Kyle Antonacci, a Navy sailor who was helping clear another sailor of a conviction for raping a female marine, was found dead last year, supposedly in a self-inflicted hanging. However, he was reportedly injured in other manners inconsistent with a hanging, and questions about what really happened have emerged. The medical examiner found that he had a broken nose and facial contusions, as well as cuts on his hands, and wrote: “I was not 100 percent convinced this was a self-inflicted hanging.”
When the fellow sailor was initially charged, Antonacci offered evidence that seemed at first to support the prosecution, and his friend Mike Pineda was duly convicted and given a dishonorable discharge. But when Antonacci revealed the full story, Navy investigators started to suspect that the female marine may have been lying, and he offered to help them clear Pineda by secretly taping conversations with the woman who had made the accusation.
When it emerged that Antonacci was supporting Pineda, the woman’s marine corps friends began to threaten him, carving an X on his door and menacing him with a knife. Despite the threats, Antonacci continued to support the investigation, calling the woman to gather evidence. Two hours after the last call he made to her, he was found dead.
When the Navy first contacted his parents to let them know about the death, they told conflicting stories. First, it was a car crash, then an aneurysm. When his parents saw the corpse, they said it “looked like he was tortured.” Post mortem photographs mysteriously disappeared and when, months later, they had the body exhumed and paid for another autopsy, it was discovered that his hyoid bone, which could have provided crucial evidence pertaining to whether he was hanged or not, was missing.
Although at this point suicide can’t be conclusively ruled out, murder as revenge for rape (or false rape accusations), is not rare. A significant number of young men who are murdered are killed due to a rape accusation. Due to the enormous emotional power of a rape accusation, any man who finds himself so accused is in grave danger. In fact, false rape accusations are often attempts by angry women to commit murder by proxy, as in the biblical story of Potiphar’s wife, and many other examples from classical literature. Therefore, there is a distinct possibility, especially given the post mortem evidence, that Antonacci was murdered by men attempting to avenge one of “their women.”
This incident further details problems with integrating women in the military. When young men and women are together in intimate settings, such as the military, sexual drama inevitably occurs, and sometimes this can have very messy outcomes. Feminists, in their typically simplistic approach to problems, will say “the solution is for men to stop raping women,” but that is to ignore the fact that human sexuality is a powerful force that is often accompanied by extremes of emotion, both positive and negative. To foster an environment that encourages this instability in the military is not only unwise, but reckless, and displays a lack of concern for troops and effectiveness as well. One would hope that our leaders – both military and civilian – could have the courage to stand up to those advocating trendy policy based on puerile notions of “how the world ought to be,” but that hope would most likely be in vain.
