Friday at 1:30 p.m.: This story has been updated with comments from the widow of Staff Sgt. Miguel Angel Colonvazquez.

SAN ANGELO — The metal dog tags lay on the kitchen table in front of Ricky DeLeon, stamped with the name of his son, Isaac. He keeps the tags close to him because Isaac wore them next to his heart. A heart he says was almost too big for his boy’s 5-foot-4-inch frame.

Isaac Lee DeLeon was a 19-year-old Army private just one year out of high school when he died at Fort Hood on June 2, 2016, one of nine soldiers drowned when a military transport truck overturned in a flooded low-water crossing. The incident ranks among the worst training accidents in the history of the Central Texas post.

Beside Isaac's dog tags on the kitchen table is something else the Army gave Ricky DeLeon, a thick blue binder containing the results of an investigation into his son's death. The Army has not yet publicly released the results, but Ricky DeLeon agreed to share them with The Dallas Morning News. A second safety investigation by the Army Combat Readiness Center, in Fort Rucker, Ala., also has been completed but not released.

The dogtags of Pfc. Isaac L. DeLeon, who died in a flooding accident during a training exercise at Fort Hood. (Vernon Bryant / The Dallas Morning News)

DeLeon, a 41-year-old disabled oilfield worker, closely read every word of the report about how Isaac died.

He looked at the binder on the table.

“To me, it’s just six inches of b-------.”

The investigation placed much of the blame for Isaac’s death at the feet of Staff Sgt. Miguel Angel Colonvazquez, the patrol leader in the transport convoy. Colonvazquez, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, drowned with Isaac that June morning.

While three other leaders in the unit who were not with the transport have also been recommended for reprimands, the Army hasn’t gone far enough, DeLeon said. The entire leadership of Fort Hood should bear responsibility for his child’s death, he believes.

“Our son Isaac is dead because of irresponsibility. It was a bad situation where they never should have been out there.”

Young man starting his life

Isaac had been thinking about becoming a soldier for a long time. He joined the junior ROTC program as a high school freshman. When he turned 17, he asked his dad to sign his enlistment papers.

“I said no, he had to finish school first,” DeLeon said.

Isaac L. DeLeon's high school portraits hang on the wall at his family's home in San Angelo. (Vernon Bryant / The Dallas Morning News)

There wasn’t much keeping Isaac in San Angelo. He didn’t want to follow his father into the oil fields. His father didn’t want that either. Ricky DeLeon knew the danger of that work. Four years ago, it nearly killed him when chemicals he was mixing in a barrel erupted and sprayed his body with acid. Ricky spent three months in an intensive care burn unit in Lubbock and another 30 days in a rehab center just to learn to walk again.

The Army seemed like the safer option.

Isaac was 16 when the accident happened, and he helped his mother take care of his dad. He would come home from school every day during his lunch period to help his father take showers. Then he would apply cream to his father’s wounds.

“The burns were so bad, and I still had a lot of open wounds,” DeLeon said. “He didn’t have no problem about helping me when he didn’t have to. He had a big heart.”

A big heart paired with a small body. At graduation, Isaac weighed about 105 pounds.

DeLeon wanted his son to go to college. “It wouldn’t have mattered if I had to put another mortgage on this house, I’d have sent him to school,” he said.

He struggles with the memory of a conversation he had shortly after his son finished at San Angelo's Central High School “When he graduated, he did what most kids do. He laid around the house, stayed up all night, slept all day,” DeLeon said.

“We argued. We bickered. I told him you got to figure out what you’re going to do with your life now. Get off your butt, and go do it.”

A few hours later, Isaac came home to say he’d enlisted in the Army. “I was so proud of him. He put me in my place,” DeLeon said, laughing even as tears rolled down his cheeks.

Still, Isaac struggled to make the minimum weight required to enter the Army. “The kid hated oatmeal, but he’d mix up oatmeal with peanut butter and protein powder and eat that to gain mass,” DeLeon said. “He had a don’t-quit attitude.”

Isaac had a girlfriend. They'd been together since they were in the ninth grade. DeLeon thinks his son was about about to ask her to marry him and wanted to get her father's approval.

"He told her dad, 'I've got to come home and talk to you one weekend.' That weekend never came," DeLeon said, staring at his hands in his lap.

News of the accident

On the day of the accident, DeLeon and his wife, Christina, heard from his stepfather that there was something wrong at Fort Hood. He had seen a news report but wasn’t sure what had happened.

“We called Fort Hood, but they wouldn’t tell us nothing,” Ricky said.

Isaac L. DeLeon is shown in a portrait on the wall at his home in San Angelo. (Vernon Bryant / The Dallas Morning News)

Ricky and Christina called Isaac’s cellphone, but their son didn’t answer. “Usually whenever we called him or texted or emailed him, he’d get right back to us,’’ Ricky said. “I told my wife, they’ve probably got something going on and they’d locked down the base. I told her, he’ll be OK.”

At 2 o’clock the next morning, they were awakened by a knock on their front door. Two casualty notification officers waited on the porch.

“A big part of us died that day.”

Map of accident scene

On June 2, 2016, nine Fort Hood soldiers drowned when a military transport truck overturned in a flooded low-water crossing. Army investigators found that errors by the unit's leaders contributed to the accident, which ranks among the worst training disasters in the history of the Central Texas post.

Touch map to see info:

Heavy rainfall and flood warnings

At about 10:30, on the stormy morning of Thursday, June 2, 2016, a convoy of four Army vehicles carrying 18 soldiers prepared to depart a motor pool at Fort Hood. The patrol aimed to train the soldiers, many of them newly minted privates, on convoy operations.

It had been raining for hours at the sprawling Army post. Much of the state had been awash in rainfall for the previous week, and more than half of the state was under flood watches or warnings.

The convoy headed out on East Range Road toward a remote area of the post about 15 miles northeast of the main gate. The vehicles then turned onto an unpaved tank trail. Around that time, the Medium Tactical Vehicle (MTV) carrying 12 soldiers, including Isaac, took the lead position in the convoy, switching places with a Humvee.

The Humvee’s driver would later tell investigators he had phoned the patrol’s leader, Staff Sgt. Colonvazquez, who was in the MTV behind him, and told him he was “unsure of the route and had concerns about the weather.”

Colonvazquez, the patrol leader, sat in the cab of the MTV with two others: the driver, Pvt. Tysheena James, 21, who had arrived at Fort Hood about a month earlier; and a 21-year-old West Point cadet who was doing leadership training at Fort Hood.

Trouble on the tank trail

On the tank trail, the convoy rolled through two large pools of water, including one deep enough to get the inside of the Humvee wet. Despite that, the convoy continued on.

About 11 a.m., the convoy arrived at the low-water crossing that intersects Owl Creek. Swollen from the flash flood, Owl Creek was later determined to be more than seven feet deep at the crossing, the report said.

The truck with the 12 soldiers, including Isaac and Colonvazquez, entered the creek first. Within seconds, it was knocked over by the rushing water and swept downstream.

Three soldiers in the back escaped, rescued by soldiers from the other vehicles in the convoy. The bodies of the remaining nine soldiers were recovered downstream. All of the soldiers were part of the 3rd Battalion, 16th Field Artillery Regiment, 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division.

An Army helicopter hovered above Lake Belton on June 3, 2016, during the search for missing soldiers from Fort Hood. They were swept away as their truck went through a low-water crossing during training. (Rodolfo Gonzalez / Austin American-Statesman)

At the time, Fort Hood officials said the patrol was in the “proper place for what they were training.”

To DeLeon, that statement still cuts deep.

“Nobody should have been out there training that day. Fort Hood had prior warnings from the National Weather Service and everyone else about the floods,” he said.

The National Weather Service had issued a flash flood warning at 8:47 a.m., more than an hour before the convoy left the motor pool. Fort Hood had also issued its own alert, at 5:05 a.m., declaring all low-water crossings and creek-crossings off limits to all vehicles, according to the report DeLeon was given.

The Fort Hood alert was emailed to the 1st Cavalry Division level, but it apparently wasn’t forwarded down to the battalion level, the report said.

“They knew about the flooding. They knew about the weather. Why did they ignore it?” DeLeon wondered. “Why did the post commander let them do it? Why was there a breakdown in communication?”

'Unanswered questions'

“I have a lot of 'whys,’ a lot of unanswered questions,” he said.

The one that haunts him most is why the patrol leader thought he could risk the lives of a dozen soldiers to cross a flooded creek.

And why nobody tried to stop him.

“I don’t understand why they would want to drive through that,” he said. “Seven feet of water? I beat myself up over it trying to understand it.”

Filled with questions, DeLeon asked for and received a briefing and the results of the investigation from an Army officer who recently visited his home.

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Patrol leader to blame

The report blames the accident on a series of three successive decisions made by Colonvazquez:

The first decision was to lead the convoy off the paved road onto the tank trail.

The second decision was to continue along the tank trail even after crossing the two large pools.

The third decision was to try crossing Owl Creek at the low-water crossing point instead of using the nearby bridge. The use of the bridge, the report emphasized, "would have prevented the accident."

Experienced combat veteran

Colonvazquez, 38, from Brooklyn, N.Y, was an experienced noncommissioned officer who had extensive driving time in various Army trucks and who had led tactical convoys after entering active-duty service in July 2003, according to the report.

During his 13-year-career, he had deployed twice to Iraq and two times to Afghanistan.

The widow of Staff Sgt. Colonvazquez, Ngo Pham, said her husband should not bear the blame for the accident. His commanders had told him to follow the training plan that day, which called for taking the convoy over the creek crossing and not the bridge.

Her husband had suggested to his commanders they should do a different kind of training that day because of the bad weather, Pham said, noting that she was told by others in the unit who had knowledge of what happened that day. But one of his supervisors had ordered the training "as planned," Pham said, and the staff sergeant was following protocol when he continued with the creek crossing.

"My husband loved his Army soldiers. He would never have done anything to put them in harm's way," Pham said. He loved the Army, she said, adding that she's upset that he is now being blamed for the tragedy.

The Fort Hood public affairs office would not respond to questions because the official version of the report has not been publicly released yet.

The report placed the lion’s share of blame on Colonvasquez. But it also recommended that three leaders associated with the unit receive General Office Memorandum of Reprimand for negligence of duties. Those leaders, whose names were blacked out in the report, were not with the convoy when the accident occurred because it was considered “Sergeant’s Time Training,” a chance for senior sergeants to do practical, hands-on training with junior enlisted soldiers.

The report cited the three leaders for not doing more ahead of time to reduce the risks to the patrol considering the weather conditions and the inexperience of the young soldiers.

Those leaders had allowed the sergeant to put James behind the wheel of the MTV, despite the fact that the 21-year-old private had “little on-the-job driver’s training,” the report said. Therefore, the report said, she had only “rudimentary understanding” of the truck’s ability to cross Owl Creek at flood stage.

The maximum depth to which the MTV can ford water is 30 inches, and Owl Creek was at least 84 inches deep that morning, the report noted. The Fort Hood Fire Department’s swift-water boat captain told investigators “it was the worst water conditions he’d ever experienced.”

A last request

Ricky and Christina DeLeon would like to see the place where their son’s body was found. They believe his soul remains trapped there. They want to place roses out on the water for him.

Last year, they asked their casualty assistance officer to relay their request to Fort Hood officials, but nothing came of it. “They never did take us out there. They never said why,” DeLeon said. “They could have taken us out there. It’s not like it was overseas or in a battle zone.”

Ricky DeLeon holds a portrait of his late son, Isaac Lee DeLeon, at his home in San Angelo. (Vernon Bryant / The Dallas Morning News)

DeLeon remembers that on the day after the accident, the boxer Muhammad Ali also died. Suddenly, the news was all about the death of a man many considered an American icon. He was disappointed how quickly the news eclipsed what happened at Fort Hood.

His son was a hero.

He was a hero to his mother.

He was a hero to his younger brother and sister.

He was a hero to his father.

“Everybody in life has a hero, and he was my hero.”