Sgt. Quandarius Stanley suffered a brain injury in last year’s Gaza pier mission. His recovery was cut short by his unexpected and mysterious death.

MARION, South Carolina — Just days before Sgt. Quandarius Stanley died in his Veterans Affairs hospital bed, his mother saw a glimmer of recovery.

The 23-year old soldier was struck by a forklift last May, resulting in devastating head injuries, while on the ill-fated U.S. mission to build a pier off Gaza for humanitarian aid delivery. He was left fighting for his life in an Israeli hospital, then transferred to Texas for months of intensive care — unable to move or speak.

In late October, a dental hygienist asked him to open his mouth for a quick look. He opened wide — the first time in five months he had responded to anyone, his mother Anna Stanley recalled.

The room erupted in applause. Anna was deep into planning for his discharge, and this small miracle filled her with hope. He would need lifelong care, but he would be home.

In the predawn morning of Oct. 31, VA hospital staff found Quandarius unresponsive. His mother rushed to the lobby, still in her pajamas, and banged on the glass doors at the entrance, desperate to see her son.

He was already dead.

“They dropped the ball,” Anna said in an interview, with reams of VA records stacked on her coffee table detailing the death of her only child. “Everybody was shocked.”

The private autopsy she requested would raise alarming questions about Quandarius’s final moments. His blood showed “markedly elevated levels” of a medication used to treat his involuntary movements, and he probably died as a result of the toxicity, the report found. The autopsy also detected the presence of alcohol, a bewildering conclusion given his only way to ingest nutrients was through a feeding tube in his stomach.

His family has been left to confront these mysteries on the first anniversary of his injury off the Gaza coast, and the first Memorial Day at home without him.

Army and VA officials, they said, have been unable to fully answer two essential questions: What or whom was at fault for the forklift injury at sea? And why, when Quandarius showed promise of getting better, did he die unexpectedly under close medical supervision?

This story is based on interviews with the Stanley family, the findings of an Army investigation into the incident off Gaza and a review of dozens of pages of Quandarius’s medical information, including VA records and his private autopsy report.

VA press secretary Pete Kasperowicz declined to answer questions about Stanley’s care and death at the William Jennings Bryan Dorn VA Medical Center in Columbia, South Carolina. VA officials also declined requests to make Quandarius’s doctors available for an interview, or say whether his death was investigated.

“VA extends its deepest condolences to the family of Sgt. Stanley,” Kasperowicz said. “VA remains committed to providing high-quality care to all Veterans.”

Army Central, which oversees operations throughout the Middle East and led the accident investigation, found numerous leadership shortfalls and safety gaps in Quandarius’s brigade but said it did not recommend any punishment over the forklift accident. It also did not identify any commander or unit responsible for the outcome.

“Multiple factors contributed to this incident,” said Lt. Col. Christina Wright, an Army Central spokesperson, who said the findings helped implement safer methods to work on temporary piers. More than 60 personnel were injured on last year’s Gaza mission.

Anna was left frustrated by the Army’s lack of accountability and communication. Social media posts and comments on Instagram provided more information about the accident than the Army itself, she said, and journalists received the Army’s findings before she did, sending a message that leadership has not prioritized him or his family.

The report mentions her son’s first name 19 times. It’s spelled correctly only once.

From South Carolina to Gaza

Quandarius Stanley — “Quan” to his friends — seemed destined for a life in uniform.

His grandfather and great-uncle served as Army infantrymen in Vietnam. Only his grandfather returned home alive. But that did not dampen the elder Stanley’s enthusiasm for his grandson to enlist.

“He said, ‘There is nothing around here … go see the world,’” Anna recalled. Front-line combat didn’t appeal to her son, she said, so he enlisted as a truck driver in 2020, mirroring his father’s civilian career.

Reserved and bespectacled, with a penchant for basketball video games, Quandarius excelled, winning the praise of commanders for his leadership potential as he climbed the ranks to become a noncommissioned officer.

He had looked forward to the mission to deliver aid for starving people in Gaza, which Israel has largely destroyed in its air and ground operations targeting Hamas, the perpetrator of the Oct. 7, 2023, surprise attack.

Bringing relief to people in need was the kind of hard and rewarding work, his mother said, that made Quandarius seriously consider the Army as a lifelong career.

By the spring of 2024, about six months into Israel’s relentless offensive against Hamas militants, tens of thousands of Gazans had been killed. Israel had sealed border crossings, allowing only a trickle of food and humanitarian aid into the besieged enclave. President Joe Biden directed the U.S. military to lead an emergency mission to build a temporary pier on Gaza’s Mediterranean shore to deliver food, water, medicine and shelters.

Quandarius’s unit, the 7th Transportation Brigade (Expeditionary), set sail in March 2024.

The pier mission was disastrous from the start. Rough seas tore the structure apart. Boats went unmoored and ran aground. The pier mission ran for three months, but it was functional for only about 20 days before commanders called it off. The U.S. off-loaded what relief groups said was a sliver of the actual need for Gaza, where nearly all of its 2 million population faced extreme hunger at the time.

A Pentagon inspector general investigation would later find that Army and Navy units lacked proper resources, forcing troops to do more with less, all while managing a chaotic and fast-changing mission.

The Army’s safety investigation found numerous problems at all levels of the brigade. Leaders failed to consider the elevated risks of complex loading and off-loading operations, exacerbated by undertrained and unfamiliar teams of soldiers working in close quarters with heavy machinery, according to partially redacted findings obtained by The Washington Post through a Freedom of Information Act request.

At one point, leaders ordered that more pallets be loaded, creating an even greater sense of urgency among exhausted troops. “The change in operations desynchronized an already stressful environment, leading to shortcuts,” the investigation said.

‘I felt I hit something’

In the middle of the night on May 23, Quandarius was in the bowels of the transport ship MV Roy P. Benavidez, where he joined other soldiers on their way to consolidate pallets.

A forklift “raced” through the area after picking up a load, investigators wrote, approaching Stanley and others from behind. The forklift driver did not have a ground guide — someone that walks in front of the vehicle to ensure the path is kept clear.

The driver saw someone’s head. They jerked the wheel.

“That’s when I felt I hit something,” the driver, whose name was redacted from the report, wrote in a statement.

Anna was driving when someone from her son’s home base called. Her mind went to a terrible place.

“What happened to my baby?” she asked. The caller advised her to pull over to hear what he said next.

She flew to Israel to be at her son’s bedside. He was alive. Yet his fortunes had grown far worse since he was evacuated. He had been deprived of air for as long as 12 minutes and needed to be resuscitated. Anna said she was told by his care team in Tel Aviv they made a mistake with his breathing tube.

The “inadvertent esophageal intubation” starved his brain of oxygen and blood flow, causing “severe anoxic brain injury,” his VA records later noted.

The hospital said in a statement that Quandarius’s intubation procedure was reviewed and found to be executed by experienced staff in line with medical standards. “This case, like others, was presented to the medical team to promote learning and improve future care,” said Elsa Kuperman, a spokesperson for Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center Ichilov.

He was moved to an Army trauma center in San Antonio. The grace and commitment from his medical team was astounding, his mother said. His Army buddies visited, including one soldier who often received a haircut from her son. Now the roles were reversed, and he lovingly gave Quan a military fade.

His doctors told Anna he was young; his brain could still heal.

“He was doing fine,” his mother said. “He was beating the odds.”

A death at VA

The plan was coming together to bring Quandarius back home to South Carolina.

He was transferred to a VA hospital in Columbia on Oct. 22, where his mother and aunt attended appointments to learn how to become caregivers — how to help him up, how to wash him.

Quandarius would stay there until his childhood home received VA-funded modifications to fit medical equipment, a process his family hoped would be finished by Thanksgiving.

But the care he received made his mother uneasy. His room lacked a suction device, which would keep him from choking on saliva, she said. The staff gave him quick sponge baths, not the more thorough showers in a chair he received in San Antonio. He was often drenched in sweat.

She felt the VA staff in Columbia was more accustomed to older veterans with injuries suffered long ago, she said, and may not have fully grasped his acute needs.

“They didn’t take his care seriously,” she said.

Anna was staying at a family housing complex on the hospital grounds when the phone rang in the early hours of Oct. 31. Quandarius was pronounced dead at 6:01 a.m. A chaplain later arrived to comfort her. “Mother tearful and sitting at Veteran’s bedside,” a staffer noted in his medical record.

His mother did not trust the hospital to conduct an autopsy and opted for a private procedure.

The report revealed toxic levels of amantadine, a drug typically used to treat Parkinson’s disease and prescribed to ease his spastic movements. Underlying bronchopneumonia may have been potential factor, the autopsy said.

The autopsy also found liver congestion and inexplicable traces of ethanol — the equivalent of three beers’ worth, Anna recalled the medical examiner saying. It was a puzzling disclosure for a immobile patient who had shrunk to under 100 pounds.

VA was provided samples from the private autopsy for their own review, Anna said. But seven months later, she has yet to receive a cause of death or be issued a death certificate from the county or VA, which is vital to unlock veteran survivor benefits.

Anna stopped by Quandarius’s grave site this Mother’s Day to freshen his flowers. Her job as a bus driver takes her by the plot every day. Hey, Quan, she’ll say out loud as she rolls by. Good night, Quan, she’ll say on the way home.

Quandarius was the oldest of 10 cousins, one of whom recently had a baby boy. It’s the closest Anna will get, she said, to being a grandmother.

One of those cousins, now 21, watched Quandarius make something of himself in the military and planned to follow him into the service.

But he’s looking elsewhere after watching Quandarius slip through the cracks. Maybe he’ll become a welder, Anna said, or a truck driver like his big cousin.

Whatever he does, it won’t be in the Army.

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