Veterans For America

Joel Currier, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

WELDON SPRING — The veins in Marshall Fink’s neck bulged with fury as he pumped his fist, telling his parents they should stick a shotgun in their mouths and pull the trigger.

His mother and stepfather begged Fink, 26, to take his medication and calm down.

That set him off.

Fink put his fingers to his head, pretending to have a gun, then pointed at his parents. He chest-bumped his mother into the garage, snarling and telling her she should die.

Shirlee and John Gentles called 911 several times the night of Jan. 11.

The police were on their way, but by the time they arrived John Gentles had fatally shot his stepson.

In a little over two years, Fink’s satisfying career in the Navy dissolved into a struggle with bipolar disorder that tormented him and ripped apart his family. His psychiatrist says the stress of the Navy career he loved contributed to the disease.

CHAOTIC NIGHT

“Please, Marshall, you’re hurting me and I love you,” said Shirlee Gentles, 52. “You’re scaring me, and I just want you to get help.”

She ran outside to the driveway. But Fink dragged her back inside. He had punched holes in the garage drywall.

“You’re not going anywhere,” he yelled.

Gentles grabbed her 12-year-old son, James, and managed to run to a neighbor’s house.

Meanwhile, her husband took his 9 mm pistol out of the closet and showed it to his stepson, who did not have a weapon.

“Marshall, this is loaded and you’re going to listen to us,” said Gentles, 62. “You need to go to the hospital.”

Fink lunged and got within an arm’s length of his stepfather when Gentles fired one shot into Fink’s stomach. He bled to death on the kitchen floor.

Police arrested Gentles, a dentist, questioned him and released him the next day. Prosecutors said he killed Fink in self-defense, and no charges were filed.

A HAPPY CHILDHOOD

Shirlee Gentles remarried and moved to the St. Louis area when Fink was 5 years old. He grew up with two stepsisters, Heather, now 28, and Allison, now 23, and his half brother, James.

Fink’s family said he and his stepfather had a good relationship, but that Fink was closer to his father, Richard “Dick” Fink, who lived near Chicago. Together, they restored classic cars and motorcycles, and spent many weekends attending swap meets and auto shows.

“He was just a fanatic about cars,” said Heather Gentles. “He and Dick shared that passion.”

Jonathan Coffin, one of Fink’s best friends in high school, said they often stayed up all night restoring Fink’s light blue, rare Mustang and cruising.

Coffin, 26, of St. Peters, also said Fink was a talented guitarist who loved jamming to his favorite songs by the Doors, Metallica and the Grateful Dead.

Fifteen months after graduating from Francis Howell High School, Fink enlisted in the Navy, inspired by the Sept. 11 attacks to serve his country.

ILLNESS TAKES HOLD

Fink was stationed at the Naval base in San Diego as a mechanic aboard the Peleliu assault ship.

“It was a natural fit that he would go and work on engines,” Shirlee Gentles said.

For more than two years, his service record was clean; his superiors even wrote him several letters of commendation. Fink wanted a career in the Navy, but a conflict of highs and lows was escalating inside his head.

“Something happened to him in the Navy,” Heather Gentles said. “He just was never going to be the same.”

Fink’s illness developed quickly and was brought on in part by stress and lack of sleep, said his psychiatrist in St. Charles, Dr. Greg Mattingly. Fink’s condition emerged about the same age as most bipolar patients, Mattingly said, and was not spurred by any specific traumatic incident.

“With bipolar, you can go from pretty much normal one day, to the next day being very, very, very sick,” Mattingly said.

Fink mouthed off to his commanders, stopped eating regularly and lost 20 pounds. He grew increasingly paranoid, and in September 2005, doctors at the Naval Medical Center in San Diego diagnosed his condition as bipolar disorder, which often results in episodes of severe depression and mania. It affects more than 5 million Americans.

Most people who develop the disorder are genetically predisposed to it, Mattingly said. Along with stress and sleep deprivation, he said, substance abuse is another common trigger. Fink had begun taking legal stimulants as part of a body-building regimen.

Because of Fink’s diagnosis, the Navy started discharge proceedings.

Fink challenged the diagnosis. He wanted the chance to return to active duty, but the Navy considered him unfit to serve.

Devastated, Fink went AWOL, hoping it would somehow delay his discharge.

Fink made plans to come home for Christmas. His mother drove to the airport on Christmas Day, but he hadn’t boarded his flight. Meanwhile, the Navy declared Fink a deserter.

His mother looked for him for almost two months. She made dozens of phone calls to Navy commanders, comrades and congressmen seeking their help.

Thinking her son could have been kidnapped or killed, she called police in San Diego to report him missing.

Detectives checked bank records and found an ATM transaction in Yuma, Ariz., where police tracked him to a motel.

Officers returned him to base to face a trial by court martial. Fink accepted a discharge classified as “other than honorable” in lieu of a trial. His mother is still fighting to have his discharge changed to honorable.

BACK TO ST. CHARLES COUNTY

In September 2006, Fink packed up a U-Haul and drove from San Diego to Weldon Spring in two days, hardly stopping.

As soon as he got home, he closed all the window blinds because he believed people were watching him.

Fink became a night owl. He rarely slept. He paced at night and slammed doors when he’d go outside to smoke. Once, at 2 a.m., he grabbed a pitchfork and began turning mulch in the yard.

Fink stopped eating because he thought his parents were trying to poison him. Instead of food, he took ephedrine pills, caffeine powder and drank his parents’ liquor. He hid the empty bottles in his room, where he spent hours sitting alone in the dark.

“When I came home last year, something was off. It just wasn’t him,” his stepsister said. “Somehow, Marshall was locked away.”

Fink became delusional. He thought Nazis were coming after him and talked of holding down his little brother to give him a tattoo of a swastika because he thought he was a Nazi.

Shirlee Gentles says she saw more than a dozen doctors to treat her own medical problems caused by anxiety over her son.

The loaded revolver she found under her son’s bed pillows compounded her fears.

“Every night for two years, I slept with one eye open because I thought he was going to kill us,” she said. “The stress was killing me.”

GETTING HELP

Three months after he came home, his parents had him committed to St. Joseph Health Center in St. Charles, where he was put on suicide watch. During treatment, Fink attacked a doctor and was put in restraints.

After almost a month, he felt well enough to come home, thanks to new medication.

Fink found a job as a mechanic at a boat dealership and repair shop in St. Charles. His co-workers said he was funny, polite and reliable.

Fink even wanted to buy a house and took his grandmother, Hazel Nyquist, with him to look at homes for sale in St. Louis.

“Just the week before (the shooting) I was saying, ‘It’s a good thing Marshall’s feeling so good,’” said Nyquist, 86, of St. Peters. “I thought things were really moving along. Apparently, they weren’t.”

In the weeks before his death, Fink confided in a co-worker that he felt lonely and depressed.

Meanwhile, the family struggled to help Fink get better. This past Christmas, Fink attended a family gathering in the Chicago area where he saw his father.

“It was a real joy to have him be with us,” said Richard Fink, 56, of Dundee, Ill. “He seemed good.”

But he said his son complained of frequent headaches brought on by medication. So Fink stopped taking it.

THE FINAL DAYS

Fink further isolated himself in the last days of his life. He stayed in his room most of the time. He called in sick to work. On days he did work, his co-workers said, he was distracted, spending at least 10 hours on tasks that should have taken two hours.

At one point, Fink called his stepfather to the computer to show him a video on the Internet of an execution-style killing.

Shirlee and John Gentles suspected he had stopped taking his medication, and his mother began arrangements to have him committed again.

On the night of his death, Shirlee Gentles said, Fink was tormented by anger she had never seen. “There’s no way to explain what happened that day,” she said.

Fink’s father has questioned the shooting, wondering why John Gentles grabbed his gun instead of leaving the house to wait for police to arrive.

“If he didn’t have this weapon, what would have happened? A black eye?” Richard Fink said.

When police told Gentles that Fink had died, he gasped and buried his face in his hands.

“I didn’t want to kill him,” Gentles told detectives. “I just wanted to stop him because I thought he was going to kill us.”

Shirlee Gentles said her husband is still too distraught to discuss with anyone the night he killed his stepson.

FINDING PEACE

The Gentleses’ home is calm again. There is no more pacing in the dark. No more slamming doors. No more screaming.

And for the first time in more than two years, Shirlee Gentles says, she can sleep through the night without worrying.

She doesn’t blame her husband for killing their son. She blames the disorder for destroying the person he used to be.

“This illness robbed us of a beautiful, beautiful son,” she says. “On the one hand, I would do anything to have him back. On the other, we have peace of mind.”