“Who knows what was going on in Cpl. Mobley’s personal life?”
The question hung in the air.
“Who knows if he had a girlfriend, fiancée? Who knows if they were having relationship issues? Who knows if his parents were having relationship issues?”
First Sgt. Christopher Rushton fired off the list of “who knows” questions as members of the Aircraft Rescue and Fire Fighting unit at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia sat in stony silence.
“Who knows if his sister was having relationship issues? Who knows if his favorite dog died? Who knows if his favorite teacher just got in a car wreck and died?”
“Who the fuck knows that?” demanded Rushton, a drill instructor for more than a decade. “Do any of y’all? So how are you going to sit here and try to tell me, or tell the CO, that this environment caused [the death of] Cpl. Mobley?”
Active-duty service members and veterans thinking of harming themselves can get free crisis care. Contact the Military Crisis Line at 988, then press 1, or access online chat by texting 838255. People who are not in the military can also call 988.
On April 7, 2025, one of their own—Cpl. Drew Mobley—had taken his own life.
During an internal investigation after Mobley’s death, a number of his fellow Marines complained about the command climate, accusing leadership of ignoring Mobley’s declining mental health and tormenting him after an injury sidelined him from regular duty.
Now, three days after Mobley’s memorial service, the rest of his unit—known as ARFF— was getting grilled. Rushton and Col. Scott Warman had gathered the Marines, collected their phones, and were taking turns berating them. The closed-door meeting lasted more than two hours.
Secret audio recordings, later shared with The War Horse, reveal what happened inside.
A War Horse investigation into the events surrounding Cpl. Mobley’s death points to systemic failures before and after his suicide and an alarming disregard for protocols spelled out in 98 pages of Marine Corps Suicide Prevention System Procedures. After inquiries from The War Horse, the Corps said it is investigating.
In the secret recording, Rushton is heard reading aloud and mocking individual Marines’ written concerns with command leaders: “Oh, master sergeant yelled at me. I’m sad. Boo-the-fuck-hoo. You really think ISIS cares?”
At one point later, he tells them: “Call CNN. Call Fox News. See how that works out for you.”
And he insisted Mobley’s fellow Marines had no idea why he took his own life.
“He made a very personal decision,” Rushton sternly told the Marines, “to turn a temporary problem into a permanent solution. Very deliberate in what he did.”
“You can’t sit here and tell me that ARFF was the reason that he did what he did,” Rushton told them. “Do any of you have a suicide note from him?”
Again, silence.
“No, you don’t,” Rushton finally said. “You don’t know what was going through his head.”
‘Not Going the Way We Thought’
For years, the military has been struggling to come to grips with an alarming number of suicides among service members. Suicide rates have climbed in the military since 2011, but, in a glimmer of hope, declined in 2024, according to the most recent Defense Department report. Still, there were 471 suicides—more than one a day—in the U.S. military in 2024. And the Marine Corps has among the military’s highest rates. Studies and the Marines’ prevention protocols warn that exposure to suicide can lead to a higher risk for similar behavior.
In a social media post in February, Sgt. Maj. Carlos A. Ruiz, the Corps’ highest-ranking enlisted member, encouraged Marines to speak up if they are struggling with their mental health.
“This tribe demands that when you need help, you ask for help,” he said. “We bend together, and we don’t break together.”
Despite its ‘suck-it-up’ image, veterans interviewed for this story say the Corps has made strides in looking out for troubled Marines in recent years. But what happened at Quantico last April provides a rare and unvarnished look into a culture that critics say can persist on the inside when unit-level commanders think nobody else is listening.
Over four months, The War Horse spoke to six Marines who worked in ARFF with Mobley. In interviews, they described working long hours for an understaffed unit, missing time with their families, and toxic leaders who dismissed their mental health concerns. The Marines who spoke with The War Horse also noted that Mobley’s death was the third suicide in the Marine Corps Air Facility, which includes ARFF, in less than two years.
The Marines who spoke out had hoped their feedback would hold ARFF’s leadership accountable for their perceived role in Mobley’s death, which Michael Snell, a former ARFF unit member, calls “horribly preventable.”
“The maltreatment had been going on forever and was getting ignored, and by literally everyone in the command,” Snell said in an interview with The War Horse. “And we basically all got told that we’re committing acts of mutiny.”
“We kind of all knew the moment they said, ‘Everybody put your phones outside’—we were like, ‘Oh, this is not going the way we thought it was going to go,’” said Malakai Standifer, another former ARFF Marine.
The War Horse reached out multiple times over a two-month period to four members of ARFF leadership—Warman, Rushton, Master Sgt. Jerry Chapman III, and Gunnery Sgt. Brian Tabares. Rushton and Warman directed inquiries to the Quantico communication office. The others did not respond.
After The War Horse submitted more than a dozen questions, detailing the allegations and sharing a number of Rushton’s and Warman’s comments from the closed-door meeting, Capt. Michael Kennedy, a Marine spokesman responded: “This incident is currently under investigation and no details regarding the investigation can be provided at this time.”
Rob Bracknell, a retired Marine officer and judge advocate, reviewed the recordings of the meeting at the request of The War Horse. He was not involved in the investigation.
“Berating Marines weeks after the third suicide in two years—that just sounds like the worst possible way to handle this,” Bracknell said. “Your first instinct should be, pull those guys into your arms and go, ‘Hey, let’s take care of you.’”
‘Be a Marine and Protect Earth’
When Drew Mobley ended his life at 22, he was working at what was supposed to be his dream job.
He’d known it since he was just a third grader. At Wallace Elementary in North Carolina, an hour’s drive west of Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, he wrote an essay on what he wanted to be when he grew up.
“I am going to be a Marine and protect [E]arth,” he wrote. “No one is stopping me until I die or end the war.”
His essay won a contest for the Duplin County School District.
More than a decade later, Mobley was at Quantico on a Sunday afternoon. He updated his life insurance policy in the ARFF rec room. He played basketball for a bit with a few of his fellow Marines. He went to a sporting goods store, where he purchased a gun, and another store to purchase hollow-point bullets. Then, he drove his Hyundai Sonata to the parking lot of the C.F. Phelps Wildlife Management Area. Around 6:30 p.m., he messaged some of his friends on Discord, a social app he liked to use, telling them he’d be offline for a while. His internet search history shows he was on his phone until after midnight.
Then, sometime in the early morning hours, he shot himself.
A few Marines who were sent to check on him discovered his body after friends tracked his location on Snapchat.
His mother later pieced together the last hours of Drew’s life from his phone log, receipts, and accounts from other Marines. In the months leading up to his death, Mobley was struggling, fellow Marines say, but they didn’t know how bad it was. He started isolating himself. His hair appeared unwashed. He arrived late to his shifts. He stopped wearing cologne.
“The boy loved cologne,” said his mother, April Mobley. “And always wore it.”
They checked in regularly on the phone, but he never told her how much he was suffering.
“My son was not a complainer,” she said. “He didn’t share his feelings.”
She remembers him telling her, after two other Marines’ suicides, that he didn’t understand why they would take their own lives. On their last phone call, he told her he was worried about his friend Cole McEachern, another ARFF Marine who was struggling.
Drew Mobley felt like he’d lost his purpose on base, Standifer said. At first, he’d enjoyed his job, April Mobley said. He made friends and had earned a nickname, Horse, because he’d “kinda just roam and graze and do [his] own thing,” said Snell. It was random, but stuck. When Mobley left work, the other Marines would joke that they were “letting Horse out of the stable.” Later, Snell got a tattoo of a horse and the date of Mobley’s death on his shoulder.
In Sept. 2023, a year and a half out of boot camp, Mobley broke his leg and tore his ACL while playing football during physical training. In Feb. 2024, he had surgery to repair his ACL, but his leg didn’t heal as expected. He was eventually placed on limited duty.
It kept him from the airfield, where Marines trained for and responded to aircraft emergencies. Quantico is also home to Marine One, the president’s helicopter.
He was assigned to dispatch duty, and around Christmastime 2024 he was sent up to the “tower.” The shifts were punishing—12 hours, sometimes longer—and indeed, Mobley felt punished, he told his mom. Typically, dispatch shifts rotated among unit members, maybe up to six shifts a month, Standifer said. Mobley had been left on them full-time for three months.
Standifer said he witnessed Chapman, the master sergeant who was named 2024’s USMC Executive Fire Officer of the Year, berating and belittling Mobley on a regular basis.
He’d get flak for attending medical appointments that took him away from work, Snell said. Toward the end, the abuse got worse, he said.
“Basically, he was in Master Sgt. Chapman’s office, like, every day, just getting torn down, berated, basically getting told that he was garbage because he couldn’t work normally, like everybody else could,” Snell said.
McEachern, another former ARFF member, was also on dispatch duty because of an injury, alternating 12-hour shifts with Mobley. “They treated our injuries like we chose to get them and treated dispatch as a punishment,” he said.
“You’re a guy all alone, separated from your friends and family,” Standifer said. “Then you get injured. You can no longer do the job you’re passionate about. The people above you are now reminding you every single day that … you’re a piece of shit, and you know they don’t want you there.”
“Why didn’t they just kick him out?” April Mobley asked. “Why keep doing that to him every day?”
‘Felt I Had Let Him Down’
Months before Mobley’s death, ARFF unit members filled out what’s known as a Defense Organizational Climate Survey. Congress mandated the annual surveys across the military to service members to provide what is supposed to be confidential feedback about their command. The War Horse submitted a Freedom of Information Act request on March 31 for ARFF’s surveys but is still waiting for a response.
In the survey, Mobley explained that he felt he was being treated unfairly and said his shifts were isolating, according to a friend and fellow Marine who read over his submission. Mobley wanted “to ensure it would be taken seriously by the command,” the friend told The War Horse. He asked not to be identified because he is still serving in the Marines and feared retribution for speaking to a reporter.
Marines who spoke to The War Horse said many of their concerns about leadership were glossed over.
“We all felt completely unheard,” said the Marine who advised Mobley. When nothing changed, Mobley, in particular, took it hard. “I felt I had let him down by saying that the command would take everything seriously.”
Within a few months, Mobley was dead.
His death rattled his family.
April Mobley wasn’t one to coddle her kids, she said. “I am the toughest mama that you can find.” But Drew was such a good boy, she said. An easy, likable kid. Always the first person to ask how you were doing, always the last person to complain about his own problems. The chaplain at Quantico told her that Drew would often stop by and ask how he was doing. Nobody else ever did that, the chaplain said. (The chaplain didn’t respond to a LinkedIn message from The War Horse.)
“To see how they just pulled the life out of him, the happiness,” she said, her voice quaking.
At Drew’s memorial, Gunnery Sgt. Brian Tabares approached his mother and told her they knew Drew was struggling, she said.
“They knew,” April Mobley said. But she was too grief-stricken to ask Tabares: Why didn’t anyone do anything to help him?
“I just, I can’t understand that,” she said.
‘Maybe Your Feelings Need to Be Hurt’
Unprofessional. Lacking values. A disgrace to the uniform.
These are among the insults Rushton and Warman hurled at ARFF just weeks after Mobley’s death. When the doors shut, and the meeting started, Warman, a first-generation Marine with two combat deployments, made it clear not everyone was on notice.
Some of you will do “great things,” he told the group. “There’s a great deal of you who have such amazing future potential, not just in the Marine Corps, but in life.”
His focus quickly shifted.
“Some of you are selfish. You’re entitled. And you’re the most disloyal people I’ve ever met.”
After Mobley’s death, several Marines had specifically called out Chapman, the master sergeant.
Chapman had a “tendency to pick certain individuals he deemed not to his liking,” Standifer wrote in a statement he provided to investigators and later shared with The War Horse. “No matter the skills or actual work the individual does, they will always be bottom-tier low-lives to MSgt [Master Sergeant].” Drew was one of these, Standifer wrote.
“Cpl. Mobley was verbally and publicly ridiculed for his inability to work shift due to a major leg injury,” Standifer wrote. This “caused him to get put in dispatch over and over, locked in a hole with only the occasional visits from shift members to keep him sane until he was pushed too far and ended his life.”
Another Marine was “constantly accused of using his mental health appointments to get out of work,” Standifer wrote.
These statements were supposed to be kept confidential, Marines said—they were told they’d only be shared with Warman and other officers involved in the investigation. But now, here they were. Less than three weeks after Mobley’s suicide, Warman and Rushton were sitting in front of the entire unit, reading snippets from those same statements.
Marines had complained about limited time with family. Some hadn’t seen their families in weeks, they said. In response, Rushton reprimanded them for not being team players.
“You don’t want to switch shifts, because, ‘Oh, my wife’s schedule won’t allow it,’” he said. “Nobody gives a fuck about your wife’s schedule. Sorry if it hurts your feelings—maybe your feelings need to be hurt.”
Some Marines complained that leaders discouraged them from attending medical appointments—including mental health appointments—during work hours. Rushton insisted these appointments needed to happen on personal time.
As for those who didn’t agree with him, Rushton said: “They’re being fucking lazy. … That’s you being fucking selfish.”
“How many of you’ve ever deployed to a combat zone?” asked Rushton, who shared he had been three times. “Do you really think ISIS gives a fuck about your feelings?”
Rushton scolded the unit for blaming Mobley’s death on leadership. “Stop blaming the chain of command over your own personal problems.”
One after another, he read aloud and rejected the criticism.
“The work climate at ARFF, and I quote, ‘Will not improve if Master Sgt. Chapman remains in charge. I respectfully and tactfully request a review of Master Sgt. Chapman’s leadership and its effect on the unit.’”
Rushton was having none of it: “Know what that sounds like to me? There’s a naval term that that falls under. … What term am I referring to? Mutiny. It’s a fucking mutiny.”
‘Every Marine Feels Supported’
Capt. Michael P. Kennedy struck a different tone in the Marines’ official response to The War Horse about the unit’s claims and the closed-door meeting.
“The loss of even one Marine to suicide is one too many,” he wrote in an email. “Our prevention and postvention efforts are applied with equal commitment and seriousness across Marine Corps Base Quantico. At Marine Corps Base Quantico, we are dedicated to fostering a community where every Marine feels supported and knows that help is always available.”
But an examination of the Marines’ official suicide prevention procedures calls into question the response before and after Mobley’s death.
The latest version of the document from the Commandant of the Marine Corps—coincidentally issued four days before Rushton and Warman’s meeting with ARFF—lays out procedures, from suicide prevention training requirements to dispelling the stigma of mental health care.
“Command climate is a critical aspect of suicide prevention in the Marine Corps,” it reads.
Leaders should be “involved with every aspect of Marines’ lives in the unit” and they should “facilitate the discussion of life stressors between Marines and leadership without judgment or stigma.” It lays out potential warning signs that might urge a commander to order a mental health evaluation for a subordinate Marine, including “significant changes in performance” and “behavior changes that appear to be unmanageable by the Marine.”
It also offers guidance for how to respond in the aftermath of a suicide. Those left behind might experience guilt, anger, shame, and betrayal after a suicide, it says. It’s common for those left behind to “seek answers and assign blame,” the document says. Leaders can help by “fostering hope” and avoiding framing that causes shame or guilt. Trust in leadership is key, the document instructs. “Ask other Marines how they are and actively listen.”
Leaders should “foster a positive, safe command climate that promotes healthy stress responses.”
After a suicide, other Marines can be “at high risk.” These efforts help survivors cope with grief and prevent future suicides.
Bracknell, the former Marine judge advocate who is now an adjunct professor at William & Mary Law School, said Rushton and Warman’s response to ARFF does not align with these guidelines.
“First Sgt. Rushton’s comments seeking to shift blame off the unit and pointing fingers at their ‘unprofessionalism’ in the wake of a suicide—that’s not the ‘positive, safe command climate’ the Commandant expected when he approved that guidance,” Bracknell said. “Instinctively, their reactions are the opposite of what any professional, caring, thoughtful, engaged leader would do in that instance.”
Retired Marine Col. Don Wogaman, who was not involved in the investigation, appeared visibly troubled after he reviewed—at The War Horse’s request—how command leaders rebuked the Marines for raising concerns after Mobley’s suicide.
The subject is painful for him. Wogaman remembers how a fellow Marine who served in the Gulf War took his own life while Wogaman was responding to his Facebook post. It “tears me up,” he said. He called Rushton and Warman’s response to the ARFF Marines “horrible leadership.”
In the Marines, Bracknell said, leaders often “fail to discern the difference between tough and cruel.” The skills hardened military commanders rely on to lead a unit are not the same ones needed to help them cope after a fellow service member’s suicide, he said.
But at times during the closed-door meeting, Warman softened his tone, sharing lessons on leadership, and living and dying as a team.
At one point, he became contemplative over the suicides: “If anybody’s responsible, it’s me,” he told the Marines. “And I accept responsibility for that, because I’m the commander, and it’s happened under my watch. I own that, and those are the things I have to live with the rest of my life—that I had three, three Marines take their lives under my watch.
“Never once in my 23-year career have I ever seen that. Ever.”
The Third Suicide
Mobley’s death was the third suicide in the Marine Corps Air Facility, or MCAF, in under two years. A senior enlisted Marine in the MCAF command died by suicide in August 2023, and an ARFF Marine took his own life about three months later. While The War Horse was reporting this story, another former ARFF member took his own life in Feb. 2026.
The War Horse was unable to contact family connected to the most recent suicide, but did reach the spouses of the first two Marines who died. In a Facebook message, one of the women said her husband “never had any issues with higher-ups or colleagues” and that command leaders were there for her after his death, “especially MSGT Chapman,” the master sergeant whom Mobley’s unit members criticized.
The other said in a phone interview that her husband had a largely positive experience in MCAF at Quantico. He suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, which stemmed from personal childhood trauma as well as his experiences in Fallujah. MCAF was one of the most supportive units he was in, his wife said.
He took his own life a little over a week after receiving an official PTSD diagnosis, she said.
“He knew that [seeking mental health treatment] would be career-changing,” she said. He reached out to a counselor during his time at MCAF, but the counselor told him she would have to notify his command if he came to her for help, which scared him off.
Military culture dissuades people from seeking help, she said. “It’s kind of like—you should get help, and then just know that your career might be over.”
The Suicide That Didn’t Happen
In the weeks around Mobley’s death, there was almost another suicide.
The story of Sgt. Cole McEachern’s is similar to Mobley’s in many ways. During an aircraft emergency, he sustained a labral tear in his shoulder. Like Mobley, he was put on limited duty and 12-hour dispatch shifts. He and Mobley would alternate shifts, and sometimes spend extra time in the tower to keep each other company.
Unlike Mobley, McEachern wasn’t new to the military and had seen some violent things. On 12-hour dispatch shifts, he had “nothing but time” to think about these memories, he said. When he sought treatment for his nightmares and post-traumatic stress at the Quantico mental health clinic, he was told he had insomnia, and they couldn’t do anything for him, McEachern said.
That’s when he began self-medicating with cocaine.
The drugs fought off the nightmares. He’d stay awake for so long, that when he crashed, his sleep was dreamless.
Some days, McEachern would be driving to the ARFF station from the barracks, and he’d turn around, filled with dread at the thought of another day-long shift spent in solitude. Then, he said he’d think of Mobley—I can’t leave him there alone, he remembers thinking. He’d turn around again and make it to work, where he’d sit in his car, trying to psych himself up to go inside.
Around shift changes, when both he and Mobley were present, he remembers that Chapman would regularly show up to chew them out. They were the “trouble kids” because they were injured, McEachern said.
He talked to his dad Ryan McEachern on the phone nearly every day, and his father said he had noticed a shift in Cole’s demeanor. Cole was always frustrated, his father said, and he’d become more negative, more withdrawn.
“When he would call, he just kind of had this depressed vibe about him,” Ryan McEachern said. He remembers one call where Cole said a member of leadership had told him he was “a piece of shit” and that “they didn’t really want [him] around anybody else” because he was a bad influence. Cole took a lot of pride in his work, Ryan McEachern said, so that hurt.
“There’s just a meanness in people that do that, even in the Marine Corps,” said the father, a Marine Corps veteran himself.
Around Jan. 2025, Cole’s calls home became sparser, and Ryan McEachern could see on the “Find My Friends” app that Cole was keeping erratic hours, sometimes out as late as 4 a.m.
Then on April 1, 2025, Ryan McEachern received a call he’ll never forget.
“I fucked up, I’m a piece of shit, everyone’s going to f-ing hate me,” McEachern remembers his son saying. Cole confessed he’d done drugs the night before. “He spiraled into this, just, whole conversation about how horrible he was.”
“I’m panicking,” Ryan McEachern said. “I was like, ‘Dude, where are you right this second?’”
Cole told him he was on base in his truck.
“I need you to drive to the mental health clinic,” Ryan McEachern told his son.
Cole resisted—the mental health clinic on base hadn’t been helpful in the past, so why would he go back there?
“I said, ‘Do not hang up your phone,’” Ryan McEachern said, his voice shaking as he retold the story. He stayed on the phone as Cole walked into the clinic and approached the front desk. From the phone, Ryan shouted a message to the receptionist. “Before he can say a word, I’m like, ‘Don’t let this guy leave!’”
As the clinic staff started to handle the situation, the gravity of what had almost happened hit hard. “I was like, holy shit,” Ryan McEachern said. “I think my kid was about to kill himself.”
On April 11, Cole McEachern was eventually admitted into a month-long inpatient mental health program, just days after his friend Drew Mobley died. Cole missed the memorial service.
Ryan McEachern said he wished Drew would have made a similar phone call.
“I think about that constantly. That phone call sucked, but I was sure lucky to get it.”
‘Feel Like I Owe Them’
Drew has been gone a year, but for his mother April, the pain is still fresh. Her voice is still raw with anger and sadness. Sometimes, she trails off mid sentence, choked by tears.
Drew, who as a third grader wanted everyone to “pray to God for the Marines that protected us and were willing to die,” is still with her. Once, after she visited Drew’s grave, she got in the car. The clock had changed to military time. “Never done that before,” she said.
April stays in touch with other Marines. She feels responsible for them, she said. She calls them on holidays, invites them to her home for dinners, sends their kids Christmas and birthday presents.
“Every boy that calls me, I feel like I owe it to them,” she said.
“I prayed to God. Like, what am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to have a purpose in all of this?” she implores. “What is my path?
“I truly feel like at this point, it’s to make all of these boys feel heard. To make them feel like what they went through was wrong and [for] somebody to acknowledge that.”
On the first anniversary of Drew’s death, April took a trip to the Grand Canyon with her family. On the way there, they stopped at a convenience store. April wanted to buy a Coke, Drew’s favorite drink. She didn’t know why, she just felt like she needed to. At the rim of the canyon, as they took in the view, she placed the glass bottle down on a post.
On the post, she spotted a sticker, left behind by another traveler. Its message astonished her: “Drew’s Crew.”
Click here to listen to a recording of the entire meeting at Marine Corps Base Quantico.
This War Horse investigation was edited by Mike Frankel, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Video and audio editing by LiPo Ching.
