Politics & Government
4 Men Charged in Navy Divers' Deaths at APG Super Pond
The officers were charged with dereliction for their involvement in a fatal training exercise at Aberdeen Proving Ground.
Four members of the Navy have been charged with dereliction of duty in connection with the death of two divers at the Aberdeen Proving Ground Super Pond earlier this year.
Chief Warrant Officer 3rd Class Jason M. Bennett, Senior Chief Navy Diver James C. Burger, Senior Chief Navy Diver David C. Jones and Chief Navy Diver Gary G. Ladd Jr. were charged with dereliction of duty Wednesday and will be court-martialed in January, according to The Baltimore Sun.
The four men are members of the Mobile Diving and Salvage Unit 2 based in Virginia Beach, VA, that was training at Aberdeen Proving Ground (APG) when Navy Diver 1st class James Reyher, 28, of Ohio, and Navy Diver 2nd Class Ryan Harris, 23, of Missouri, drowned during an exercise to locate a helicopter underwater on Feb. 26.
On the day of the dive, the team did not have enough specialized gear and so Reyher and Harris used scuba equipment, Reuters reported.
A line tethered to the pair got tangled with an object on the bottom of the 150-foot-deep military testing pond, the floor of which is "littered with metal objects," The Washington Post reported.
During the dive, their oxygen supply ran out, according to The Baltimore Sun.
At the Oct. 9 arraignment of four officers at Naval Station Norfolk, all were charged with dereliction of duty for failing to adhere to safety procedures, Navy Times reported.
The penalty for one count of dereliction of duty is two-thirds pay suspended and up to three months in jail, according to The Virginian-Pilot.
Bennett, who pleaded the Fifth Amendment during a pretrial hearing in June, was also charged with neglecting to inform the commanding officer of deviations from the training plan, The Virginian-Pilot reported.
It is against protocol to dive farther than 130 feet, and Bennett failed to request permission from his commanding officer to go deeper, according to Navy Times.
Two others, including the commanding officer, have already been penalized in the deaths of Reyher and Harris.
The commanding officer, Michael Runkle, was relieved of his duties in May and reassigned because the Navy said it lost "confidence in his ability to command."
Chief Warrant Officer Mark Smith accepted an administrative punishment in lieu of judicial proceedings, the Associated Press reported.
Bennett, Burger, Jones and Ladd have been taken out of their leadership roles during the proceedings, according to The Virginian-Pilot, and their trials will take place in January.
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