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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Family seeks answers about airman’s death

Orofino woman died while based in Guam

Kelsey Anderson
John Miller Associated Press

BOISE – The grieving parents of a 19-year-old Idaho woman who died serving her country thousands of miles from home say the U.S. Air Force won’t give them information about the circumstances of her death.

Airman 1st Class Kelsey Sue Anderson, of Orofino, died June 9, 2011, at Andersen Air Force Base on the island of Guam, a U.S. territory in the Pacific Ocean 3,300 miles west of Hawaii. The military has reported she committed suicide.

But Chris and Adelia Sue Anderson, her parents, filed a lawsuit last month in U.S. District Court to force the Air Force to respond to their Freedom of Information Act request seeking more information about how their daughter died.

The Andersons say their daughter, an avid soccer player and horseback rider who worked in her hometown’s flower shop before joining the military, was unhappy with her job as a security guard on Guam but neither distraught nor depressed in their final contacts days before her death. The arrival of an Air Force colonel at their home, accompanied by local sheriff’s officers from Clearwater County, to relay the terrible news was a bolt from the blue, they say.

“We just want to know what happened,” said Chris Anderson, who with his wife runs a hunting outfitting business in north-central Idaho’s forests, in an interview Wednesday. “We don’t care if it’s good or bad, we just want closure so we can get on with our lives. It’s been two years with no answers.”

According to their federal lawsuit, the U.S. Air Force told the Andersons in May 2012 an investigation into their daughter’s death was complete.

They expected to quickly receive a report about what happened in an aircraft maintenance hangar that housed two B-2 bombers. That’s where they’d been told their daughter’s body was found the morning of June 9 in a locked stall of a second-floor women’s bathroom, the apparent victim of a self-inflicted gunshot wound from her own service weapon.

Kelsey had been on Guam less than five months.

When no documents arrived by August, however, her parents contacted Idaho U.S. Sen. Jim Risch and filed a Freedom of Information Act request with military offices in Quantico, Va.

Risch’s office received a letter from an Air Force colonel in September, saying the investigation into Anderson’s death had been closed but that it could take six months before her parents received a response.

Months passed, however, and the Andersons say they heard nothing. The Air Force didn’t respond to a formal appeal they filed in May, either, according to their complaint. Now, they say, the Air Force is violating federal law by failing to provide them with information – or tell them why it’s exempt from disclosure.

“They basically ignore us, like we don’t exist,” Chris Anderson said. “We’re her parents. We have the right to have an answer.”

Contacted by the Associated Press, Air Force officials said requests about the case must come from Kelsey Sue Anderson’s family.

Risch aides were unaware the matter remains unresolved and pledged to contact the Air Force again if Anderson’s parents want additional help. “We can certainly go back in and inquire on the case,” said Brad Hoaglun, the senator’s spokesman in Boise.