THE NEW YORK TIMES – In the year before Troy Norrell died, he grew convinced that the government had somehow infiltrated his brain. And in a way, he was right.
The 44-year-old was a rising star in the Navy’s Special Boat Teams — an elite group of stealth speedboat crews who can race over rough seas at 60 miles an hour to deliver Navy SEALs to their targets.
But after years of pounding across the waves, he was barely able to function. He grew forgetful and confused. He struggled with insomnia, alcohol abuse and rage. On a training trip, he smashed a rearview mirror and started cutting his chest with the glass.
He was forced to medically retire in 2017 after 12 years in uniform.
As a civilian, he grew delusional and paranoid, and started to believe that the government had bugged his phone, then his kitchen walls and finally his own skull.
“There’s only a little piece of me left,” he told a neighbor in 2021, tapping his head. “They got the rest.”
A few days later, he was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a field near his home in the San Diego suburbs.
An autopsy revealed that his brain was riddled with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., a progressive disease often associated with football players who suffer repeated blows to the head.
A Defense Department neurologist who analyzed samples of Mr. Norrell’s brain wrote that his C.T.E. probably came from years of impacts with waves. The neurologist alerted the Navy that other sailors in the Special Boat Teams might face the same risk.
As if to underline the point, six weeks after Mr. Norrell’s death, another boat team member in the grip of paranoid delusions, Travis Carter, 33, died by suicide a few miles away …
