A picture of Thomas Bagosy the night before he killed himself in the middle of Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. courtesy of Robert Bagosy

On a spring day last year, Robert L. Bagosy stepped outside his two-story home in an Atlanta suburb and found the box.

Bagosy, a 65-year-old former police detective and Marine reservist, isn’t one to surprise easily. But the box — which suddenly appeared after a year-long wait — was a shock. Its contents, each clue, detail and revelation, might explain why his son died.

Bagosy knew his son, a firecracker of a kid, would lead an unpredictable life, but never imagined it would end as it did. Marine Corps Sgt. Thomas Bagosy, a 25-year-old Iraq and Afghanistan combat veteran, returned home to his wife and two children with signature battle wounds: post-traumatic stress disorder and a brain injury. In May 2010, as military police surrounded him in the middle of Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, Tommy put a gun to his chin and pulled the trigger.

A white-haired, barrel-chested man, Robert Bagosy remained stoic as he affixed combat ribbons to his son’s dress blues at a funeral home and also while burying Tommy at Arlington National Cemetery. A few months later, he began weeping one day and cried for weeks. Then Bagosy knew what he needed to do next.

“When you become a suicide dad, a survivor, you go into detective mode,” he said. “I kept pushing the envelope to find out what happened.”

It’s not an uncommon experience for military suicide survivors to look to records of a loved one’s work performance, medical history, and combat experience for answers about how and why the death occurred. As the Department of Defense tries to understand and prevent suicide through policies, programs and its own investigations, these survivors reconstruct every moment at which a service member’s life could have been saved – including by the institution he or she served.

For Bagosy, these records captured a version of Tommy’s soul, and they are how he began to understand the suicide and what kind of a man his son had become.