Veteran Suicide Documentary To Feature 2 Marylanders Advocating For Change

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“This is just another step to making the situation known,” Tricia Fogle said during filming at her Point of Rocks home. “The more it continues, then hopefully things just happen.”

Sexual Assault Stole ‘All Humanity, Normalcy’

Annapolis resident Betty Buck shared the story of her son, Hospital Corpsman Danny Buck. The Navy sailor died by suicide after he was sexually assaulted by three fellow seamen while stationed in Japan. Patch first told his story in June 2023.

“You would never believe you’re ever going to have to bury a child. No parent should,” Betty Buck said.

Danny Buck asked his mom to FaceTime him on April 29, 2019, saying it was urgent. She pulled over at the Riva Road bridge over the South River to take the call. The 39-year-old told her it was “D Day” or “Death Day.” He revealed the assault, saying he “lost all humanity and normalcy.”

“When he said ‘Death Day’ to me, I knew,” Betty Buck said. “His whole actions, his mental health, everything had changed since he came back from Tokyo. I knew he was drinking more.”

Betty Buck sent her son’s friends to his apartment in San Diego, where he chose to transfer after the assault. She also connected her other children to the call and alerted the police to send a crisis negotiator.

The two-hour call left Betty Buck needing a restroom break, so she made her son promise to stay on the line with his siblings. Betty Buck bolted to her family business’s office in Prince George’s County, and she “set a land record for getting from Riva Road to Upper Marlboro.”

When Betty Buck returned to the call, they talked for another three hours. Her son eventually said he loved her and hung up. Still on the phone with police negotiators, Betty Buck ordered officers to break down his door. It was too late.

A Naval Academy chaplain and a casualty officer were at her door within hours. She boarded a flight to San Diego that night for his funeral.

Navy officers instructed her not to speak publicly about her son’s cause of death, Betty Buck said. She told them she refused to stay silent, so they would have to accept that or escort her off the base. The Navy let her stay for the funeral, and she was honest with anybody who asked how he died.

“I said ‘You got the wrong mama bear,'” Betty Buck stated. “Anyone that asks will be told the truth … I’m not going to be quiet and neither will my children.”

Danny Buck shot himself in the heart, a calculated decision to allow an open casket for his then 3-year-old daughter to say one last goodbye. He had also scheduled flower deliveries for his daughter and wife for all their special days.

The scarring memory replayed whenever Betty Buck entered her office at the family beer business, Buck Distributing.

“Every time I walked in that building, I heard that gun go off,” she said. “It was a family-owned and run business for 75 years. [I was] never expecting to sell it, but I did because I couldn’t continue walking in that building.”

Before his last breath, Danny Buck asked his mom to fight for change.

“One of the things he said to me was ‘Mom, you’re a force of nature when you believe in something. I need you to do what I’m not strong enough to do. I need you to make people understand what is going on in the military,'” Betty Buck recounted, adding that her son’s group lost two other hospital corpsmen to suicide within 30 days. “It was something I knew I couldn’t walk away from.”

Betty Buck sold the family business and started the HM2 Buck for Hope Foundation, a nonprofit named after her son and his rank as an HM2. The group advocates for sexual assault prevention and mental health reform in the military.

“Someone has to stand up and say ‘This has to stop. This is going on. It has to stop,'” Betty Buck said during the interview at the HM2 Buck for Hope office in downtown Annapolis.

PTSD Left Soldier In ‘Very Dark Place’

Patch first covered the Fogles at a September fundraiser in Nick Fogle’s honor. The event at Mayo’s American Legion Cummings-Behlke Post 226 raised over $50,000 for veteran mental health resources. The money benefited America’s Warrior Partnership, a nonprofit supporting soldiers like Nick Fogle.

Tricia Fogle noticed changes after her husband, an Apache helicopter pilot, made an emergency landing when his chopper lost an engine in October 2021.

When he returned home, Nick Fogle started drinking and missing work, leaving his wife on alert. She once found the kids watching TV alone and heard loud rap music blaring behind a locked bedroom door. Tricia Fogle picked the lock and sprang into action.

“He was sitting in the bathtub, and he had a gun in his hand,” Tricia Fogle said. “I literally just jumped in. I held him.”

Nick Fogle apologized and promised he’d never do anything dangerous.

“A big part of me believed him,” Tricia Fogle said. “I … thought that he would never leave me and his children behind.”

The combat still weighed heavy on Nick Fogle, who had a forearm tattoo of a little girl holding a bomb with the word “No” written across her forehead.

Concerning behavior escalated when Nick Fogle rewatched graphic dashboard videos from combat missions.

“He played those videos for everyone on Christmas Day, and everyone got sick to their stomach,” Tricia Fogle said. “People were trying to tell me that he needed to get help ASAP.”

Tricia Fogle tried to connect him with therapists and priests, but he refused every offer, worrying that it would blemish his Army record.

The PTSD left Nick Fogle increasingly irritable, aggressive and aloof. He even spent $130,000 between December 2021 and his death the following July.

“He told me how he was in a very dark place, how depressed he was, how sad he was and how he’s f-cked up and he’s pretty much lost everything,” Tricia Fogle said. “The mood swings were insane.”

Nick Fogle called his wife several times on July 6, 2022, apologizing and saying he loved the whole family. Tricia Fogle remembers that “His voice sounded really funny. It was like empty.”

“I will never forget it. It was just withdrawn, emotionless and almost like he had a decision in the back of his head already,” she said.

The couple was on the phone again later that day when Nick Fogle died.

“I don’t know if he meant to hang up. Part of me wishes that he did. So I hear the phone kind of drop a little bit, and it goes silent. And then, I hear the gun go off. And I screamed,” Tricia Fogle said.

The 38-year-old took his life at his home in El Paso, Texas. He was in uniform and on lunch break at the time.

At first, Tricia Fogle ran circles in her head, wondering how she could’ve intervened.

“I should’ve told somebody in the military regardless [of] if he would’ve lost his job,” she said, noting that she eventually stopped blaming herself. “It took me a while to get over that it was not my fault and that there was nothing that I could’ve done. I mean, I could barely function.”

Nick Fogle’s children were 3, 9 and 11 when he died.

“I was scared that she would never remember him,” Tricia Fogle said of their youngest daughter. “Whenever she wants to look at pictures, I have a whole album on my phone so that she can look through all of them and realize he loved her and that he was there.”

Documentary Puts Faces To Stories

Tedesco is interviewing other military families, service members and mental health experts for the documentary.

“You hear the number 22 a day, but the number is way higher than that,” Tedesco said, pointing to the reported number of daily veteran suicides. “It’s not just the people, it’s the families, it’s the children … You’re not accounting for everything else and every other person that’s affected.”

Tedesco expects to finish the film by late summer 2025, when it will air on the PBS affiliate in Buffalo. He is targeting a nationwide release in November 2025. It will be available for free on the Buffalo Naval Park’s YouTube channel, which has over 10,000 subscribers.

“The mission of the Buffalo Naval Park is to honor, educate, inspire and preserve,” Tedesco said. “I take that extremely seriously, especially the honoring part.”

This is Tedesco’s second documentary in his “Two Wars” series. The first film, “The Road to Integration,” won a pair of New York Emmy Awards this October for its coverage of the military’s transition from segregation to integration.

“The Road to Integration,” viewable here, tallied an estimated 147,000 viewers when it aired nationally on PBS affiliates around Veterans Day 2023.

Tedesco called the reception “overwhelmingly positive” and the awards “mind-blowing.”

“I hope that those lead to opportunities to tell more stories,” he said. “I still can’t believe that I have an Emmy on my mantel. It’s really insane.”

The accolades are humbling, but Tedesco’s true motivation is to spark change through his storytelling.

“We’ve become so desensitized to PTSD,” said Tedesco, who’s originally from Stony Brook, Long Island. “I think we forget that these are real people and real families, and it just needs to be told. It needs to be shared.”

The documentary will also help Danny Buck and Nick Fogle be remembered for more than their last days.

“You and I just sat through two interviews and hearing what these people have sacrificed for their country, not just Danny and Nick, but their families,” Tedesco told Baumgart. “I think it’s important that we are sharing their stories.”

A medic nicknamed “Doc,” Danny Buck joined the Navy at age 25. He winced at the sight of his own blood but was a steady hand for injured Marines during a deployment to Afghanistan and another to Iraq. With the help of his mother, Danny Buck once distributed 600 pairs of sneakers to service members rehabbing injuries.

“He loved being in the service,” Betty Buck said. “Danny was always a leader. When he believed in something, he was very strong in going after it. He never shirked from anything.”

Outside of work, he loved spending time outdoors. After getting married in St. Mary’s County, he and his wife spent their honeymoon driving across the U.S., visiting friends along the way. While stationed in Italy, the couple took their daughter to Disneyland Paris.

Danny Buck “loved his little girl thoroughly,” his mother said, so another Navy wife made a stuffed doll for his daughter to remember him.

“It was a picture of Danny standing at attention in his uniform, and she carried that thing with her everywhere. That was Daddy,” Betty Buck said.

Nick Fogle enjoyed family vacations to Ruidoso, New Mexico, where he would ride horses and hike with his loved ones. Tricia Fogle described him as her “partner in crime” and a “family-oriented” man.

“He was the most affectionate, loving person. I was so lucky to find someone like him. I have no regrets at all. He did everything for his family. He would drop everything for his kids and myself,” Tricia Fogle said. “He cherished me. I was his everything. And I know that even though he had his illness or whatever demons that he had in his head, that was still there.”

Nick Fogle also served as an infantryman and a bomb technician, totaling five years in combat zones. He served tours in Afghanistan, Iraq and Tajikistan.

“He loved this country more than words can explain. He loved the people. He wanted to protect everybody. He adored the ground that all of us walk on. And the flag meant everything to him,” Tricia Fogle said.

Tricia Fogle “can’t even tell you how many lives” her husband saved. Nick Fogle’s obituary said this earned him honors like the Bronze Star, the Army Commendation Medal with Valor Device and Air Medal with Combat Device.

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“You should see Nick’s ribbon rack. It’s insane,” Tricia Fogle said. “His career is something that is so impressive.”

Moving Forward: ‘You Don’t Stop’

Danny Buck’s abusers were never held accountable, his mother said, alleging that they also assaulted other victims.

Rather than seeking revenge, Betty Buck poured her heart into HM2 Buck for Hope.

Annual galas have helped her raise $2 million for public information campaigns. With the foundation’s funding on sure footing, Betty Buck thinks she is done throwing the worthwhile but cumbersome galas. She now plans to put that fundraising to work.

Partnering with Annapolis public relations firm Liquified Creative, HM2 landed billboards on Anne Arundel County buses advertising the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. One of those buses passed Betty Buck on a tough morning around her son’s birthday, reminding her to keep pushing forward.

“Part of what makes me get up in the morning is Danny is around all the time,” she said. “I was walking up the street, right at the intersection of Conduit Street and Main Street, was one of those buses with the billboard on the back. Okay, Danny. I got the message. I’ll get myself together. I’m good.”

Betty Buck also commissioned a soon-to-be-completed mural spotlighting the culture of silence surrounding military mental health and sexual assault. The mural’s outline, showing a sailor with hands over their mouth, is already visible outside the HM2 office at the corner of Conduit and Duke of Gloucester streets.

“Why didn’t he talk to us? Why didn’t he share with us?” Betty Buck recalled hearing from her son’s colleagues at his funeral. “Because he wasn’t allowed to. I said ‘He wasn’t allowed to tell me.'”

Betty Buck applauded recent policy changes made through the Department of Defense.

Within the last four years, Pentagon commissions have generated nearly 200 recommendations to prevent suicide and sexual assault. The solutions ranged from quality-of-life improvements and gun purchase waiting periods to removing sexual assault investigations from the chain of command and hiring 2,000 sexual assault prevention employees. President Joe Biden also signed the Brandon Act in 2021, letting service members request a mental health evaluation at any time by asking their ranking officer.

The changes are welcome, but Tricia Fogle thinks there’s still room to improve.

“It’s easier said than done. Actions speak louder than words,” she said.

Troops currently undergo screening before and after each deployment, but she said most breeze through the questionnaire and conceal their struggles for fear of career setbacks. She would prefer personalized check-ins without strings attached.

“You have to talk to them and sit with them. Body language means everything,” Tricia Fogle said, also calling for release planning to help retiring soldiers transition into civilian life. “There’s so many homeless veterans that are out there that are just deteriorating because they were unable to get the help even when they get out.”

Tricia Fogle faced her own mental health struggles after her husband’s death. She chose, however, to seek help.

The family moved to northern Virginia to be closer to relatives. Tricia Fogle started therapy and later moved to their current home in Frederick County. She now works in mental health care at a prison.

“You have two paths you can take. The easy path, which is being self-destructive. That’s easy. Or doing something about it, getting help, which takes work,” she said. “I chose to realize I have three children that need me and that this is not how you deal with things.”

Tricia Fogle knew she had to share this lesson in the documentary. She hopes her story will spark mental health reform and inspire others to get treatment.

“Nothing happens overnight, but you don’t stop,” she said. “If there’s a means to an opportunity, the thing is, I’m not going to say no. Me saying no is saying I give up. And that’s not something that I do at all.”

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