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Special Forces vet took

two guns, a knife and a
grudge into fatal
meeting
Special Forces vet had a grudge and guns

Sig Christenson, Staff Writer

Updated: Jan. 18, 2017 2:03 p.m.

12 of 15

A clean-shaven Sgt. 1st Class Steven Bellino, wearing a

big smile, stands with a buddy at an Army social event.
Undated. Photo courtesy of Scott Workman.
Courtesy, Scott Workman

At her desk and preoccupied, 1st Sgt.

Tiwanda Griffin-Greer didn’t see Tech.
Sgt. Steven Bellino enter her office until
she heard a metallic clinking and looked
up. He had taken a seat in front of her, a
Glock handgun tucked into the
waistband of his Air Force “blue suit”
uniform.

Bellino told her to call her boss. Several

minutes passed before Lt. Col. William
Schroeder opened the door, stared
down at Bellino and spotted the gun, an
Air Force investigator later would tell
Bellino’s family.

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“Let’s talk about your AWOL status,”

replied Schroeder, commander of the
342nd Training Squadron. A moment
later, he lunged at Bellino.

The shots fired April 8 inside Forbes

Hall, a training headquarters on
Lackland’s Medina Annex, put the base
on a brief lockdown.

The two men, veterans of the U.S.

Special Operations Command, died in a
murder-suicide.

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They were in the Air Force’s elite

Battlefield Airmen program at Joint
Base San Antonio-Lackland, where
Bellino had trained in a tough
pararescue program the summer before
— and by washing out, had seen his
military career unravel.

An Air Education and Training

Command investigation of the shooting
continues. But a collection of audio
recordings, military records, an Air
Force psychiatric evaluation, a timeline
Bellino made of key events in his life —
all made available to the Express-News
by family members, much of it provided
to them by the Air Force — show he
harbored a deep anger.

The trove included a two-page

unsigned note typed eight months
before the shooting. The Air Force
described it as a suicide note. The
family members dispute that, saying an
expert they hired called it “highly
unlikely” Bellino wrote it.

At 41, Bellino had struggled to regain his

footing amid professional setbacks
following repeated deployments in Iraq
and Afghanistan. Post traumatic stress
disorder symptoms grew more and
more severe in the final year of his life,
the documents indicate.

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Friends say Bellino was idealistic, a man

of exacting fairness, even when
distributing candy to kids in the
Balkans. He lived up to the letter of the
law and expected it of others. He would
call out anyone who fell short — he
once accused a sergeant major of lying
in front of a roomful of soldiers.

But the high standards and high

achievement through his years as an
Army Ranger, Green Beret, CIA and NSA
contractor and FBI agent masked a
growing personal crisis. A series of
perceived slights and violations of his
sense of honor had accumulated long
before he came to Lackland — and he
told almost no one about it.

“I do not like this world, and I do not

want to be a part of it any longer,”
Bellino wrote in the disputed note in
August 2015, the month he quit the
pararescue program, went home to
Ohio and was charged with being
absent without leave. “I’ve searched for
many years to find a home consistent
with my ethics and such a place does
not exist.”

The Air Force confirmed it found that

note in a flash drive during a search of a
San Antonio storage shed and that
investigators believe Bellino wrote it.

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Bellino’s family members refuse to

believe he killed himself and are trying
to clear his name. Still grieving in
Parma Heights, a suburb of Cleveland,
they say he had everything to live for
after a sterling military career.

“Steve devoted his life to the military,”

his father, Michael Bellino Sr., told one
of his son’s friends from the pararescue
program in a phone call the older man
recorded. “And then, I mean, he was in
battle. He had all these missions he did;
the awards, everything he’d done … and
then it’s going to come down to this,
where (he’s) going to kill himself?”

Hardened, then brittle

Bellino considered himself a patriot.

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He had joined the Army with his

parents’ permission at 17, spent years in
special operations, became an
explosives expert, spoke Arabic. He
lived in Ecuador to perfect his Spanish.
His GPA was 3.5 at Ohio State
University, majoring in criminal
psychology.

And Bellino had excelled in a long list of

military schools and deployments. He
earned the coveted Ranger tab, became
a Green Beret, spent years in the Ohio
National Guard and did contract work
for the CIA and National Security
Agency in Iraq. Out of the military,
Bellino graduated from the FBI
Academy in Quantico, Virginia, hoping
to serve in the agency’s Hostage Rescue
Team.

He impressed many along the way. A

Special Forces company commander,
Maj. Richard G. Rhyne, wrote of him in
2001, “Staff Sgt. Bellino continually
displays a heroic attitude. He is above
the standards in every thing that he
does.”

Behind the standout résumé was a

darker side. Bellino soldiered through
multiple overseas deployments over
two decades but told his family
members very little about his service.

They didn’t know Bellino had been a

Green Beret until his funeral.

He had close calls. A suicide bomber in

Iraq detonated an explosive belt on the
other side of a wall from him. Much
later, Bellino mentioned it on a long list
of memories that triggered PTSD
symptoms — the worst of which was
how he unintentionally killed a young
Afghan girl with an M203 grenade
launcher during a firefight.

He was fond of children, a doting uncle,

though he never married and had few
serious relationships, said Bellino’s half-
brother, Scott Workman.

As colleagues and commanders fell

short of his ethical code, an older,
brittle Bellino smoldered. In
conversations with his lawyers in his
final eight months, it was clear that his
experience at Lackland made it a full
burn.

Yet Bellino wrote that he had arrived

“feeling excited about the future” when
he pulled up at the Medina Annex in an
old Saturn bought in better times.

Hammered by war

Bellino’s entire adult life had been about

conquering the next mountain, but
recent years of frustration might have
given him pause.

After his final tour in Afghanistan, he

had gone to the FBI in 2011 but ended
up in a New York assignment he
thought was for burned-out agents. He
clashed with a supervisor and quit in
2013.

“Every day I was there felt like a lie and

as if I couldn’t breathe,” he wrote in the
disputed note. “Agents were there to
achieve their dream title, not actually
make the world a better place.”

There’s no record of Bellino seeking

psychiatric help while in special
operations, though it could have been
done informally. An Air Force
psychiatric evaluation stemming from
his AWOL charge found he suffered
from no “severe mental disease or
defect,” and had “no historical or
current mental health symptoms.”

The forensic psychiatrist who examined

him, Dr. (Maj.) Belinda Kelly, also wrote:
“Tech. Sgt. Bellino does possess certain
personality traits, specifically stoicism,
limited interpersonal relationships, a
high threshold for respecting
leadership and a somewhat rigid
personal code of what he considers
professional behavior.”

He “denied experiencing any persistent

negative emotional effects” from
“combat-type situations” as a CIA
contractor in Iraq and Special Forces
soldier in Afghanistan, she wrote.

Bellino gave a different narrative to Dan

Conway, his last lawyer, weeks before
his death.

In a 13-page report and timeline that

included a “summary of historical
events relevant to potential PTSD,” he
described being incapable of
concentrating or controlling his anger,
having trouble falling asleep most
nights or being around large crowds.
There were recurring nightmares. He
kept to himself more than in the past.

Those symptoms would worsen almost

as soon as he began Lackland’s two-
week Developmental Course, where he
was the highest-ranking NCO and class
leader.

The Air Force was not his first choice.

After the FBI, Bellino had lived with his
parents in Ohio, tried to rejoin the
active-duty Special Forces and felt
betrayed when he was rejected. He had
been “misled for months” into thinking
he could return, he wrote in his
timeline to Conway, adding, “Words do
not capture the energy I expended to
make this application process work and
the anger that followed.”

He tried to enter the Navy but was too

old, and his FBI experience steered him
away from any other U.S. law
enforcement agency, Bellino added.

“I had reasonable expectations enlisting

into the Air Force,” he wrote. “But some
of the challenges encountered I could
never have foreseen.”

The washout

The trouble began quickly. Trainees

were told they wouldn’t get
“washbacks” — a second chance to pass
training. In his timeline, Bellino called
that policy arbitrary and punitive.

Students who had flunked told him they

believed the school’s trainers “seemed
to dislike” airmen who had transferred
from other military branches. They
were released from the Air Force with a
stigma — a re-entry code, “3A,” that
made it it more difficult to land jobs in
the Defense Department or private
security firms.

Col. Sean McKenna, AETC’s chief

spokesman, confirmed that the code is
typically given for performance failure
and requires a waiver to re-enlist. A
policy now allows such individuals to
get new jobs in the Air Force — it
stemmed from a commander-directed
investigation into the Battlefield Airman
program that has not yet been publicly
released, he said.

The Air Force told Bellino his training

had a 90 percent attrition rate but
never mentioned troops from other
services would be “punished for failure”
with the 3A code, Bellino complained in
his timeline. He detested the way the
school was run, with nightly
accountability check-ins and daily room
inspections.

But worst of all, Bellino’s ethical code

was affronted. His group was ordered
to start a fund, with the understanding
that it was “to buy very expensive
parting gifts” for the trainers. Each
trainee would chip in $80 to raise a
total of more than $4,700 — “clearly a
racket,” Bellino wrote in the timeline.

The AETC disputes that. The Battlefield

Airmen Training Group classes have
voluntary funds to buy food or
equipment supplements for trainees
and for “the benefit of the student
training team,” which doesn’t violate
policy, McKenna said. He said the
trainers and their methods were
professional and the commander’s
probe uncovered no hazing.

Bellino wrote that an instructor at an

exercise class asked about his Army
specialty — the Special Forces’ “18
series” — and that another trainer
“shouted at me in a very proud tone,
‘Did you hear what I did to the last 18
series guy we had?’”

The Air Force said such a comment

would violate no rules but could not
confirm that it had been made.

The same trainer yelled that he hadn’t

completed a lap in a pool days later. The
airmen had to complete 25-meter
underwater lengths, touching a crack
on the bottom corner of the deep end,
ascending and recrossing within three
minutes. Bellino followed an order to
swim down to touch the crack again,
but he had been “unfairly singled out,”
he wrote in the timeline.

The following Monday, on Aug. 3, 2015,

Bellino quit the program. He refused
trainers’ orders to sound a bullhorn to
signal his departure, telling them it was
juvenile, and the trainer who he felt had