A few hours later, Kirk Vanderbur was dead at age 24. His body was found on a private shooting range in tiny Hubert, N.C., shot not once but twice - in the stomach and the head - with two separate weapons found lying 10 feet apart.
Ten months later, a 270-page Navy investigative report reached the same conclusion a local sheriff had announced two days after the extraordinary death: Vanderbur had committed suicide.
The Navy report portrayed Vanderbur as a tormented young man with serious girlfriend and money problems. It said he was torn by feelings of "inadequacy and unworthiness" that drove him to suicide.
That conclusion was not based on physical evidence. It was the result of a ''psychological autopsy" - a controversial post-mortem evaluation based on comments from Vanderbur's friends, co-workers and family members, and a study of his writings.
The procedure is the same one the Navy relied on in 1989, after an explosion aboard the USS Iowa killed 47 sailors. The Navy falsely accused one of the dead men, Gunner's Mate Clayton Hartwig, of sabotaging a gun turret as part of a suicide attempt.
A psychological autopsy prepared for the Navy by the FBI portrayed Hartwig as an antisocial, suicidal loner.
Nine months after the explosion, a panel of psychologists harshly criticized the Hartwig analysis as improper and invalid. A congressional inquiry said investigators, relying on the analysis, made false assumptions and sought only evidence that reinforced their preconceived notions about Hartwig.
Scientists later concluded through lab tests that the Iowa explosion was an accident. The Navy publicly apologized to Hartwig's family.
Four years after the Iowa debacle, the military still uses psychological autopsies to buttress rulings of suicide in suspicious deaths of servicemen, despite misgivings by psychologists about their reliability.
