Distant War May Have Claimed Md. Soldier

The sheriff's office and state police are both conducting investigations of what happened that night, as is standard procedure when an officer kills someone. Muriel Dean said she is speaking to a lawyer about the possibility of filing a formal complaint.

"It's just all protocol to them," she said. "This isn't protocol to us; it's a person."

The one thing Dean's family and the police agree upon is that his death is a tragic illustration of the effect that the war has had on some of the people who fight it.

As a young man, Dean fished, hunted and played baseball and football. He was always quiet and polite, rarely upset and never in trouble. He had volunteered for the Army in 2001, had been honorably discharged from active duty after his service in Afghanistan and was serving the final five years of his commitment as part of the reserve.

Tommy Bowes, who owns TN Bowes Heating and Air Conditioning, where Dean worked as an installer and service mechanic, said: "Every job we put him on we got rave reviews. Nobody can say a bad thing about him."

Yet Dean's time in Afghanistan changed him profoundly, his family and friends say -- dimming his love for life in general, leaving him dependent on antidepressant medication, therapy and alcohol. His condition worsened after he stopped seeing his psychologist, his wife said, but her calls to the VA Medical Center begging doctors to contact her husband went unreturned. She asked for him to be put on disability leave because of his post-traumatic stress disorder, but that only led to more papers to be filled out.

Then Dean received his deployment letter, and his depression began to spiral out of control. He was drinking all the time and flying into rages, Muriel Dean said. He told her he felt that he was going crazy but refused to return to the VA center. His love for her, however, remained constant. He still called her his "tater tot," she said, and still sang "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" to her over the phone.

And then, just 17 months after she introduced herself to that handsome man in a bar in St. Mary's County, he was gone forever.

"Our lives had just begun," she said. "He just couldn't go back to that war."