Sixteen Year Struggle

            Sixteen years. That’s how long Connie Gruber waited for justice. And just this year, she finally got it. Kneeling in front of her husband’s grave this past Friday, she felt true peace for the first time since April 8, 2000. It was on that day that her husband had died, and had been blamed for the deaths of 18 others.

            Brooks and Connie Gruber got married in 1992, after originally meeting on a blind date. He was a helicopter pilot- a first lieutenant, and she was a teacher at the Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville. The couple celebrated the birth of their first child—Brooke—in July of 1999, and seemed to have much to be excited about as they entered the 2000s millennia. Brooks had just received a new (and very elite) assignment—to be one of the first individuals to fly the Osprey, a hybrid aircraft that can take off and land like a helicopter, and fly horizontally like a plane with fixed wings. Gruber was extremely excited about this assignment.

            On April 8, 2000, Gruber was piloting an Osprey in a simulated rescue operation in Arizona. Little is known about what actually happened, but another Osprey was being flown 5 minutes behind the Osprey that Gruber was flying, and the individuals in this Osprey witnessed the aftermath. As they flew over the desert, they saw Gruber’s Osprey, on the ground, burning. All 19 aboard had died.

Investigation of the Osprey crash that killed 19 people including Brooks Gruber.

            In the aftermath of the crash, predictably, Connie Gruber was devastated. Her future dreams and plans were suddenly now gone, along with the love of her life. But to add insult to injury, the media reported that the cause of the crash was pilot error, though no details of the crash were actually known. Connie was furious that her husband’s name and reputation had been smeared through the mud based on assumptions. She believed in his innocence, and decided to take up a fight to get his named cleared. She began knocking on doors, writing the pentagon, writing congressmen. Nobody seemed to care enough to help her in her fight. This continued for 16 years.

            In the meantime, the number of Osprey accidents mounted. More and more people died while testing Ospreys, and Connie Gruber finally began to see that her belief in her husband’s innocence had substance, and that she finally had proof to point to to defend her husband. However, it seemed that most people still were not interested in helping her.

            Finally, Connie found help. A man by the name of Walter Jones, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, received a letter from Connie. It immediately touched him, and he decided to look into the matter. He came to agree with Connie’s stance, and fought extremely hard to collect evidence to show Gruber’s innocence. After compiling much evidence, he found that there was a design flaw in some of the earlier Ospreys.

Connie Gruber (right) poses with her daughter (middle) and House Armed Services Committee member Walter Jones (left).

After all this, Connie finally was able to find somebody with the authority to clear her husband’s name that would actually listen to her: Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert O. Work. He looked into the matter and agreed with Connie, based on the evidence that Jones had found. So, Work wrote a letter formally clearing Brooks Gruber and his co-pilot of any misconduct, and he hand-delivered it to Connie on February 17. After 16 years of fighting for her husband, she finally achieved her goal, and as she kneeled by her husband’s grave this past Friday (the 16^th anniversary of his death), it was the first time she felt completely free since that horrible day; her husband’s name  had finally been cleared.

Brooks Gruber