On Friday, Aug. 2, U.S. Army Spc. Jacob Ashton left Fort Drum in upstate New York for the 5 1/2-hour drive to his hometown in Ohio, where he spent the weekend with his girlfriend.
He had made the trip regularly since returning from a nine-month deployment to Iraq this year, his mother, Michelle Ustupski, said. As usual, he texted his girlfriend when he returned to Fort Drum around 8:30 p.m. that Sunday to say he had arrived safely.
It was the last time his family or friends heard from him.
Ashton, 21, was found dead at the base the next day, according to a Fort Drum news release. Two soldiers came to Ustupski’s home in Ohio to deliver the grim news.
On Monday, the Army charged another soldier, Spc. Riley Birbilas, 22, with premeditated murder in Ashton’s death and obstruction of justice. Officials from Fort Drum and the Army’s 10th Mountain Division, citing the continuing investigation, did not offer a motive or the cause of death. The Fort Drum news release included details about Ashton’s Army service but not about how he had died.
Ustupski said the medical examiner told her the cause of death was blunt force trauma and that her son, who trained as a bodybuilder, did not appear to have “put up too much of a fight.”
“He was caught off guard,” she said.
The authorities, she added, also told her that her son had sustained the fatal wound in his room and had then been brought to his car. She said his body had been found in the car in a parking lot near the barracks.
A spokesperson for the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division declined to comment Thursday.
The killing of Ashton was the second killing in recent years involving soldiers connected to Fort Drum, a vast installation near the Canadian border that employs more than 15,000 service members and nearly 4,000 civilian workers.
Last year, Jamaal Mellish, a former soldier once assigned to the base, and another man were sentenced to life in prison after being convicted of murder in state court in New Jersey for the 2020 killing of Cpl. Hayden Harris. Prosecutors said the murder had resulted from a dispute over a vehicle transaction. Mellish and Harris had served together at Fort Drum.
Ashton and Birbilas had been roommates in the Fort Drum barracks since April, when they returned from Iraq, Ustupski said. They were assigned to the headquarters of the 2nd Battalion, 14th Infantry in the 10th Mountain Division’s 2nd Brigade Combat Team.
“We’re in disbelief,” Ustupski said.
She drove to Fort Drum from Ohio on Sunday night for Birbilas’ initial court appearance. While driving, she kept thinking that her son had taken the same route on his last night alive.
He had lived with her in Willowick, Ohio, until around seventh grade, when he went to live with his father in nearby Perry, a village of about 1,600 about a half-hour from Cleveland. He was soft-spoken, had a positive attitude and was always ready to help, his mother said. She and his father never married, but his father was “a good role model,” Ustupski said.
Ashton played baseball and football at Perry High School, and enlisted in the Army after graduating in 2021. He was adventurous and wanted to see the world and also believed that joining the military would “mold him into a better person,” Ustupski said.
“He was just a regular all-American boy,” she added.
His initial enlistment was to end in December. He had earned a Combat Infantryman Badge during the Iraq deployment and an Army Commendation Medal with a “C” device, which recognizes meritorious service or achievement in combat.
Ustupski said her son had talked of continuing in public service, perhaps as a firefighter or police officer. He also planned to enter a bodybuilding competition in Ohio next year.
“You know, you pray all the time,” Ustupski said. “You prayed really hard for him to come home, to be safe. He came home without a scratch. And you thought he was safe.”
At the court hearing Monday, Ustupski listened on speakerphone while the proceedings played out in another room. At one point, she said, she called Birbilas a “coward.”
“I know he heard all that,” she said.
Like Ustupski’s son, Birbilas enlisted in 2021. On Wednesday, he was being held in the Oneida County Jail in Oriskany, New York, awaiting an Article 32 hearing, the military’s version of a grand jury proceeding, where evidence is presented to determine if a prosecution will advance to a court-martial. Under military law, he faces life in prison or the death penalty if convicted of the murder count.
His mother, Amber Frederick-Birbilas, declined to comment Wednesday and referred questions to a lawyer, Robert Capovilla, who said a “thorough investigation into the facts is nowhere near complete.”
“The information we have at this point,” he added, “creates far more questions than answers about what happened.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
