The Strange Death of Job Price

Navy SEAL Cmdr. Job Price's 2012 death in Afghanistan was ruled a suicide. But a private investigator says it was murder.

SEAL Cmdr. Job W. Price

For years, Matt Cubbler has tried to correct what he sees as a grave injustice done by the Navy SEALs. Cubbler, a retired small-town police officer, has told anyone who would listen that Cmdr. Job W. Price did not kill himself.

Price, the decorated 42-year-old commander of SEAL Team Four, died of a gunshot wound to the head a few days before Christmas 2012 while on deployment in Afghanistan. A military investigation ruled the death a suicide. Price was struggling with stress and exhaustion, but no witness interviewed by military investigators believed he was suicidal. No suicide note was ever found.

Cubbler’s involvement began in the fall of 2019 when Price’s father, Harry, asked if he would review the military’s investigation. Cubbler had a background in law enforcement: He worked in several small-town Pennsylvania police departments and served as a U.S. Air Marshal for more than four years after 9/11. He was also a family friend; Cubbler knew Price from high school in the 1980s in Pottstown, Pa., a former steel town about an hour’s drive from Philadelphia. Unlike the others whom the Prices had asked to examine the case, Cubbler said yes.

Five years later, Cubbler, a 53-year-old Army vet, is still at it. He has never been paid for his efforts. For a time, it seemed like no one was listening, but Cubbler’s investigation recently got a boost after he appeared on several podcasts to call out the corruption in the SEAL community that he believes may have played a role in Price’s death. He says he’s now working with a documentary film team that is developing a project to investigate Price’s death. (The filmmakers created a web page to solicit tips, Who Killed Job Price?)  

Several independent forensic experts attached to the documentary reviewed the evidence and concluded with a high degree of confidence that the SEAL commander didn’t kill himself.  For Cubbler, the forensic experts offered the outside validation that he had been seeking ever since he first read the file on the military investigation into Price’s death.

“When I started looking into it, the first thing that stood out to me was the timeline,” he told me. There were big gaps. Price’s body and the crime scene were left unsecured for nearly nine hours. “And whenever you see gaps in timelines, that opens up opportunities for bad things to happen.”

Critical evidence was washed away. The military investigation file, which Cubbler shared with me, revealed the on-scene investigator’s request to leave the body and the scene undisturbed had been ignored. Medical personnel removed Price’s body from his quarters, washed him, and dressed him at the direction of members of Price’s SEAL team, Cubbler says. The brown paper bags covering his hands, secured with tape to preserve evidence, were removed.

Things seemed even stranger when Cubbler looked at the photos of the body. The SEAL commander was found lying on his back in his bunk in the SEAL camp in Tarin Kowt, Afghanistan, on the morning of Dec. 22, 2012. His right hand, which rested on his chest, clutched his 9mm Sig Sauer pistol, his finger on the trigger with the hammer cocked. Price held a green pillow in his left arm.

Matt Cubbler, left, interviews Rob O’Neill, a former member of SEAL Team Six, on JSlayUSA.

Investigators concluded that the bullet had entered the right side of Price’s head, exited the left side at a downward angle, and passed through the pillow and a section of the mattress before striking a nearby desk. A spent 9mm shell casing was found under Price’s body. A recently released ballistics report confirmed that the SEAL commander’s gun had fired the spent shell and the bullet that was found in a pool of blood under Price’s bed.

Cubbler had seen countless suicides during his law enforcement career. This one didn’t make sense. The bullet’s trajectory meant Price would have been lying on his left side when he fired the shot through his right temple. However, the SEAL commander was found lying on his back with his head facing right and his right hand clutching the gun on his chest. To Cubbler, it looked like the scene had been staged. “How does the body get to that place?” he said. “That looks wrong. I’m not a forensics guy, but I just, I’ve been on enough scenes in 30 years that I know what doesn’t look right.”

Another mystery: no one could say for sure that they heard the shot that killed Price. The SEAL camp was an echo chamber with concrete walls and metal doors. There was no privacy; conversations could be overheard from nearby rooms. The sound of a gunshot would have sent people scrambling to find out if they were under attack, as four members of Price’s task force had been killed by enemy fire in recent weeks. One person was awoken around 5 a.m. by a loud noise and recalled smelling sulfur or gunpowder. The Navy JAG assigned to SEAL Team Four, whose room was 80 to 100 feet from Price’s, heard a “sharp noise” after midnight. Critically, however, neither person got out of bed to investigate.

A death without honor

Price left behind his wife and a 9-year-old daughter, whose unframed photo was found on a desk in the SEAL commander’s room. His body returned home three days after his passing, in the pre-dawn darkness of Christmas Day. His ashes were scattered at sea.

Price’s sister, Bronwyn, also believes that her brother didn’t take his own life. The way his body was found, naked, with no explanation, didn’t mesh with the man she knew. Price was obsessed with details. Appearances mattered. Accountability mattered. Bronwyn believes her brother would have put on a uniform if he intended to end his life, and she’s also certain Price would have left a note; he was a writer who penned thoughtful letters. The last time she saw her brother, he told her that suicide was “the coward’s way out.”

“I get it that really perfectionist people kill themselves. People who people don't expect to kill themselves do kill themselves. I get all of that,” Bronwyn Price told me. “I’m not delusional. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen. I’m just saying they have shown me no evidence that that happened. The only evidence there is all says he was murdered.”

For the family, the pain of their loss was compounded by their feeling that the SEALs failed to honor Price. “They will tell you that the reason they don't honor Job is because he killed himself in theater, which means while he was deployed, which means he gave up on his men, and he was a coward,” Bronwyn Price said. “That's why it's looked differently upon. And that's the shame my father bore all these years.”  (A representative of Naval Special Warfare told me that Price’s name is inscribed on a Wall of Honor at the headquarters of the East Coast SEAL teams.)

Job Price and his sister, Bronwyn.

Harry Price, who died earlier this year at 86, was a retired associate headmaster at a Pottstown boarding school that Donald Trump’s sons attended. He spent the last years of his life trying in vain to clear his son’s name.

“I have been reaching out to those I believe can help me,” Harry Price wrote to Donald Trump Jr. in 2015. “I have dear friends, some military and some civilian, who have been prompting me to keep pushing for a reopening of this investigation due to the glaring inconsistencies and the new information coming to light. We are seeking your help in any way possible.”

No help came from the Trump family.

Crime Scene “Irregularities”

Cubbler and the Price family weren’t the only ones who thought the details of how Price’s body was found didn’t add up. Military investigators also noted several “irregularities” in the crime scene.

The position of the SEAL commander’s body was one irregularity, but investigators pointed out that it was “within the realm of possibility and not inconsistent with the finding that his death was a suicide.” The location of the spent bullet under Price’s bed also puzzled investigators. Other irregularities included the SEAL commander’s “positive outlook,” expressed in emails, and his focus on planned events the following day. Family members said Price looked forward to attending Naval War College in Newport, R.I., when he returned from Afghanistan.

“Despite these irregularities, the preponderance of the evidence indicates that Cmdr. Price’s death was a suicide,” the NCIS investigator wrote. “Witnesses consistently stated that Cmdr. Price was under considerable stress and not acting in a manner consistent with his past behavior. Cmdr. Price was not exercising, eating poorly, dehydrated, and having difficulty sleeping.” Price was said to have been deeply affected by the death of Kevin Ebbert, a 32-year-old corpsman with SEAL Team Four, who was killed by enemy fire on Nov. 24.

Those who served with Price in Afghanistan painted a picture for investigators of a man who was unraveling. The Navy JAG assigned to SEAL Team Four told military investigators that Price was “increasingly withdrawn, abrupt, erratic, lethargic, and disheveled.” The JAG believed the SEAL commander was “extremely disturbed and not mentally sound” but not suicidal. “We all realized he was struggling, but not to a degree that was dangerous,” the JAG told investigators. Two weeks before he died, senior enlisted SEALs and officers told Price in a meeting that they were worried about him and not receiving clear guidance on the mission.

The day he died, Price seemed happier than he had been in the weeks prior. He appeared less pale, made jokes, and laughed. He told staff how proud he was of them. “At the time, the staff believed that Cmdr. Price had merely gotten more rest or recovered from being sick,” the NCIS investigation noted. “In retrospect, the staff implied a belief that Cmdr. Price had made the decision to take his life and was saying goodbye.”

The SEALs and the Defense Department as a whole have made strides in recent years to address warning signs and problem behaviors that could be indicators of mental health issues. At least a dozen SEALs have died by suicide in the last ten years, either while in the military or shortly after leaving, The New York Times reported.

Those who knew Price well had a hard time accepting that the stresses of the deployment caused Price to take his own life. No one doubted Price was exhausted and under pressure, but this was his 13th career deployment. Since completing Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training in 1994, Price had handled stresses that few people could. In his nearly 20 years in the SEALs, Price had been awarded four Bronze Stars and five medals for meritorious service.

Fellow officers knew Price as someone who could be relied upon day and night. Team Four’s executive officer, who told military investigators that Price “was hands-down my best commanding officer,” said he demonstrated “extreme professional dedication” to the team and the mission. In a note shared with the Price family, Dan Marshall, a retired SEAL command master chief, called Price “an exceptional leader, one of the best I ever served under.” Retired SEAL Vice Adm. Collin P. Green penned a handwritten note to Price’s father in 2019, when Green headed Naval Special Warfare Command. Green recalled how much he had learned from Price when they lived together in Bahrain for a year. “Job will never be forgotten,” Green wrote. “Thanks for raising a man like him.”

The only hard evidence that Cubbler says showed Price was depressed were the 15 Valium tablets he was prescribed on Dec. 13 for anxiety and lack of sleep. “That is the only thing that anyone associated with his death investigation has ever pointed to other than the fact that he was lying in bed with a gunshot wound to his head and with a gun in his hand,” Cubbler told me. “But that isn’t actually evidence of suicide. There’s no evidence of suicide. It’s evidence of murder.”

Missing SEAL cash

Cubbler’s initial impression that the NCIS investigation of Price’s death was, at best, seriously flawed or, worse, a coverup, has only strengthened over time. While Cubbler is confident that the evidence shows Price didn’t kill himself, he can’t say who did.

Price’s final deployment was rife with internal tensions. Some members of Price’s unit despised him for his demanding, by-the-book leadership style. And the SEAL commander was investigating previously unreported corruption by his men.

Three members of the special operations community, none of whom believe that Price killed himself, told me that the SEAL commander’s death may have had something to do with missing informant money.  Approximately $30,000 in cash disappeared during Team Four’s deployment in Afghanistan. The money was supposed to be used by specially-trained SEALs to pay locals for information about the Taliban and other threats in the country, but poor record-keeping invited abuses.

It wouldn’t be the first time SEAL funds vanished. In 2017, Staff Sgt. Logan Melgar, a Green Beret, reportedly discovered SEALs were stealing informant money in Africa and was killed by two members of SEAL Team Six in what may have been a hazing incident that went wrong. Cash also went missing in 2009 when Team Six rescued Capt. Richard Phillips from Somali pirates who hijacked his cargo ship, the Maersk Alabama. Phillips gave the pirates $30,000, which subsequently disappeared.

Several former members of SEAL Team Six, the secretive unit that killed terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, said that informant money had been frequently pilfered by its members. “The system is ripe for abuse,” a former Team Six leader told The Intercept in 2018. “We knew this money wasn’t being tracked, and guys were stuffing their pockets.”

According to the three sources in the special operations community, a senior chief previously assigned to Team Six controlled the cash that went missing in Afghanistan. At Team Four, the senior chief raised concerns that he was undermining platoon leadership by fraternizing with junior enlisted SEALs by hosting them at parties and living with two new team members.  According to one source, Price discovered the cash was missing in Afghanistan, questioned the senior chief about it, and gave him a deadline to explain what happened shortly before he died.  

Those who knew Price say he would have cracked down hard if he found that the money meant for informants had gone missing. “He was hard but fair,” a former senior enlisted SEAL who served under him told me. “That means something to a military man.” Price wasn’t a fan of the kick-ass-and-take-no-prisoners image that some in the teams cultivated. His family says he wanted to change the motto of SEAL Team Four from “mal od osteo”—Latin for “bad to the bone”—to the famous Goethe quote: “The deed is everything, the glory nothing.”

Price’s leadership grated on some of the newer men under his command who wanted things run more loosely. “He took his job really, really seriously. Too seriously,” said Rob Huberty, a former SEAL who served under Price on his final deployment. “I have sympathy now for him, but I hated him, and so did everyone else.”

“I know why now, but I couldn't see it then, and it's because he wanted to be the best he could be,” Huberty said on an episode of the YouTube show Combat Story released last year. “He wanted to be perfect. He was a guy who was not going to leave his office until late in the morning on stuff that I feel is fairly inconsequential—how your PowerPoint deck looked. He was a tireless tyrant.” Price was both a “completely ineffective leader” and, at the same time, “completely competent,” Huberty said.

Price may have been hard on his men because things had gotten out of hand in SEAL Team Two, the unit he relieved in Afghanistan. Army Green Berets who served with the SEALs accused them of throwing grenades over the wall of a remote compound in Kalach, Afghanistan “for no particular reason.” The SEALs fired .50-caliber rounds at random vehicles. “Something else I witnessed several times was during ops, the SEALs would sometimes use a slingshot to shoot children in the face with hard candy,” one Green Beret told investigators.

In a story first reported by The New York Times, three SEALs with Team Two were investigated and accused of abusing Afghan detainees. The SEALs allegedly kicked detainees, dropped rocks on them, fired pistols near at least one of them, and poured water down their throats until they choked. One SEAL allegedly dragged a detainee by a scarf wrapped around his neck. After the detainees were released, one of them died. The charges against the SEALs were dismissed twice—first, in an administrative proceeding known as a Captain’s Mast and then in a court-martial.

Was Price caught up in a clash with corrupt SEALs? Did it add up to murder?

Cubbler hopes to find out. He has never forgotten his promise to Harry Price and carries on the father’s mission to clear his son’s name.

“I don’t believe in my heart of hearts that the Navy or DOD is going to open an investigation unless I can get a confession or someone who was part of the cover-up admits to their role,” Cubbler said. “What do I think is a realistic outcome is that the window of opportunity is now open for the Navy to acknowledge the overwhelming evidence that Job didn’t kill himself and change his cause of death. And that would allow Job to finally be honored for his service and sacrifice to his country and give his family the closure they have been seeking.”