Death of Spc. Ryan Longnecker still unsolved

Guardsman’s death still a mystery

By Holbrook Mohr - The Associated Press
Posted : Monday Sep 29, 2008 13:49:30 EDT

JACKSON, Miss. — Military investigators are still tying to determine what happened to a Kentucky National Guardsman nearly four months after his skeletal remains were found on a Mississippi base and urged anyone with information to contact them, authorities said Monday.

Spc. Ryan Longnecker, 19, was training at Camp Shelby in south Mississippi when he disappeared Aug. 6, 2007, just two days before his unit left for Iraq. Soon after he vanished, the military announced that Longnecker had run off with two guns and turned the case over to the U.S. Marshals Service.

His remains, however, were found by another soldier June 3 in the woods on the sprawling 136,000-acre training base between two roads and a few hundred yards from a building, authorities have said. Longnecker’s two military issue weapons, an assault rifle and pistol, were found nearby.

“It is an undetermined death investigation at this point,” Chris Grey, an Army spokesman, said.

The soldier’s father, Bryan Longnecker, a retired Marine from Milton, Ind., said there’s been much speculation about what happened, but nothing concrete has surfaced.

“It don’t make no sense,” Bryan Longnecker said. “I don’t want to call it a possible drug overdose, but that’s the only thing that’s made sense to me so far.”
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