Sailor Found Dead After Neighbors Evacuated : Suicide: 11 hours later, the young man’s body is discovered in his family’s Anaheim Hills home.

Police evacuated a quiet residential neighborhood here for more than seven hours after a distraught young man threatened to kill himself with a gun, police said Thursday. But inside his house, the young man may have already been dead by the start of the evacuation.

Brian Benicke, 21, who police said was AWOL from the Navy, was found by his family on a living room sofa around 9 a.m. Thursday. At first, family members thought he was asleep, but they later discovered he was dead of a single gunshot wound to the head, neighbors said.

Police said a gun was found near Benicke’s body, and his death appears to have been a suicide.

Neighbors and police said Benicke had been upset about a recent breakup with a girlfriend.

About four hours before the body was discovered, some 20 Anaheim police officers left the neighborhood without entering the Benicke house after having tried unsuccessfully to contact Benicke.

Neighbors said the victim’s mother refused to let police enter her home, but Anaheim Police Capt. Roger Baker, who headed the contingent of officers, said that decision was made by “mutual agreement.” He said that at the time, he did not believe there was sufficient evidence that a crime had been committed.

The tragedy began about 9 p.m Wednesday when police received a report of a young man with a gun who had threatened to kill himself.

Soon after arriving outside the Benicke home police heard what sounded like a gunshot from inside. They evacuated about 10 houses in the immediate area, sending some residents to a local school while others waited at the end of the block.

“I didn’t know anything had happened until a cop started banging on the door and said there’d been a shooting,” recounted one neighbor, Dave Hennings.

For the next seven hours, police, believing Benicke was still alive, tried to contact him by phone and by loudspeaker as they surrounded the house. Finally, around 5 a.m. without any response, they gave up and allowed neighbors to return to their homes.

Baker said that investigators will have to wait for results of an autopsy to determine just what happened inside the Benicke house--in particular to resolve the key question of whether the young man was already dead by the time the evacuation got under way.

“We’re anxious to know how the coroners will rule and where they’ll fix the time of death,” Baker said.

The Benickes, with their flag at half-staff and a bullet hole in their front window, declined comment.

“We don’t even really know what happened because it all went so fast,” an unidentified relative said.