A U.S. Navy SEAL has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for his role in the hazing death of a U.S. Army Green Beret while the men served together in Africa. The SEAL's attorney said he plans to appeal the punishment.
Tony DeDolph received the sentence Saturday from a jury of fellow servicemembers at a Navy base in Norfolk, Virginia, the Navy said in a statement Monday. He had pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and related counts Jan. 14.
DeDolph had placed Army Staff Sgt. Logan Melgar into a martial-arts-style chokehold to try to make him temporarily lose consciousness during what the SEAL said was a prank. Melgar died of strangulation.
DeDolph is one of four service members — two SEALs and two Marines — to be charged in Melgar's 2017 death in the African country of Mali. Charging documents do not state why the service members were there. But U.S. Special Forces have been in Africa to support and train local troops in their fight against extremists.
DeDolph testified during his court-martial that they were trying to get back at Melgar for perceived slights. The other SEAL, Adam Matthews, testified in 2019 that the perceived slights included an incident in which Melgar was driving his motorcycle to a party at a diplomatic embassy in the capital city of Bamako. Two Marines were following in another vehicle before Melgar drove off, Matthews said. Matthews suggested that the Marines felt Melgar had abandoned them in an unsafe city that’s been the target of terrorist activity.
The service members plotted to get Melgar back with an elaborate prank known as as a “tape job,” DeDolph testified earlier this month. The prank included binding Melgar with duct tape, applying the choke hold to temporarily knock him out and then showing Melgar a video of the incident sometime later.
The case has pulled back the curtain on misconduct among some of America’s most elite service members, while offering a brief window into how some have addressed grievances outside the law.
DeDolph is a member of the elite SEAL Team 6. Besides the prison time, his sentence strips him of his pay and his rank of chief petty officer. He'll also receive a dishonorable discharge. The punishment still must receive official approval from an admiral.
DeDolph had faced a maximum sentence of 22 1/2 years in prison.
DeDolph's attorney, Phillip Stackhouse, told The Associated Press in an email that the sentence will be appealed.
Stackhouse also expressed concerns about the length of the jury’s deliberations, which he believes were not long enough to reasonably take a full measure of DeDolph’s accomplishments as a SEAL and as a person.
Stackhouse said there were well over 100 pages of character statements as well as evaluations from superiors and classified documents that detailed DeDolph’s heroism in combat. DeDolph was shot in the shoulder “and stayed in a firefight for another hour and a half and then stayed with his team to finish the deployment,” Stackhouse said.
“I wish people could see what the jury had access to review,” Stackhouse said. “On multiple occasions, his actions and heroism and that of three or four other guys with him are going to have a lasting impact on our country. And nobody is going to know what he did.”
Matthews, the other SEAL, and Marine Kevin Maxwell Jr. have already pleaded guilty to lesser charges and were sentenced to shorter terms in military prison. Another Marine, Mario Madera-Rodriguez, is scheduled for court-martial in April.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Wildlife crews are no longer actively searching for two juvenile gray wolves who were part of a pack that killed dozens of cows and calves last summer in Northern California’s Sierra Valley, an official said Tuesday.
The two wolves were members of the Beyem Seyo pack that in 2025 killed or injured at least 92 calves and cows in a seven-month period, according to a report released last week by two researchers with the University of California, Davis.
Wolves in the state are protected under California law and the federal Endangered Species Act. Under former President Joe Biden, officials said they planned a first-ever national recovery plan for wolves, but President Donald Trump’s administration ended that initiative in November.
In October, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife announced it had euthanized four gray wolves — three adults and a juvenile — from the Beyem Seyo pack after “an unprecedented level of livestock attacks across the Sierra Valley” by a single wolf pack since the canids returned to the state. It also said it planned to capture and relocate the remaining two wolves to wildlife facilities to prevent their behavior from spreading to other wolves in California.
Gray wolves primarily prey on wild animals like deer and elk, not livestock, but the pack became used to killing cows and calves, the department said.
“These wolves had become habituated to preying on cattle, a feeding pattern that persisted and was being taught to their offspring which would leave to form their own packs and could teach them the same cattle-preying behavior,” the department said at the time.
But following weeks of searching for the remaining two wolves, officials have “reduced efforts to capture” them, Katie Talbot, CDFW Deputy Director of Public Affairs, said in a statement.
“Despite best efforts from CDFW’s expert wolf biologists and law enforcement officers, we have not been able to find or get close enough to these young wolves to safely capture them,” Talbot said.
“We remain hopeful our continued remote monitoring will allow for sightings that will lead to safe capture of these juveniles," she added.
Talbot said that CDFW crews will be working this week on capturing wolves and collaring them throughout the state, including in the Sierra Valley.
Wildlife officials tried for months to prevent the pack from attacking farm animals by using drones, nonlethal bean bags, installing flags or rope to deter them and having officers in the field 24 hours a day, seven days a week, but their efforts failed.
“The efforts that the (CDFW) made were tremendous and heroic but it was too late.” said Amaroq Weiss, senior wolf advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity.
She said that cattle ranchers in the area should have been taking proactive prevention measures for years, including increased human presence around the cattle, keeping the livestock bunched up instead of letting them loose on large grazing pastures, and calving at the same time of year that deer and elk are birthing so wolves have a source of wild prey.
“Ranchers in California have been on notice that wolves were coming since late December 2011, when we got our first wolf. They have been on notice they would establish packs since 2015,” when the first pack was confirmed in Siskiyou County, Weiss said.
Gray wolves were eradicated in California early in the last century because of their perceived threat to livestock, with the last known native wolf killed in 1924 in Lassen County. Since their reintroduction in Idaho and at Yellowstone National Park in the mid-1990s, they’ve proliferated throughout the West. The recovering population has meant increasing conflict with ranchers.
“It was a horrible summer here for everybody and the emotional strain was probably worse than the financial strain for most people. They did the right thing. We couldn’t go on living the way we were living,” said Rick Roberti, a cattle rancher in Plumas County and president of the California Cattlemen’s Association, who lost several animals.
Economist Tina Saitone and researcher Tracy Schohr said in UC Davis’ quarterly agricultural economics update released Friday that the Beyem Seyo pack killed more livestock than the entire wolf population of Montana killed in 2024 and the killings of farm animals by the wolves in Wyoming in 2023.
In Montana, the state’s 1,100 wolves killed 54 domestic animals in 2024, and Wyoming’s 352 wolves killed 49 livestock in 2023, the scientists said.
In California, about 70 gray wolves were responsible for 175 livestock kills between January and October of last year, with the Beyem Seyo pack responsible for half of the killings, according to CDFW data.
Roberti said the attacks on livestock in Plumas and Sierra counties left many ranchers angry. He said he would like to see certain areas in the state declared “special zones” where people are allowed to hunt wolves that attack livestock.
“We’re pretty much in unison about thinking that it would help if we started taking out the ones that are just killing cattle and are too habituated to man or they’re not afraid of us,” he said.
The predators are a long way from recovery, Weiss said, adding that killing them is not a long-term solution.
“The scientific literature is pretty conclusory that killing wolves to resolve conflicts with livestock is not a solution. It can actually be counterproductive. It can result in there being more conflicts with livestock," she said.
FILE - This remote camera image provided by the U.S. Forest Service shows a female gray wolf and two of the three pups born in 2017 in the wilds of Lassen National Forest in northern California on June 29, 2017. (U.S. Forest Service via AP, File)
