The killing of Jamie Dean

The Maryland state's attorney's office launched an investigation into Dean's death and ruled it a justifiable homicide. But it harshly criticized the actions leading up to it: "The tactics used by the Maryland State Police were overwhelmingly aggressive, and not warranted under the circumstances," stated its report. "As certainly as [Dean's] death is in part a consequence of his own actions, it is also in large part due to the unfortunate choice of tactics employed by the commanders of the State Police [emergency response team] unit."

One criminal justice expert who reviewed Dean's case, Eastern Kentucky University professor Peter Kraska, said Dean's death epitomized the increasing militarization of law enforcement. He said the aggressive tactics used by the Maryland State Police to "pacify" Dean could only end one way: his being "neutralized" by a sniper's bullet.

The state's attorney's ruling is cold comfort to the Deans. Dean's parents and Muriel have hired a lawyer and plan to sue the agencies involved in the standoff. But the case is moving slowly and has thus far served mostly to erect a wall of silence between the law enforcement officers and the family. St. Mary's County Sheriff Tim Cameron said he thought the Deans deserved some explanations, and that he looked forward to sitting down with them, but now that lawyers are involved, he has to hold his tongue. The Maryland State Police declined requests to comment on the case.

Today, Muriel Dean, 38, hardly sleeps at night. She is distraught by the legal case and the fact that Jamie was recalled by the military. How could the Army have not known that he suffered from severe psychological stress after returning from Afghanistan? Sitting in her neat little house in Hollywood, Md., Muriel rubs her fingers over her forehead constantly, as if she has a terrible headache and is trying to massage it away. The carpet in her living room is well vacuumed and there is a pretty wallpaper border in her dining room, but the house has a ghost. Whole walls are adorned with photographs of Jamie. The unity candle they lighted at their wedding sits between two champagne glasses on a shelf above the couch, and there are two La-Z-Boy chairs upholstered in "real tree" camouflage facing the big-screen TV Jamie loved to watch.

Muriel, who was eight years older than Jamie when he died, has a daughter, 17, and a son, 13, from a previous marriage. Although she had known Jamie only a year before he was killed, she and Jamie had a lot in common, having both grown up in the rural St. Mary's County.

Until the mid-1990s, many residents of St. Mary's made their living working either the land or the water. Dean worked both. Mostly, he helped out on the farm, where every year until 1993, the family harvested 30 acres' worth of tobacco, plus truckloads of corn and other vegetables. The work was hard but Dean enjoyed it. "He loved to get on that tractor and just plow," says his mother, Elaine. "He said he loved the smell of the fresh dirt turning over. He was just in his own little world, nobody bothering him."

Elaine's father, Jamie's grandfather, began crabbing in the late 1970s. He pulled several hundred crab pots a season from the Chesapeake Bay and called his one-man outfit Captain Bob's Seafood. On the weekends, Dean went crawling with him. Dean, his mother says, would rather fish or hunt than just about anything else. And though he was an average student, he was popular, especially with the girls. He had a wide smile and older women giggled to his mother about his "bedroom eyes" and his "cute butt." He played on the high school football team and by senior year was working part time on a construction crew.

In early 2001, Dean's younger sister, Kelly, joined the Air Force. "Jamie said, 'You can have the military,'" says Elaine. "He didn't want anything to do with it." But a broken engagement that spring left Dean unmoored. He started partying every night, coming home near sunrise, hanging out with people who did drugs. His mom worried, but before she even got a chance to sit him down, he sat her down.

"Mom, I joined the Army," she remembers him saying in July 2001. "I leave in two weeks." Elaine was floored. She didn't want him to go, but Jamie had made up his mind. "I've been partying too much," he said. "You worked too hard to raise me right. Now I need to get away from here."

In April 2004, Dean's unit shipped out for a 12-month tour in Afghanistan. Dean, who'd risen to the level of sergeant, led a team of scouts, clearing caves and houses in remote villages. But service overseas wasn't what Dean had expected. He told his Uncle Rob that sometimes the Army wouldn't provide shelter for his team, and they'd have to force villagers to let them sleep in their homes. He also said he routinely got in trouble with his commanders because instead of sending the younger guys into dangerous situations, he'd choose to just go in himself. "It was typical of Jamie to want to take responsibility," says Rob Purdy, a veteran of the Gulf War.

When Dean returned, he moved into the family farmhouse with his dad. He was distant, says Purdy, and he didn't want to do the things they'd always loved, like hunt and fish. Meeting and marrying Muriel seemed to be a godsend. Dean could be compassionate and loving and was learning to be a good stepfather, Muriel says. Her daughter, Tanya, had quickly grown fond of him.

There were problems, however. Most nights, Muriel says, Jamie would come home from his job servicing electrical units for a local air-conditioning repair shop and drink the equivalent of a six-pack of beer. "I'd ask him, 'Why do you need to drink all the time?'" Muriel says. "And he'd say, 'To forget.' I'd ask him, 'Forget what?' But he wouldn't talk about what he did over there. All he said was: 'It takes the pain away.'"

Dean's drinking wasn't the only thing that worried Muriel. He didn't sleep much, and when he did, he had vivid nightmares, and sometimes she'd wake up soaked in his sweat. He had wild mood swings; some days he'd sing "Twinkle, twinkle little star" to her over the telephone at work, and some days he'd tell her that if she ever cheated, he'd kill her. She was never sure what would set him off.

Jamie didn't say much about the war to Muriel or to his mother -- just that they didn't understand, or that they didn't want to know. Jamie did admit he had seen his friends die violently. He also told vague stories about kids with bombs strapped to them who would approach the soldiers. Muriel and Elaine don't know for sure if Jamie ever shot children, but they suspect he may have. "When Jamie did something wrong as a kid," Elaine says, "his conscience would eat him up." And whatever he'd done or seen in Afghanistan seemed to be eating him alive.

Next page: Contacting the V.A. about his PTSD seemed to calm Dean