RAEFORD - Family members say Staff Sgt. Seth Andrews and his wife, Hillary, spent Saturday preparing for Christmas, offering no hint of trouble brewing between them.
Then a neighbor passing by their home in the 100 block of Patolly Place around midnight Saturday saw their door was open, looked inside and found their bodies.
Investigators are calling it a murder-suicide.
It appears that Seth Andrews, a 24-year-old Fort Bragg-based soldier who returned from Iraq just weeks ago, shot his wife in the upper body with a .30-06 rifle before fatally shooting himself, Hoke County Sheriff Hubert Peterkin said.
There were no signs of a struggle and it appeared the shooting had just happened minutes earlier, he said.
"We don't know what the motives are," Peterkin said. "A lot of times we get these and we don't know why, but there evidently had to be something wrong. We don't know."
Seth Andrews' mother, Debbie Cooke, said she had last spoken to her son by phone about 4 1/2
The Andrews couple, she said, had plans to spend the holiday alone together, possibly on a cruise, because they had only been married a short while and Seth Andrews had been deployed twice.
They talked on the phone about what Cooke should get them for Christmas, she said.
"Everything was good," Cooke said. "They were talking about decorating the tree and dressing their dog up as a reindeer."
The next Cooke heard about her son and his wife was when a chaplain and a sergeant walked up to her doorstep. They had a message she more expected to get when Seth Andrews was away at war.
"I was praying it was a big nightmare and I'd wake up," Cooke said, "but it didn't happen."
Cooke said her son, who is from Moberly, Mo., joined the Army after high school out of a sense of duty, telling her, "If I don't do it, Mom, who will?"
He joined the Army in June 2005 and trained at Fort Benning, Ga., according to the 82nd Airborne Division.
Meeting at Fort Polk
Seth Andrews met his wife several years ago at Fort Polk, La., while he was training in a war games exercise, his mother said. Hillary Andrews, the daughter of a soldier, had been one of the civilians hired to play the enemy in the exercise, and they met during the training, Cooke said.
"He knew she was the one," Cooke said, "as soon as he met her."
They married April 16, 2010, according to Hillary Andrews' Facebook page.
Seth Andrews, who arrived at Fort Bragg in 2009, deployed to Haiti from January 2010 to March 2010 and to Afghanistan from April 2010 to August 2010. Most recently, he deployed to Iraq as part of Operation New Dawn from June 2011 to November 2011, according to the 82nd.
Cooke said her son had re-enlisted twice since joining up, and that he loved the Army - especially the travel and the adventure of jumping out of airplanes.
He never indicated that he had seen major combat during his deployments as a mortarman with the 1st Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment.
"We Facebooked back and forth or emailed, and he said it was pretty boring, actually," Cooke said. "He was mainly training the soldiers over there."
Attempts to reach family members of Hillary Andrews were unsuccessful Tuesday.
Her Facebook page says she was from Enterprise, Ala., and attended Fayetteville Technical Community College.
Her wall portrays a happy woman who loved her friends and family, and who was excited to see her husband return on Nov. 28. She posted several photos and a video of his unit marching at Green Ramp after the deployment.
Since the shooting, her wall has been consumed by posts from family and friends grieving over her death.
Many express disbelief about what happened.
Cooke, too, says she can't image what happened.
"I'm at a total loss," Cooke said. "It's way out of character. He was a great guy. He really was. He loved his wife."
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