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Sailor who made ‘Numa’ video slain

A 39-year-old sailor and one-time producer of a popular online video known as the “Enterprise Numa Numa” was killed in his Maryland home in what police say was a murder-suicide involving his girlfriend.

Electronics Technician 2nd Class (SW) Michael Joseph Missimer was found Jan. 27 in his apartment in Annapolis, Md., with a fatal gunshot wound, police said.

In 2005, Missimer was serving aboard the aircraft carrier Enterprise when he filmed, edited and posted online a five-minute video of shipmates dancing and spoofing a popular YouTube clip known as “the Numa Numa video.” Missimer’s video has been viewed more than 2 million times during the past several years, according to YouTube.

Anne Arundel County police in Maryland received a phone call from Missimer’s live-in girlfriend who said authorities would soon find two dead bodies in her apartment, and one of them would be her body.

Moments later, police entered the apartment and found Missimer had been shot in the chest, and the woman, Helen Clapsaddle, 43, appeared to have committed suicide, police said.

Missimer was serving with a Patuxent River detachment of the Naval Computer and Telecommunications Strategic Communications Unit, which provides airborne communications systems linking the president and the defense secretary to the military’s nuclear arsenal.

Missimer’s shipmates were stunned by the news of his death.

“He was what you’d call the life of the party,” said Information Systems Technician 1st Class John Fallowfield, the petty officer in charge at Missimer’s unit. “He always knew how to make you smile and laugh. That’s probably one of the best traits, his sense of humor.”

Fallowfield recalled some Navy leaders were not happy with Missimer’s video, which showed sailors mocking themselves and dancing irreverently.

“He caught a lot of flak about that,” Fallowfield said of the video. “It was just something they pulled together when they had some time on the carrier.”

The video’s widespread distribution caught Missimer off guard.

“You would look at that and think we’re fairly open,” he said in a 2006 phone interview with Navy Times. “[But] we’re all pretty modest people. We did this with the understanding it would be in-house.”

Services for Missimer are scheduled for Feb. 11 in Catonsville, Md. His two children are expected to attend, Fallowfield said.