THE LONG COUNT: We Started With Two Names. The List Didn’t Stop.
A Caltech astronomer shot on his porch. Three AFRL employees dead in one night. A charge dismissed eleven days before a killing. And the same institution at the center of every single case.
SUBJECT: PATTERN ANALYSIS // AFRL-CONNECTED CASUALTIES, JUNE 2025 - FEBRUARY 2026
DATE: MARCH 18, 2026
CROSS-REF: [THE GHOST GENERAL] [THE DEAD DROP] [THE GREEN BURIAL]
DATA CONFIDENCE: HIGH (LASD PRESS RELEASES, BERNALILLO COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE, FBI ALBUQUERQUE FIELD OFFICE, WRIGHT-PATTERSON AFB PUBLIC AFFAIRS, WEST MILTON POLICE DEPARTMENT, OHIO BUREAU OF CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION, LA COUNTY MEDICAL EXAMINER, CALTECH/IPAC, NASA JPL/NEO SURVEYOR, DTIC, USPTO, UNSW ALUMNI MEMORIAL, CONGRESSIONAL TESTIMONY, NBC DATELINE, DOE/NNMCAB, THE SALTY SOLDIER, ABC7, FOX19, WHIO, DAYTON DAILY NEWS, NEWSWEEK, NATURE, AV PRESS, TAOS NEWS, SPACENEWS, DEFENSE NEWS, OHIO DEPT OF HEALTH VITAL STATISTICS)
Where We Are
Ten days ago, we published THE GHOST GENERAL. Every outlet ran the same story about Major General William Neil McCasland: retired general, medical concerns, check your cameras. We ran the public records. We found his business partner misidentified as a community acquaintance in every article. We found his wife’s astronaut-semifinalist career that nobody reported. We mapped $450 million in active defense contracts across the institutions he built and advised. Two days later, in THE DEAD DROP, we followed the digital trail to @TMBSPACESHIPS, an anonymous X account that went silent the day McCasland vanished. We recovered a 1998 schematic from its archive and a reverse-engineered propulsion component list from the bleed-through on the back of the page. Attribution to McCasland: probable, not confirmed.
On Monday, we published THE GREEN BURIAL. Monica Jacinto Reza. The inventor of Mondaloy, the superalloy enabling America’s replacement for Russian rocket engines. The woman who waved at her hiking companion from 30 feet away on a ridgeline in the Angeles National Forest and ceased to exist. We documented the FLIR-negative search, the scent trail that ended at a misplaced beanie, the Find a Grave memorial created while helicopters were still searching. We connected her to McCasland through the AFRL funding chain and through their shared connection to Dallis Hardwick, Reza’s mentor, who co-invented the alloy and worked under McCasland’s command at Wright-Patterson. Her alloy. His budget. Their mentor. All three on the same program at the same time. Two of them now gone. The third dead of cancer in 2014.
That was Monday. We thought we had the full picture.
Then a commenter wrote four words: “Shades of the Marconi scientists.”
And a reader asked: “Any known connections to Nuno Loureiro or Carl Grillmair?”
We started looking. What we found is worse than what we expected.
The Astronomer
Carl Johann Grillmair spent nearly 30 years at Caltech’s Infrared Processing and Analysis Center. IPAC. If you’ve read a headline about NASA detecting an asteroid with NEOWISE, or water on another planet, the data pipeline that processed that detection was one he helped operate.
He was the instrument characterization specialist for NEO Surveyor, the first space telescope built specifically to find objects that could hit Earth. He ran quality assurance on the NEOWISE Science Data Center. He published 147 peer-reviewed papers. He lived in the desert because the nighttime darkness was better for watching the sky. He built his own observatory at his home. He flew small planes and gliders that he maintained himself, and he’d cheerfully take anyone up who asked. His work was quiet. The implications were not.
The algorithms Grillmair built and validated do one thing: find a dark, cold object against the black of space using nothing but the heat it borrowed from the sun. That’s how you find an asteroid. It’s also how you find a Chinese satellite. Or a Russian hypersonic glide vehicle. Same math. Same pipeline. Different customer.
The Air Force Research Laboratory knows this. AFOSR, one of the lab’s own directorates, funds research into long-wavelength infrared detection in the same spectral bands that Grillmair’s NEOWISE telescope operates in. Planetary defense and missile defense are the same physics problem with different names. And Grillmair was one of the people who made the physics work.
And IPAC doesn’t exist in isolation. It’s responsible for processing all NEO Surveyor data. NEO Surveyor is being developed by JPL. JPL is managed by Caltech. Grillmair’s IPAC and Monica Reza’s JPL are the same institutional family. The same campus corridor. The same stretch of the San Gabriel Valley where America’s planetary defense infrastructure lives.
On the morning of February 16, 2026, at approximately 6:10 a.m., LA County Sheriff’s deputies responded to a 911 call in the 30700 block of 165th Street East in Llano. A rural desert community in the Antelope Valley. They found Grillmair on his front porch. Gunshot wound to the torso. Dead at the scene.
Freddy Snyder, 29, was arrested later that day after a carjacking in the same area. He was charged with murder, carjacking, and a December 28 burglary. Bail set at $3.175 million. Arraignment scheduled for March 26 in Lancaster.
That would be the end of it. A tragic, random act of rural violence. Except for what happened two months earlier.
Eleven Days
On December 20, 2025, Grillmair spotted someone on his property who didn’t belong there. He called law enforcement. When deputies arrived, they found Snyder in the area carrying a loaded, unregistered rifle. He told them he was walking to the post office.
Property records show Grillmair’s home and the local post office are in opposite directions from Snyder’s address.
Snyder was arrested. Charged with carrying a loaded firearm in a personal vehicle and attempted escape from jail. Two felonies. An armed man who lied about his destination, caught on the property of a scientist who works on classified-adjacent infrared sensing data.
On February 5, 2026, both charges were dismissed under California Penal Code 1385. Judicial discretion. “In the furtherance of justice.”
Eleven days later, Snyder was back on Grillmair’s porch with a gun.
The identity of the presiding judge who dismissed the charges has not been located in accessible public records. The case number has not been located. No motive for the killing has been publicly disclosed. Detectives say they don’t believe the two men knew each other.
Read that sequence one more time. Armed trespasser. Unregistered rifle. Lied about his destination. Caught on a Caltech scientist’s property. Arrested. Charges dismissed. Returned. Killed the scientist. And nobody can explain why any of it happened.
Snyder’s arraignment is scheduled for March 26 in Lancaster. He is the only perpetrator in the kinetic cases we document in this briefing who is still alive.
The Night Nobody Connected
We hadn’t heard about this one until a source on X flagged it. Once we verified it, the architecture of the pattern changed.
On October 25, 2025, Jacob Prichard, 34, killed his wife Jaymee at their home in Huber Heights, Ohio and placed her body in the trunk of their car. He then drove to Sugarcreek Township, broke into the apartment of a coworker, 1st Lt. Jaime Gustitus, 25, and shot her to death. He drove to the West Milton Municipal Building, parked in the safety exchange zone, opened the trunk so responding officers would find Jaymee, and killed himself on camera.
Two women. Two locations. One night.
All three were confirmed employees of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
Prichard was an Acquisition Project Manager in AFRL’s Sensors Directorate. That directorate develops technologies for air and space reconnaissance, surveillance, precision engagement, and electronic warfare. Space-based sensors. The same technological pipeline that feeds the infrared detection work Grillmair was doing at IPAC. His job was managing the advanced research programs that produce those systems.
Jaime Gustitus was an Operations Research Analyst in the 711th Human Performance Wing, part of AFRL. She grew up in Novi, Michigan, with three brothers and two sisters. She graduated from the Air Force Academy in 2022. She earned a Master of Science in Operations Research from the Air Force Institute of Technology. She held a Top Secret/SCI clearance. She specialized in mathematical and quantitative modeling for aerospace applications. She was the kind of person the Air Force spends a decade and millions of dollars building. She had been out of the Academy for three years.
Jaymee Prichard, 33, worked within the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center. Finance specialist. Her family described her earning her MBA “while working full-time and excelling as a mother.”
Three people connected to the Air Force’s research apparatus. Dead in a 12-hour window.
The investigation spans three Ohio counties. It is being run jointly by the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation, local police across Greene, Montgomery, and Miami counties, and the Air Force Office of Special Investigations.
AFOSI. Not base security. Not local PD. The Air Force’s counterintelligence and criminal investigation agency. The unit that handles espionage, counterintelligence threats, and criminal matters affecting Air Force operations.
Here is the detail that should keep you reading.
Months after the incident, authorities have explicitly stated they have not determined a motive. No confirmed affair. No restraining order. No documented history of domestic violence. The public record contains no explanation for why Jacob Prichard killed a TS/SCI-cleared operations research analyst and his own wife on a Saturday night in October.
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is where Dallis Hardwick spent her career. It is the installation William Neil McCasland commanded. It is where the government side of the Mondaloy partnership was managed.
Count It
Here is what we now have. Every fact below is sourced and verified.
Monica Jacinto Reza. Inventor of Mondaloy. AFRL-funded contractor, then JPL NASA. Vanished June 22, 2025.
Jacob Prichard. AFRL Sensors Directorate. Dead October 25, 2025.
Jaymee Prichard. AFLCMC, Wright-Patterson. Dead October 25, 2025.
1st Lt. Jaime Gustitus. AFRL 711th Human Performance Wing, TS/SCI cleared. Dead October 25, 2025.
Carl Grillmair. Caltech/IPAC. NEOWISE pipeline. NEO Surveyor instrument characterization. Shot dead February 16, 2026.
William Neil McCasland. Former AFRL Commander. Vanished February 27, 2026.
Six people. Nine months. Every one of them connected to the Air Force’s research laboratory or the institutions it directly funds. AFRL is the entity that develops and transitions the most sensitive aerospace technologies in the American defense arsenal. Every name on this list connects to it.
Behind them in the chain sits Dallis Hardwick, Reza’s mentor and co-inventor of Mondaloy. She worked at AFRL’s Materials Directorate at Wright-Patterson until her retirement in 2012. According to a 2024 memorial published by the University of New South Wales, she died on January 5, 2014, after a stage four breast cancer diagnosis. After publication, a reader located her Ohio death certificate in state records. It confirms the UNSW account: she died at Hospice of Dayton. The certifying physician, not a coroner, signed the certificate. No investigation. No autopsy. Her death was natural.
What remains unusual is the silence around it. The only U.S. record is a Dignity Memorial listing through Tobias Funeral Home in Dayton. It contains her name, her dates, and nothing else. No biographical detail. No survivors. No services. No AFRL memorial notice. No Dayton Daily News death listing. A senior civilian scientist who won the Meritorious Civilian Service Medal and spent years at one of the most prominent Air Force installations in the country, and the sum total of her domestic death record is a stub page on a funeral home aggregator and a memorial published by a university on the other side of the world, a decade after she died.
The Architecture
Now step back and look at what connects them.
Hardwick and Reza invented the alloy. The patent is public record. US 2010/0266442 A1. “Burn-Resistant and High Tensile Strength Metal Alloys.” Jacinto et al.
McCasland commanded the laboratory that funded the alloy’s maturation. The lab directed the Hydrocarbon Boost program and the assessment of Mondaloy for preburners, thrust chambers, and hydrostatic bearings. His $4.4 billion portfolio paid for the work that would put Reza’s metal inside American rocket engines. When he took command in May 2011, Hardwick was still one of his senior civilian scientists. All three were on the same program at the same time.
That program existed for one reason. Every time the United States launched a spy satellite, a GPS satellite, or a military communications satellite for the better part of two decades, it did so on a Russian engine. The RD-180. Built in Moscow. Sold to America because America couldn’t build its own. Congress held hearings about it. The Air Force called it an unacceptable national security vulnerability. Mondaloy was the fix. The material breakthrough that finally made a domestic replacement engine possible. The AR1 has twelve components made of Mondaloy. Pre-burners. Turbine rotors. Turbine housings. Every part that touches the fire. In March 2022, Russia cut off RD-180 servicing in retaliation for Ukraine sanctions. The alloy Monica Reza invented is what stands between the United States and a gap in its ability to put national security assets into orbit.
Grillmair connects through a different channel but the same institution. IPAC processes data for NEO Surveyor, which is developed by JPL, which is managed by Caltech. JPL is where Reza was working when she vanished. The lab funds infrared sensing research in the same spectral bands that Grillmair’s NEOWISE telescope operates in. Infrared detection of dark space objects is dual-use: the same physics that finds asteroids tracks adversarial satellites and hypersonic weapons.
The Wright-Patterson personnel worked inside the building where Hardwick spent her career and McCasland held command authority. The Sensors Directorate. The 711th Human Performance Wing. The same installation. The same research ecosystem. And McCasland’s command history extends beyond Ohio. Before AFRL headquarters, he ran the Phillips Research Site at Kirtland AFB in New Mexico, home of AFRL’s Directed Energy Directorate. Kirtland and LANL, 100 miles apart, share joint programs in directed energy, weapons physics, and advanced materials. The New Mexico defense corridor is not two separate nodes. It is one continuous pipeline.
Look at the map. Reza vanished in LA County. Grillmair was killed in LA County. Both in the shadow of the JPL/Caltech corridor where America’s planetary defense infrastructure is built. McCasland vanished in Albuquerque, home of Kirtland AFB and Sandia National Labs. The Wright-Patterson deaths were in Dayton. These are not random locations. They are the three geographic nodes of American defense aerospace research. Southern California. New Mexico. Ohio. The triangle where AFRL lives.
And at every node, the same institutional silence. JPL said nothing about Reza. NASA said nothing. The AIAA said nothing. Caltech’s statement about Grillmair said he “passed away suddenly” without using the word “shot.” Wright-Patterson offered counseling services. In every case, the institution that lost someone chose the minimum possible disclosure. The silence is its own pattern inside the pattern.
This is not a loose collection of people who happened to work in defense. This is one documented system, traceable through patent filings, congressional testimony, DTIC records, and federal contract databases. One system. And in nine months, six of the people connected to it are dead or gone.
The Corridor
We weren’t looking for this one. A reader flagged it after we published the Green Burial. Once we verified the details, the New Mexico vertex of the triangle got heavier.
Melissa Casias, 53. Los Alamos National Laboratory employee. She vanished from Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico on June 26, 2025.
Four days after Reza.
That morning at 6:15 a.m., she drove her husband Mark to work at LANL. Both of them work there. She told him she was heading to another location on site and drove away. By 7:45 a.m., she was back at their home in Ranchos de Taos. She told her daughter Sierra she'd forgotten her security clearance badge and would work from home. Sierra didn't question it at the time. But another family member later told KOB it didn't add up: 'She couldn't have forgotten her badge because they got into the labs and she was driving
Think about what that means. If she drove through the LANL security gate, she would have needed her badge to enter. Then she told her daughter the opposite. The family's question is a sourced one, and NMSP has not addressed it publicly.
Around 12:50 p.m., she brought Sierra a sandwich at a cafe in Taos Plaza. Normal. Quiet. Then she was last seen on surveillance footage walking alone eastbound on NM 518, carrying a backpack, heading toward the Carson National Forest.
When Sierra came home from work, the car was in the driveway. The front door was locked. Inside: her mother’s keys, wallet, purse, personal phone, and government-issued LANL work phone. Both phones had been factory-reset.
Casias was not just an administrative assistant. Department of Energy records confirm she served on the Northern New Mexico Citizens’ Advisory Board for Environmental Management Los Alamos throughout 2022 and 2023, participating in official DOE meetings on legacy radioactive waste remediation, environmental monitoring, and federal cleanup budgets at the nuclear weapons facility where she worked. Her name is on official correspondence to the DOE Field Office Manager. She sat in rooms where sensitive facility data was discussed.
Los Alamos National Laboratory is 100 miles north of Kirtland Air Force Base, where McCasland once commanded operations. LANL and AFRL share extensive programmatic overlap in advanced materials, directed energy, and weapons physics. The New Mexico defense corridor runs from Albuquerque through Santa Fe to Los Alamos. McCasland vanished from one end. Casias vanished from the other.
The New Mexico State Police investigation remains open and active. No breakthroughs have been reported since August 2025. She is still classified as missing, endangered. She has not been found.
We are not yet asserting Casias belongs on the same list as the AFRL cluster. Her role was administrative, not scientific. The family believes she left voluntarily under severe personal and financial stress. That theory is plausible. But it does not explain the badge discrepancy her own family flagged on camera, or why she left a secure nuclear facility under a disputed pretext, or why she successfully factory-reset a government-managed device before walking into the wilderness. And it does not explain why it happened four days after Monica Reza did the same thing from a ridgeline 800 miles away.
What the Marconi Scientists Taught Us
Between 1982 and 1990, approximately 25 British scientists and engineers connected to GEC-Marconi died under suspicious circumstances. Most worked on the Sting Ray torpedo project or Strategic Defense Initiative-related programs. One tied a rope to a tree and accelerated his car, decapitating himself. Another loaded his vehicle with petrol cans and drove into a building. A third was found with a plastic bag over his head, ruled “sexual misadventure.”
Each death had an explanation. The UK Ministry of Defence maintained the deaths were unrelated. A minister acknowledged it was “odd that all were computer scientists working in the defense field” but said “there any relationship stops.” No centralized investigation was ever conducted. The cases were never solved.
The structural architecture is the same as what we are documenting now. Defense-connected individuals. Anomalous circumstances. Individual explanations that individually satisfy. And an institutional posture that structurally prevents pattern recognition by distributing the cases across jurisdictions that never talk to each other.
Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Homicide Bureau has Reza. Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office and the FBI have McCasland. LA County Sheriff’s Homicide Bureau has Grillmair. Ohio BCI, AFOSI, and three county police agencies have the Wright-Patterson triple. New Mexico State Police has Casias. Norfolk County DA has Loureiro. Six separate jurisdictions. Zero cross-referencing mandate.
Nobody is looking at this list as a list.
A Note on Loureiro
We include Nuno Loureiro with a clear caveat. His connection to this pattern is weaker. He was not employed by AFRL, JPL, or any of the contractors in the Mondaloy chain. He was a plasma physicist and fusion scientist at MIT.
The overlap is indirect. MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center conducts research that touches classified defense portfolios in directed energy and advanced propulsion. McCasland’s board seat at Riverside Research encompasses plasma physics. The connection exists but it is institutional proximity, not a documented funding chain.
What makes Loureiro’s case worth flagging is the killer. Claudio Neves Valente planned the operation for at least three years. Burner phones. No credit card usage. A pre-staged storage unit in New Hampshire maintained since approximately 2022. And a mass shooting at Brown University two days before the targeted killing in Brookline that possibly buried a precision hit in the noise of a spree attack.
Accessible public records show no foreign intelligence connections, no travel to Russia or China, and no financial anomalies. His stated motive was personal grievance.
We are not asserting Loureiro belongs in the AFRL cluster. We are noting that within the same nine-month window, another defense-adjacent physicist was killed by a perpetrator whose operational planning exceeded what personal grievance typically produces. The reader can decide what to do with that.
What We Are Not Saying
We are not saying these deaths were coordinated.
We are not saying a foreign intelligence service is assassinating American scientists.
We are not saying the perpetrators were directed by anyone.
Here is what we are saying. Every word of it is documented.
The entire chain of human expertise behind a strategic national security technology, the alloy enabling American independence from Russian rocket engines, has been broken. The inventor is gone. The commander is gone. The mentor is dead. Every person who held the complete institutional memory of how Mondaloy went from a laboratory curiosity to a flight-qualified engine component has been removed from the system.
At the same installation where that alloy was qualified, three more of the lab’s employees died in a single night, and the motive has never been established.
At the institution that processes data for America’s planetary defense infrastructure, an astronomer was shot dead by a man whose prior arrest on that same property was dismissed eleven days before the killing.
At America’s premier nuclear weapons laboratory, an employee who sat on a DOE advisory board drove onto the campus, told her daughter she’d forgotten her badge despite apparently using it that morning, wiped her government phone, and walked into the wilderness four days after Reza did the same thing 800 miles away.
Five of the nine names in this briefing are women. Of the three who vanished without a trace, two are women, and both share identical signatures: belongings left behind, digital trails severed, no body recovered. Reza and Casias generated search and rescue. McCasland generated FBI and cable news. If you were selecting targets to minimize the speed and scale of the institutional response, you would choose accordingly.
Each case, on its own, has an explanation or an open investigation. The cluster does not.
No entity is examining these incidents as a cluster. The cases are distributed across six jurisdictions, three states, and at least eight investigative agencies. The structural architecture of the response guarantees that no one will ever see the list unless someone builds it.
We just built it.
SENTINEL ASSESSMENT
This investigation started with a woman who waved and a general who walked. It now encompasses nine names across three strategic domains: the propulsion materials that free us from Russian rocket engines, the infrared sensing that tracks what moves through space, and the nuclear weapons complex that sits at the center of American deterrence.
The network connecting these people is not a theory. It is patent filings, congressional testimony, DTIC records, DOE advisory board rosters, and federal contract databases. It is Dallis Hardwick’s signature on the same document as Monica Reza’s. It is McCasland’s command authority over the budget that paid for the alloy they invented together. It is Grillmair’s data pipeline running through the same JPL campus where Reza worked when she vanished. It is three more bodies at the base where all of this was built. And it is a LANL employee who drove onto the campus of a nuclear weapons facility, told her daughter she’d forgotten her badge despite apparently using it that morning, wiped her government phone, and walked into the same wilderness corridor where McCasland would vanish eight months later.
The timeline is accelerating. Reza on June 22. Casias on June 26. Four months of silence. Then Wright-Patterson in October. Then February: Snyder’s charges dismissed on the 5th, Grillmair dead on the 16th, McCasland gone on the 27th. Three events in 22 days. The dismissal enabled the killing. The killing preceded the disappearance.
What we do not have is causation. We are not pretending we do.
What we have is a count. And the count is long enough that someone with subpoena power should be looking at it.
If you have information about the disappearance of Monica Jacinto Reza, contact the LASD Homicide Bureau Missing Persons Unit, Detective Shannon Rincon or Detective Richie Sanchez at (323) 890-5500. Anonymous tips: LA Regional Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477.
If you have information about William Neil McCasland, text BCSO to 847411 or call (505) 468-7070.
If you have information about the death of Carl Grillmair, contact the Sheriff’s Homicide Bureau at (323) 890-5500. Anonymous tips: Crime Stoppers at (800) 222-8477.
If you have information about the Wright-Patterson incident, contact Lt. Jason Moore of the Miami County Sheriff’s Office at (937) 440-6085 ext. 3991.
If you have information about Melissa Casias, contact New Mexico State Police at (505) 425-6771. Anonymous tips: Albuquerque Metro Crime Stoppers at (505) 843-STOP.
Keep looking up.
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Previous briefings: THE GREEN BURIAL | THE DEAD DROP | THE GHOST GENERAL | THE CURATED ORBIT | Forensic Audit: The Covert Space Force Mobilization | The Wide Angle | The Ignition Sequence | The Ghost Coma | The Heartbeat | The Surge | The Silent Edit | The Sentinel Dossier
What would the searches for Reza and McCasland look like if we looked at how their movements would be different if they disappeared through their agency, rather than as victims? How would McCasland leave the house in order to escape the view of the 700 surveillance cameras that were checked, and get to a car that was waiting for him? Where would Reza head to escape the eye of Companion One as fast as possible, and get down the mountain to a trailhead with an awaiting car that was different from the one where the car she came in was parked?
Seriously one of the craziest things I’ve ever read. This reads straight out of Sekret Machines Chasing Shadows book 1, written by Tom Delonge and his advisors which is how we know about NM in the first place. Seriously those books need to be studied again and framed within what’s happening right now. Scary stuff. This channel rules, can’t wait for more dot connecting.