierced and his head on a pillow. He’s complaining, but there’s an oddly sweet quality to the tape.
“I’m tired. I’m hungry. I don’t have makeup. I’m cranky. I’m sleepy,” he says as music plays in the background. “Hi, Mom!”
After two years of performing, the band gained enough notoriety to get an invitation from a record company. Marshall said they submitted seven songs, their entire repertoire at the time. The record company liked “one and a half” songs and asked for more, Marshall said.
A frantic month followed, with the band working non-stop to produce more music. They turned in another tape. The producers didn’t like any of it. There would be no record deal. A short time later, the band broke up.
Marshall didn’t hear from Ganz after that until a Facebook message arrived in March 2009.
“Things have been going great with me,” Scott wrote. “I’m living in Florida now, and I’m going off to basic training in a month. I’m just happy the government is going to teach me to play with explosives.”
The idea of Scott joining the military floored his former band, whose members remembered him as the little brother with the dreadlocks.
It also surprised but pleased Scott’s father.
“He wanted to go,” David Ganz said. “I asked him why, and he simply said, ‘I want to serve.’ I understood that. I respected that. But as a father, I was scared to death.”
Scott was assigned to the 841st Engineer Battalion as a combat engineer specializing the removal of explosives. He immediately took to the Army, just as he had with the band.
“I suspect he wanted some order and stability in his life,” his father said. “He absolutely took to this like a duck swimming in a pond. It was just what he needed.”
A sense of structure
When Scott Ganz was in high school and before he joined the band, there were days when his father would take him to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting in the morning and Alcoholics Anonymous in the afternoon.
But Scott had come so far, his father said. To the surprise of his friends and family, enlisting in the military gave him a sense of structure that they had never seen before. David Ganz said it was as if his son had finally found a place in life where he felt he belonged.
“This was a club that would have him and that he wanted to be a member of,” he said.
Craig Bryan of the National Center for Veterans Studies at the University of Utah said military life — despite the stresses of combat — often has a positive effect on soldiers who lived troubled lives before joining the service.
“Oh, yeah, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve worked with soldiers who had chaotic upbringings,” he said. “They join the military to get away from that, and some of them do quite well.”
That seemed to be the case for Scott Ganz when he finally ended his 14-month deployment in Afghanistan.
His father celebrated the news of his son’s return to Florida by cutting down a yellow ribbon that he had affixed to the door of his freeholder office. In April 2012, soon after Scott returned to the United States, he and his fiancée met his father and his wife in Las Vegas.
David Ganz remembers an odd conversation from that trip in which his son spoke in the third person about a soldier who had been in a bomb blast. Later that night, Ganz thought about what Scott had said and told his wife, “It sounds to me like he was in the explosion.”
He was.
Scott had confided in his younger sister about the details. He had been on patrol in an armored vehicle in November 2011 when it triggered a bomb armed with 125 pounds of plastic explosive. The force of the blast slammed his head against his machine gun, breaking his helmet and knocking him out. Scott was hospitalized for two days before being sent back to his base.
By the time he returned home to Florida, Scott said he was in pain and having difficulty sleeping, his father said.
While still in the military, Scott had gotten prescriptions for medication to help him sleep. But he continued taking the pills long past the seven to 10 days’ recommended usage, his father said.
When David Ganz went to Florida for a visit in January, he noticed his son’s hands were trembling. He asked Scott if he was drinking again. He said he wasn’t.
Later that month, though, Scott checked himself into a rehabilitation clinic for two brief stays.
Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr., D-Paterson, has been pushing for increased funding for research into traumatic brain injuries, the signature injury of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“The fact of the matter is it’s a growing problem, especially when people fall though the cracks and are not attended to,” he said.
Bryan, of the University of Utah, published a study recently that found that soldiers who survived bomb blasts were more likely to talk about suicide or report sleep problems if they did not lose consciousness after the blast. Bryan compiled the data while serving in Iraq as a clinical psychologist working with soldiers who were being treated after a blast.
Expecting a child
David Ganz said he never heard his son discuss suicide. All he knows is Scott Ganz chose not to reenlist when he had the chance.
While life in the military had been good to Scott, his father said he understood the decision. He was being married and the couple were expecting a child in May. Scott had a job as a telemarketer and wanted to take advantage of his status as a veteran to get a college degree. He enrolled in a local community college and began taking computer programming courses.
Then, on Jan. 17, he went to a gun shop in Orlando and bought a 9mm Beretta for $600 plus a $75 holster and some ammunition.
When his sister learned about the gun and asked why he had bought it, Scott replied that he was living in a tough neighborhood and needed the gun for protection, his father said.
On Feb. 6, David Ganz was talking to another freeholder in their Hackensack office when a phone message arrived. It was from his former wife — Scott’s mother — in Florida. Scott had killed himself with a gunshot wound to the head. There was no suicide note.
Ganz said he does not know if Scott was ever found to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder or any other condition stemming from the 2011 bombing incident because he has not seen his son’s military medical records. He said he has filed an open-records request to obtain a copy of his son’s autopsy report but has been told that it could be another month before the results of toxicology tests are available to indicate whether Scott had alcohol or drugs in his system at the time of his death.
Given his son’s history with substance abuse, Ganz said he had long dreaded getting a call about Scott being in an accident. But he never expected that Scott would die from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
“I’m not an expert,” he said weeks later, reflecting on his son’s death. “But it seems to me that if you have an epidemic of something that is causing grief and pain to so many people, that you need to investigate what the causes are and take the steps to eliminate what those causes are.”
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