Bethea spent nearly a year at sea documenting daily life on the ship, taking hundreds of photographs that her sister says formed a kind of visual diary of her deployment. The USS Fort Lauderdale was operating in the Caribbean as part of the Trump administration's mission around Venezuela, which included the capture of Nicholas M. She died about a month before the ship returned to Norfolk, Virginia, in July.
Her sister, Arianna Calderon, told NPR the family blames gaps in health care access and the length of the deployment for what happened. "Nothing matters to me more than my sister," Calderon said. "Nothing ever has. I lost my world, genuinely. I lost everything, and all I care about now is getting some semblance of justice."
The loss raises hard questions about what kind of mental health support service members get during long stretches at sea, especially for a family that watched an 11-month deployment stretch on without their sailor coming home. Calderon says she wants accountability, not just grief.
She never made it back to Norfolk to see any of those pictures printed.