Grieving Parents Sue Air Force for Answers in Daughter’s Death

Photo Credit: APThe 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 northcentral 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.”

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