Family members of vets who commit suicide seek understanding

Sgt. Nick Pansini did not come home to die.

Pansini, from Littleton, joined the Marines 5th Air Naval Gunfire Liaison Company (ANGLICO) after he finished high school in 2005. After three years in Okinawa and tours in Iraq in 2008 and 2009, he was ready to return to civilian life.

He got a job, a girlfriend and dog, and filled his spare time by riding his mountain bike and putting together two hot rod cars. Nick’s father, Joe Pansini, thought his son had moved on from his war experiences, and was keeping busy.

He learned later that there was one thing Nick was not doing.

“At what point did he deal with his war experience? He did not,” Joe said on Saturday.

Nick Pansini shot himself in his own home in Littleton on July 22, 2010. He was 23 years old and had been out of the Marines for about a year.

“There was not the magical note that was left behind,” Pansini’s father recalled. Not having served in the military, he had no idea what his son was going through, he said.

With the help of the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors (TAPS), Joe has spent the past year trying to understand.

He and more than 300 people  like him were at the Cheyenne Mountain Resort  this weekend for the 3rd Annual TAPS National Military Suicide Survivor Seminar  — the largest yet, said spokeswoman Ami Neiberger-Miller.

This was the second seminar  for Pansini. It’s a place where he and other survivors can attend workshops and lectures, but above all, it gives Joe a chance to tell his son’s story.

Even as a kid, Nick liked the idea of service jobs — he wanted to be a firefighter or a police officer. He was itching to join the military, even when his father encouraged him to think about it.

In June 2005 , a month after Nick finished high school, Joe got a call while at work.
“Guess what?” Nick said.

“I could tell he had his sideways grin going,” Joe recalled on Saturday. “He didn’t have to tell me. I knew.”

Nick joined the Marines. He was a good, tough, sergeant who was proud of his job, friends later told Joe. When Nick got back from Iraq, he threw himself into civilian life with the same gusto, and got accepted to Red Rocks Community College  for a paramedic-firefighter program.

Nick told his family that he was having nightmares, but he brushed them off. Even after he woke up in his backyard a few months before his death with a loaded weapon in his hand, he dismissed the idea of post traumatic stress disorder.

They were just dreams, he told his dad.

“I know what I signed up for,” he told his roommate. “I can handle this.”

On Friday, July 23, 2010, Nick didn’t show up for work, which wasn’t like him, his father said. He had shot himself the night before.

Joe suspects that Nick was suffering from undiagnosed PTSD and traumatic brain injury , caused by explosions. In his mental health screening checklist Nick indicated that he hadn’t been exposed to explosions, which his father says is not true. Joe believes that many guys do the same thing.

“They just want to get out ... and get back to their families, their girls, their cars,” he said.

Joe hopes that, someday, he can help other fathers recognize the warning signs and become even more involved in the lives of their children, as they return from war.

In the meantime, he is learning to deal with the death of his son. He is left with the memories and the two hot rod cars, which sit in pieces in his garage.

Joe prefers to think of his son as gone, but not lost.

“I haven’t lost my son,” he said. “I know right where he is.”

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