A day before a San Diego Navy veteran, his wife and daughter were found dead, relatives say the family sought VA mental-health help for him.
David Voight, 56, was a highly decorated Navy veteran who spent roughly three decades in the military, served in Iraq and Afghanistan and worked in explosive ordnance disposal, including alongside Navy SEALs. His wife, Amy Voight, 54, was herself part of the national-security community, working as a digital forensic examiner for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, according to her parents. Their 13-year-old daughter, Mya Jane Voight, was an eighth grader at Pershing Middle School.
All three were found dead from apparent gunshot wounds Wednesday morning, September 16, after a neighbor entered the family's home and discovered David and Amy unresponsive. Police subsequently found Mya dead elsewhere inside the residence, and investigators recovered a firearm from the home.
San Diego police have said there is no known threat to the public and no outstanding suspect, but authorities have not formally classified the deaths as a murder-suicide or publicly identified who fired the shots. The San Diego County Medical Examiner's Office is expected to determine the official causes and manners of death, making it important not to present as established fact what remains under investigation.
What emerged after the family's identities became public, however, makes the deaths even more difficult to comprehend. Amy's parents say David had been struggling with deteriorating mental health and symptoms they believed were related to post-traumatic stress disorder, and they say Amy sought help for him from the Department of Veterans Affairs the day before the family died.
Mary and Jerry Austin told FOX 5/KUSI that David had become visibly distressed, describing anxiety, depression, frustration and increasingly concerning behavior. The Austins said they encouraged their daughter to take her husband to the VA, advice Amy apparently followed on Tuesday, September 15 - her 54th birthday.
According to Jerry Austin, Amy spoke with a receptionist and nurse and asked whether something could be done to help calm her husband. Austin said she was told counselors were busy and that an appointment would have to be scheduled, an account he also provided to the San Diego Union-Tribune.
The VA disputes that characterization. VA Press Secretary Quinn Slaven told FOX 5/KUSI that the agency could not discuss David's individual care because of privacy restrictions but said, "What's being alleged regarding VA services is not accurate," adding that VA health facilities offer same-day mental-health care to veterans who request it.
That dispute cannot presently be resolved from the publicly available information. It is not clear which VA facility the Voights reportedly visited, precisely what Amy or David told staff, whether David was formally evaluated, what level of urgency was communicated, or whether additional services were offered to the couple.
But the VA's own published policies make the family's account particularly significant. The agency says veterans seeking mental-health assistance should begin receiving help on the day they reach out and that same-day services can include an in-person evaluation, telehealth appointment, nurse triage, prescription assistance or arranging appropriate follow-up care. VA guidance further says a veteran in crisis or needing mental-health care immediately should receive prompt attention from a health professional.
The distinction between "same-day care" and actually seeing a psychiatrist or counselor that day is important. Under VA policy, same-day service can sometimes consist of triage or arranging a later appointment rather than receiving a complete psychiatric evaluation, meaning the VA's statement and the Austins' account are not necessarily mutually exclusive without more information about what happened during the visit.
For the Austins, however, that distinction offers little comfort. "If the VA had tried to help, we wouldn't be having this conversation right now," Jerry Austin told the Union-Tribune, while telling FOX 5/KUSI that veterans experiencing an acute mental-health crisis should be able to receive immediate assistance.
Austin, himself a Navy veteran who told reporters he has PTSD, also cautioned against reducing his son-in-law's entire life to what police are now investigating. He described David as a "great guy," said he had never known him to be violent toward Amy and attributed the dramatic change he observed to what he believed was PTSD.
Whether PTSD played any role in the deaths has not been medically or officially established, and Austin told the Union-Tribune he did not know whether David had received a formal PTSD diagnosis. PTSD also should not be conflated with violence: most people with PTSD do not commit violent acts, and a diagnosis alone would not explain what occurred inside the Voight home.
David's military history nevertheless places his family's tragedy against a much larger and troubling national backdrop. The VA's National Center for PTSD estimates that about 15% of veterans who served in Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom have PTSD in a given year, while approximately 29% have experienced it at some point in their lives.
The suicide numbers are even more sobering. The VA's latest national report found that 6,398 veterans died by suicide in 2023, the most recent year for which comprehensive national data is available — an average of approximately 17.5 veteran suicides every day. Although the total declined slightly from 6,442 the previous year, suicide rates per 100,000 veterans increased for both male and female veterans.
Perhaps most revealing is where many of those veterans were in relation to the system created to care for them. According to the VA, 61% of veterans who died by suicide in 2023 had not received VA health care during the preceding year, underscoring that having services available is different from successfully connecting vulnerable veterans to those services.
The federal government's own watchdog has documented weaknesses in that connection. In 2024, the Government Accountability Office found that a Department of Defense program specifically designed to connect transitioning service members with mental-health care failed to successfully reach more than 70% of automatically enrolled service members in 2022, in part because the program relied heavily on telephone calls and sometimes did not begin outreach until two to three months after military separation.
That particular program concerns the transition from active duty and does not establish anything about David's experience years later, but it illustrates a broader problem recognized by the government itself. GAO concluded that the Defense Department and VA had not adequately assessed how well their combined programs actually connected transitioning service members with mental-health services, leaving officials unable to fully determine where gaps existed; as of the GAO's latest update, work responding to that recommendation remained underway.
Access problems can continue long after a veteran leaves uniform. GAO has separately found staffing challenges affecting VA mental-health programs and concluded that the VA's methods for assessing whether its community network has enough mental-health providers could produce an incomplete or potentially misleading picture of access.
The demand is substantial enough that the VA increasingly sends veterans outside its own hospitals and clinics for behavioral-health treatment. A GAO report released in April found that veterans received more than 600,000 referrals for behavioral-health care through community providers between fiscal years 2021 and 2024, with the VA spending approximately $4.29 billion on care associated with those referrals.
None of those statistics proves that the VA failed David Voight, nor can anyone responsibly conclude from the information currently available that a different response on September 15 would have prevented three deaths. Mental-health crises are complicated, PTSD does not inevitably lead to suicide or violence, and investigators have not yet officially established what happened inside the family's home.
But the chronology described by Amy's parents raises questions that deserve answers. A combat veteran's family says his mental health was deteriorating badly enough that they urged his wife to seek professional help; his wife reportedly took him to the VA; and less than a day later, David, Amy and their 13-year-old daughter were dead.
The tragedy is particularly wrenching because neighbors described a family almost unrecognizable from the crime scene police encountered Wednesday. Lindy Ross, who became close with Mya after meeting her during the pandemic, described the teenager as witty and funny and recalled a household where "there was always laughter."
Amy's parents remembered their daughter as an exceptionally intelligent and devoted mother. David's record reflected nearly three decades of military service, deployments around the world and more than two dozen awards and decorations, according to reporting citing Navy records.
There is an uncomfortable question embedded in those two versions of David Voight - the decorated serviceman who spent decades serving his country and the veteran whose relatives say was visibly deteriorating psychologically near the end of his life. America has spent enormous resources training men and women to function in environments of war, trauma and extraordinary stress, while repeated federal reviews show that connecting some of those same people with effective mental-health care afterward remains an unfinished task.
The VA operates the nation's largest integrated health-care system and provides extensive PTSD treatment, suicide-prevention programs, crisis services and same-day mental-health options to millions of veterans. Those programs save lives, and any examination of their shortcomings should acknowledge that the system also provides care successfully to enormous numbers of former service members.
Yet the persistence of thousands of veteran suicides each year, documented staffing and access problems, and federal findings showing vulnerable former service members sometimes slipping through gaps between programs demonstrate why simply having services on paper is not enough. The meaningful measure is whether a veteran in distress can reach the appropriate person at the moment that help is needed.
Exactly what happened when the Voights reportedly sought that help remains an unanswered part of this investigation. It deserves examination alongside the forensic question of what happened hours later inside their San Carlos home, without presuming either that the VA caused the tragedy or that its existing policies necessarily worked as intended.
For now, San Diego is mourning three people rather than a statistic: Amy, David and Mya Voight. Mya's classmates have left messages near the family's home, Pershing Middle School has made counselors available to students and staff, and a neighborhood that remembered laughter coming from the Voight residence is confronting an ending almost no one around them appears to have anticipated.
Anyone with information about the deaths is asked to contact the San Diego Police Department Homicide Unit at 619-531-2293 or Crime Stoppers at 888-580-8477. Veterans experiencing a mental-health crisis, as well as people concerned about a veteran, can contact the Veterans Crisis Line by calling 988 and pressing 1, texting 838255, or seeking emergency assistance; the service operates around the clock.
Originally published on September 17, 2026.
