Airman 1st Class Emily Riley was good in biology, had played the drums since junior high school and taught herself to master the keyboard.

Passionate about music, she was a big fan of the Canadian indie rock band Tegan and Sara, and followed the identical twins on occasion to watch their shows.

At 19, Riley took that spirited attitude into the Air Force, but then something went wrong. On Nov. 27, halfway through her training as a medic at Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston, she committed suicide.

Ten days later, another woman in the same medical technician corpsman course was found dead.

The Air Force said both women hanged themselves.

“Of course, I miss everything about her. I loved her to death. She was a really unique person. She loved the underdog,” her mother, Susie Riley, 48, of Abilene, Kansas, said, recalling Emily taking foster children under her wings while in high school.

“Emily would always approach them and try to help ease that transition. She was an animal lover. She just liked to help people. If she thought she could do something nice for somebody, she would do it.”

Riley and Airman Basic Ana Espinal, 18, of New Market, Virginia, were among 476 troops in the armed services to kill themselves last year.

Why the two women at Fort Sam killed themselves isn’t clear. The Air Force didn’t comment on the their cases and Riley is waiting for answers. Espinal’s mother could not be reached.

Both young women were part of a sad roll call of victims that has changed little from 2013, when 479 soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines committed suicide.

The 2014 mark tallied by the San Antonio Express-News is the third-highest since 2003. Almost as many troops have died by their own hand in the last 11 years, 4,414, as the number who died in the long Iraq War, 4,489.

The Pentagon released an analysis Friday of troop suicides for the 2013 calendar year. It also reported that 288 active-duty U.S. troops killed themselves last year, a figure that included 135 active-duty soldiers —15 of them from Fort Hood, which has led all major Army installations in the number of suicides for a decade.

Last year’s total also includes 188 reserve component troops on full-time status that were not included in the Pentagon report.

“The numbers tell us that we still have work to do — one suicide in the ranks is too many,” said the Pentagon’s spokesman, Rear Adm. John Kirby. “This report isn't just about numbers, it's about understanding the factors in the lives of our service members who have died or have attempted suicide.”

“There is not an easy way forward here, leadership throughout this department is focused keenly on learning more, doing more and preventing more,” he said.

Three years ago the military hit bottom, setting its worst mark ever for suicides —514. It has hovered under 500 since following a steady rise rooted in the start of the Iraq War.

A link between wartime deployments and self-inflicted deaths, once disputed by the military, is now acknowledged. The Defense Department’s 2013 Suicide Event Report said that around half of victims had deployed, as had half of those attempting to kill themselves.

At Fort Hood, at least nine of the 15 who took their own lives served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Two other deaths suspected to be suicides remain under investigation. More soldiers from the post committed suicide last year than were killed in combat, car accidents or died of natural causes.

“This is sad news, but unfortunately not surprising,” said retired Army Col. Carl Castro, research director of USC’s Center for Innovation and Research on Veterans and Military Families and a two-tour veteran of Iraq who advised Defense Department research panels on psychological health. “We tend to still just throw darts at the wall hoping something will work.”

In one Fort Hood case, Spc. Adrian Orlando Maganacasanova, 28, of Palmdale, California, committed suicide while talking with an ex-wife on the video chat site Skype. His wife and young child were outside their home in Killeen as he hanged himself, said Garland Potvin, a Killeen justice of the peace.

“He was basically in the residence, locked his current wife out and whenever the ex-wife saw what happened she called the (police department), she didn’t have the correct address, when they started looking they finally found him, forced open the door and there he was,” said Potvin, who ruled the death a suicide.

Suicide victims in the military are most often male, Anglo, under 30, have a high school diploma and are enlisted. They have much higher suicide rates than civilians, ranging from 18.7 per 100,000 in the active-duty component to 29.9 per 100,000 in the National Guard.

Firearms and hanging are the most commonly used methods of death, and victims struggle with relationship woes, trouble at work and with the law, financial problems and abuse at the hands of others.

No one at several Fort Sam commands returned calls this week when asked for number of suicides there last year, but Riley and Espinal were among just 5 percent of suicide victims who are women. They were among nine active-duty suicides in the Air Education and Training Command in 2014.

Serving in the Air Force’s 383rd Training Squadron, Riley and Espinal were in the same class and it is thought they knew each other. Whether that played a role in their deaths isn’t clear. The Air Force would not comment or grant interviews with students in the course.

The post’s Medical Education & Training Campus suspended classes and held a tri-service awareness ceremony in the wake of their deaths. They were the first airmen to kill themselves since the joint medical training program began four years ago at Fort Sam.

When Riley thinks of her daughter, she sees a cheerful kid with a big heart and great sense of humor who was proud of the fact that she was quirky.

Emily Riley, her mom said, didn’t always have to blend in with everybody else.

“It devastated our lives,” Susie Riley said of her death. “It’s just terrible. … She had big plans for her future.”

sigc@express-news.net