Family Says Question Remains Over Staff Sargent's Sudden Death
Virginia Caballero died unexpectedly on a flight home from the Middle East- a flight none of her immediate family knew she was on.
At first glance, the 2014 death of Staff Sargent Virginia Caballero is a tragic but rarely explained freak event.
The Death of Virginia Caballero
Caballero died of a blood clot which started in her leg and travelled to her heart.
“The clot broke loose and went through her heart and obstructed her pulmonary arterys...to the left and right lungs. It would be as if you were pumping water and threw dirt into the pump....the water could not get through,” said Dr. Jesse Cole, a radiologist who examined the autopsy and other medical documents for me.
In fact, Cole’s analysis mirrors that of the hospital which treated her, and the autopsy performed by Dr. Mark Peters, who was working in the Winnebago County, Illinois, Medical Examiner’s Office in September 2014.
Caballero died shortly after midnight on September 13, 2014.
Dr. Cole said that one known risk factor, though rare, for developing such a blood clot is a long flight, as Caballero was on.
He further stated that it is possible for a blood clot to develop like this in a perfectly healthy person like Caballero.
Why Was She Coming Home?
Caballero was coming back on a flight from deployment in the Middle East.
But this is where it gets confusing.
According to a screenshot of a text message Virginia Caballero had with a colleague, provided by her family, as late as September 7, 2014, she believed she had a month left of deployment.
According to a news story at the time, Caballero was supposedly surprising her family by coming back early from deployment.
One news story quoted a cousin, but I spoke with her mom and two sisters and they both say Virginia would not have surprised them and the last they heard from her she was scheduled to come back in October 2014.
“The first time she came back from we did this big old welcoming party at the airport and she had told us when she was coming back so we could do that for her,” her mother, Mary Caballero, told me.
Her sister Susan Turner told me that after she checked she found out the rest of the unit did not arrive back until October, as scheduled.
Furthermore, unlike her first deployment, this deployment was not going as well.
“She called me once and said that she was having trouble with the females in the unit- with the personnel in the unit- because she was from Texas and she was the higher rank,” her mother explained, “She was supposed to have ordered them around and none of them wanted to pay attention and so they messed with her.”
Her sister, Maria, told me that Virginia alluded to issues but did not elaborate, “I thought it was because she couldn’t,” she said.
Her mother said Virginia told her that the behavior started in training and continued when she got to Kuwait for the deployment.
Ironically, Virginia’s superior had submitted paperwork for Virginia to receive an award for her service during this deployment, just five days before her death.
Her Final Flight
Next the events leading up to and shortly after Virginia’s death have never made sense.
According to hospital paperwork, Virginia Caballero arrived at the hospital at 6:58 Central Time.
Her family wouldn’t be contact for two more hours, around 9PM Central Time.
Virginia’s mother was the first to get a call, but she told me she went into a state of shock after hearing the news.
“I didn’t know what was going on for three or four days,” Mary Caballero told me.
Though Mary Caballero has little recollection of the events, she seemed to be providing medical information.
According to a hospital file, it says, “Patient’s mother reports there is a family history of VTE.”
VTE is a condition in which a blood clot forms most often in the deep veins of the leg, groin, or arm.
Except Virginia’s mother and sisters told me the family has no such history.
Susan Turner said events only got more inexplicable from there.
Turner said she got a call first from her mom at about 8PM local time in Colorado on September 12.
Her mom told her that she was told Virginia had fainted but that things should be fine.
Over the next hour Turner got differing reports. About an hour later, she called the hospital and got a commander who had been with her sister on the phone.
The commander then told her that her sister went to the bathroom and she was not looking well. When she did not come out a “stewardess” went to check on her and, as soon as the door opened, Virginia fainted.
“Then, they did CPR,” Turner said she was told, “As soon as they did CPR, her heart stopped. They just happened to have the equipment to restart her heart.”
Turner said that because the commander referred to the stewardess, this probably meant Virginia was on a commercial flight.
The military has never provided the flight plan to the family, Susan also noted.
According to a document, Virginia had flown from Ireland to the West Coast, when the plane made an emergency landing.
“The patient was in transit from Europe ultimately to the West Coast and apparently was found unresponsive in the bathroom during her flight from Dublin.”
A receipt was found in Virginia’s belongings, from Shannon Airport in Dublin, Ireland, between 1 and 2PM, local time, on the afternoon of September 12.
But Virginia was stationed in Kuwait, and the military has yet to explain how she got from Kuwait to Dublin.
Turner said what the commander told her next, “The outcome of her health will determine on the amount of time it took us to get from the airport to the hospital and that took about thirty minutes, and she’s also brain dead. I’m like ‘brain dead.’”
“Her heart’s doing really good. She’s fighting really hard,” Turner said the commander told her further.
Based on this, Turner said she suggested to the commander that Turner talk to her sister on the phone: hopefully, hearing a familiar voice would trigger something in her brain.
The commander agreed but a room needed to be set up to do this, Turner was told.
“I didn’t hear anything until 11 something {just passed midnight central time where Virginia Caballero was} and the guy says, ‘I just want to give you condolences for you and your family.’” Turner said another Army staffer told her. “And then he said, ‘Oh, I mean what you’re going through’ and he hung up.”
Turner was next told that her sister was on life support, “but that her heart was working very well. None of that made any sense.”
Turner said she then called the hospital where her sister was staying and ordered the hospital to keep her sister on life support until the family arrived.
She next talked the commander and demanded to talk to her sister.
She said she was told the phone was placed next to her sister’s ear and Turner began to talk to her for a couple minutes.
Then, she said a doctor got on the phone and told Turner her sister was dead.
“I’m sorry she’s gone,” Turner said the doctor told her.
Virginia Caballero was pronounced dead at 00:59 Central Time on September 13, 2014.
News stories have given different versions of events. One had her dying on the plane; in another story, a commander, not a stewardess, found her unconscious.
One fact which a news story confirmed was that Virginia was only flying home with one person and not her unit, “She served in Kuwait for roughly eight months and for some reason was coming home a month early with a high ranking travel companion,” the story stated.
The stories, written shortly after her death, often referred to details as being “sketchy”, but they remain sketchy more than seven years later.
The conflicting stories, Virginia’s two sisters and mother told me, have never been explained by the military.
“None of it makes sense,” Maria told me.
None of the three believe the story she was coming home early, so they do not know why she came back, where she was going or even how she got to Ireland. They further cannot understand why a healthy 41-year-old developed such a deadly blood clot on the plane ride.
Family Drama
That confusion is increased by what happened to Virginia’s papers.
Her father was given power over her papers: something Maria, Mary, and Susan said Virginia would not want.
“The one thing that has really bothered me about all this is they left my dad in charge of all her papers, all her private papers, of what happened to her,” her sister Maria told me, “Virginia would not have done that. She would not have left him in charge of anything, because she didn’t love him, and he didn’t love her.”
It was a sentiment, seconded by Susan Turner, and even their mom.
“She didn’t want her dad to be involved with anything of hers,” Mary said, “They put, they put him on there. I don’t know who did.”
Virginia’s father passed away in early 2021.
The Army public affairs department declined to comment for this story.
This is very sad and I feel so bad for her family. Definitely something weird going on…