Cruel Death

by M. William Phelps

  By the end of the year 1998, BJ had completed medic training in North Carolina, another twenty-five-week, intense training course (Corpsman Training Delta 18), where he learned everything from working on injured soldiers in the field, to conducting autopsies on cadavers. Next to God, most field soldiers will say, the corpsman is the soldier’s best friend.

  During this part of his training, BJ conducted between “six and twelve” dissections, he later explained, of cadavers. At first, that initial cut, BJ said, “was awkward.” The first time he had worked on an expired human body was not the most pleasant thing he had ever done. “But you got used to it.” It was the nature of every part of the SEAL training: All of it seemed impossible if you sat down and went through it on paper, or in your head, thinking about what you had to do; but you made it through because you didn’t think about what you were doing. Instead, you just did it.

  The field training—making wounds look real—was something the military went to great lengths to stage for its SEAL candidates. They had what were called “Hollywood kits.” With fake blood and special effects, the military made the scenes look as gruesome as possible.

  After a while, a SEAL became immune to the effects of the injuries and brutality of what he was involved in. Regarding battlefield triage injuries, “I was told to treat [injured soldiers] like machines . . . and I would be the mechanic and try to fix the problem,” BJ explained in court. A soldier would never look at it as his best friend lying there injured, fighting for his life. A corpsman took emotion out of it. He did the job and moved on to the next situation.

  And that was that.

  After a while, a soldier with his guts hanging out of the side of his body was not what a medic saw; he took himself out of the situation and understood that it was something he needed to fix, like a broken robot.

  Beyond the graphic Hollywood effects and cadavers BJ worked on during training, live beings were brought in, too. This was where things got really weird during training, BJ later said.

  “I worked on mainly goats, but also pigs.”

  As the training drew to completion, corpsmen were asked to take part in, as a final exam, a final training exercise (FTX). In BJ’s case, it was a “realistic [helicopter] crash scene with multiple casualties.” In this exercise, the trainers brought in several live goats and, as BJ explained it, “some were injured intentionally more than others.” Some were dead. Others were maimed and hurt beyond repair.

  It was BJ’s unit’s job to help save as many animals as they could.

  “But in the end,” BJ said, “they all died.”

  Another part of BJ’s training included serving on an EMT ambulance squad in New York City and a stint in an emergency room at a Manhattan hospital for one month, where he witnessed people die and people maimed and people in all sorts of real life-threatening situations.

  During BJ’s first three years in the military, he put up stellar performance numbers and records. Bar none. He had a reputation that few ever achieve, earning a good-conduct medal and expert marksmanship status with a rifle and .45-caliber pistol. According to his military record, his career was running swimmingly, but then things started to change for him when, he later said, “I met Erika.”

  Indeed, if you believe BJ’s version, once he hooked up with Erika, his military life quickly spiraled out of control, like a plane that had lost its wings. It had become unmanageable very rapidly, without him even realizing it.

  “BJ was not a violent person,” said one former friend who knew BJ before he met Erika. “I felt completely safe around him all the time—except for maybe when we got into a car and he was driving.” This woman, whose husband was a SEAL buddy of BJ’s, had spent four months alone with BJ in her home. He lived there. “BJ was just quiet and very shy with girls,” she said. “He would not even approach a girl in a bar. He’d ask me to approach the woman for him.”

  But then, Erika came around—and everything changed. Erika was so obsessed with BJ, said this same former friend, “that she asked me not to look at him, and definitely not talk to him.” BJ was ten minutes late coming home one day after taking off with a SEAL buddy to go look at guns. He was right down the street from the home. Erika came in and “freaked out. She let out this bloodcurdling scream and threw her frozen pizzas all over the kitchen floor.

  “‘Where is he? Where is he?’”

  Calm down. He was right around the corner.

  Erika called his cell phone. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m just down the street. You know where I am and what I’m doing. Relax.”

  She wouldn’t calm down.

  Come home, come home, come home. Right now.

  She called BJ at least fifteen times, her friend said, until he finally shut off his cell phone.

  BJ was soon faced with a choice: Erika or the SEALs?

  BJ’s parents had never met Erika, nor had they even heard of her when BJ called shortly after the wedding to announce that he was now married.

  “August 21, [1999],” BJ told his mother over the phone. He sounded happy. “We met three weeks ago.” Recalling the incident later, Elizabeth Sifrit had tears in her eyes, her voice scratchy and weak from the pain of having to recall how her son’s life took such a nosedive into chaos.

  BJ’s problems in the SEALs started as early as 2000, merely months after he ran off with Erika to Las Vegas to get hitched. Mrs. Sifrit got a call one day. She was informed that her son had gotten into some sort of trouble, and by July 2000, she later said, “I knew he was going to select out of the SEALs.”

  One of the incidents involving Erika that added to BJ’s list of growing problems with the navy took place in Alaska. BJ was in the Northwest as part of his Mountain and Arctic Warfare training, a rigorous test of endurance, patience, strength, and emotional stability. Only the tough survived the SEAL Alaska maneuvers—and BJ was certainly expected to complete his training without any problem, given his extraordinary performance rating up to this point, and likely to exceed expectation.

  BJ was not allowed to tell Erika where he was going, whenever he went on training maneuvers. None of the SEALs were. It was policy. Part of the navy’s disciplinary tactic of getting these soldiers ready for what could be the most covert operations in the world.

  In some strange sort of code, which BJ and Erika had worked out before he left, BJ was able to get Erika the exact location of where he was stationed.

  So Erika, lovestruck and going crazy back home without her husband around, flew out to Alaska the next day.

  BJ snuck her into his room.

  Part of BJ’s training involved his corpsman work. He was trained in field medicines. He often had various amounts of narcotics, and even morphine, hanging around his room, for which he was responsible. Well, lo and behold, BJ got caught with Erika in his room—where his medicine bag was just sitting there, easily accessible.

  A big no-no.

  Later, a rumor would circulate that Erika and BJ had actually broke out the morphine and used it while she was out there; but if this happened, it was not included in the extensive report the military made of this breach of conduct. In that report, BJ was reprimanded and given a second chance. He was told to “thoroughly familiarize yourself with the Navy’s rules and regulations concerning the storage and distribution of medicines both in the team area and while on training evolutions. . . .” Beyond that, BJ was told to report to his superiors for a good old-fashioned tongue-lashing. BJ was ordered to “keep the SEAL Team TWO Command Master Chief advised of [his] progress until directed otherwise.”

  BJ spent some time building up his reputation and standing again. But then soon after, things really went downhill when he was stationed at Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina, with Erika. By this point, Erika was putting a tremendous amount of pressure on BJ to spend more time at home. She had no concept of what a military wife was supposed to do, or how to act—better yet, a navy SEAL wife. Meeting BJ, Erika knew what she was getting into, yet she couldn’t hand
le the time apart. It was turning her inside out to see BJ go away.

  So, with Erika going crazy and causing BJ all sorts of trouble, according to BJ, he and Erika devised a plan to get him tossed out of the military so he could open a business with Erika and work side by side with her all day long—essentially giving her what she wanted.

  On August 30, 2000, BJ walked off the base, leaving his “prescribed . . . appointed place of duty,” a report of the incident noted. When he was confronted with the offense during formation by his staff sergeant and the hospitalman first class on duty, BJ shouted, “Fuck you!” to both of them.

  The entire unit looked on in disbelief.

  That sort of disrespectful, foul language didn’t go over well with his superiors. Later that same day, when confronted with the offense by his gunnery sergeant, BJ took things a bit further by calling the sergeant out. When the officer failed to respond to BJ’s insults, BJ said, “I see that you’re all talk and no show.” Then he walked forward into the guy, “pushing his body against [the] Gunnery Sergeant. . . .”

  From there, BJ walked to the barracks, packed his things, and waited for Erika to pick him up outside.

  Leaving the base without express permission from a superior was a direct violation of the law. BJ had not been authorized to leave.

  He was in big trouble.

  Exactly what he and Erika wanted.

  When he returned the following morning near eight o’clock, BJ was walking through camp talking on his cell phone, which was, again, a direct violation of camp policy and code.

  “Put that away, Petty Officer Sifrit,” his superior said.

  BJ stopped. “No.” Then kept walking.

  “Put that away, Petty Officer Sifrit.”

  “Fuck you!” BJ scolded, and walked off.

  “What did you just say?” one of the officers nearby asked.

  BJ quieted down some and smiled. “I said, ‘Fuck you.’ Did you hear me this time?”

  During his court-martial, BJ was asked why he had used such language, upon which he answered, “I didn’t have a reason—I just disrespected them, sir. I have no reason, sir.”

  “You have no justification for it?” asked the military judge.

  “No, sir.”

  BJ and Erika had talked about how he could get kicked out of the navy on a “bad-conduct charge” because, according to BJ, she didn’t want him to wait for an honorable discharge, which could take months, maybe even up to a year. This way, if he got himself kicked out quickly, he could do a little time in the brig and be done with it all.

  The problems had initially started a few days earlier, on August 18, 2000, when BJ had taken off from the camp at a high rate of speed in his Chevelle on his way to get a haircut. Taking off, BJ floored the gas pedal and barreled out of the gate, which was manned by marines. Without stopping, at a speed of, he later said, “fifty miles per hour,” BJ laughed as he drove through the gate. The marines stood guard at the gate, stopping each vehicle exiting or entering the camp, but when they spotted BJ hauling ass, they, of course, had to jump out of the way to avoid being hit and possibly even killed.

  After his haircut, BJ went back to the base and did the same thing on the way back in.

  At one point, BJ had been thrown in the brig, and his mother, Elizabeth, flew into town to hire a lawyer to get him out. Erika was “hysterical,” going ballistic at the notion that her husband was in jail. At the apartment one night after a military hearing on BJ’s account, Erika and Elizabeth got into an argument over what was going on and how BJ was going to get out of the brig.

  Elizabeth was BJ’s mother. She didn’t need some woman he had just met and married telling her what to do, and how to handle the situation. More than that, BJ had made it clear later that it was Erika who had gotten him into so much trouble in the navy, with her constant need to meddle in whatever operation or maneuver he was involved in. Erika pulled her gun on Elizabeth, who had locked herself in the bedroom and called 911.

  In the end, BJ got what he wanted. As a hospital corpsman second class, BJ was demoted several pay grades, forced to forfeit his $600-per-month salary, confined for a period of ninety days in the brig, and, exactly what he and Erika had wanted to begin with, booted “from the United States Navy with a bad-conduct discharge.”

  22

  The Civilians

  There is no doubt that Erika was the dominant partner in the Sifrit marriage. She had caused BJ great problems within the navy, and because of her unstable behavior, BJ had opted out of the navy. According to BJ, he could have obtained what is called a “separation in lieu of trial” (an administrative discharge), but Erika insisted that they take the case to trial and plead guilty with “assigned military counsel,” instead of a much-respected, thirty-year, seasoned trial attorney Erika had hired early on in his case, whom Elizabeth was now paying for—that is, until the hired lawyer was fired.

  On top of that, in order for Erika to “get her husband back,” as one source later put it, “as quick as possible,” BJ pleaded out to that “bad conduct” charge and was discharged dishonorably. But he could have—if he had fought it—stayed in the navy and continued on with his career. As he saw it, however, why bother? Why go back into the navy and be right back in the same position a month, or a year, down the road, with a wife who went crazy every time he walked out the door?

  According to Erika, the second year of the marriage was when everything went wrong and her fairy tale turned into a nightmare. After the baby episode and BJ’s court-martial and time in the brig, having him around her all the time turned out not to be what Erika might have expected. The scrapbooking business, which Erika’s father had financed, was eating up most of Erika’s time. She was now working seven days a week—all day long and well into the evening. Business wasn’t great, but she was keeping the lights on. One of the only setbacks was BJ, who would actually scare customers away, Erika and Mitch later insisted. He’d be sleeping in the store on the floor, or on a chair, and customers would walk in and then turn around and walk right back out.

  It was right around this time, Erika said later, that she found out BJ had cheated on her a second time. Because of his repeated infidelity, Erika went into a severe depression and realized that she had built her life on the foundation of a guy she didn’t even seem to know. It was a devastating wake-up call for her. Between working all the hours and dealing with BJ, Erika found herself at the psychiatrist’s office in town, wondering how to fix everything.

  It was the winter of 2001. Dark, cold, lonely.

  “I received mental counseling for mental conditions to include OCD and anxiety order,” Erika later told law enforcement.

  As the sessions carried on, Erika’s doctor prescribed what she later referred to as “a lot of medications . . . that just did not work.”

  Nothing seemed to deaden the pain or the anxiousness of worrying what BJ might say and do next, and how the business would survive the economic post–September 11 downturns hitting America. Add to these pressing issues, she and BJ were burglarizing various retail stores and selling the merchandise, and Erika was walking around with a huge monkey on her back. She knew that the cops could show up and arrest them both at any moment. But you ask Erika or those close to her during this time and you get the idea it was all BJ’s doing—that his behavior alone was what sent Erika running off to a therapist, and eventually being placed on antidepressant meds. Not that she was burning the candle and committing felonies and abusing drugs and alcohol.

  23

  “What . . . Did You Do?”

  Joshua Ford and Geney Crutchley were in the bathroom, likely pacing around, scared for their lives, wondering what to do. The bathroom was rather large. To the left was a stand-up shower; to the right a closet. Most of the floor space had been taken up by the hot tub, which was situated in the northeastern corner with a blue tile step in front, a blue tile deck along the wall by the large window looking out onto a balcony. On the opposite side of the hot tub wa
s a countertop running the span of the wall, which had a three-drawer vanity underneath the right side, and an area in the middle and on the left side of open space.

  This bathroom had hosted some great times in the past—not only for Erika and BJ, but for other couples who had rented the condominium before them. But now, BJ and Erika had a couple they had just met and partied with, both now being accused of being thieves, inside the bathroom as their prisoners.

  They had kidnapped them. And Erika Sifrit was certain that her former navy SEAL husband, drunk and angry, with an immense chip on his broad shoulder, was going to kill them.

  According to Erika’s version of what happened next, after Joshua and Geney locked themselves in the bathroom, and BJ stood by the door pointing the gun toward them, she “ran downstairs and started looking for the stuff in hopes that I would find the stuff somewhere, that it was just misplaced, praying that I’m gonna find it and come back upstairs and say, ‘Here’s the stuff. See, it’s okay. Don’t do anything, period.’”

  But that’s not what happened next, Erika said.

  Instead, while she was downstairs looking for her Coach purse, panicking, fearing BJ was going to snap and kill them, she frantically turned over couch cushions and looked in drawers and on tables and underneath the couches. She was startled by . . .

  . . . shots.

  Several loud cracks she knew had come from her .357 Magnum.

  And then, as she stopped what she was doing, she heard BJ thumping at the door, trying to kick it open. How she knew this—she never said. But as she was downstairs, Erika later insisted, hearing those noises, knowing BJ had begun his killing rampage, she ran back upstairs quickly.

  “What the fuck did you do?” she claimed she asked BJ as she watched him trying to kick the door open.