An American man who had worked for three decades at the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, was found dead in a construction site this week. The Naval Criminal Investigative Service is investigating the death as a suspected suicide.

The worker had nothing to do with the detention center at the remote base where the Pentagon holds some 169 foreign men as prisoners, a prison camps spokesman said.

The civilian man was described as “a contract employee with GCR, a subcontractor that handles the base landscaping,” said Navy base spokesman Terence Peck, in a short statement. He declined to provide the man’s name or age because NCIS “is currently conducting an investigation into the incident.”

The discovery of the body Monday at an abandoned structure in a housing area undergoing construction was the talk of the base, according to Guantánamo residents, in part because the man was widely recognized around the residential areas as a supervisor of the landscaping crews. And because he had been a long-time civilian resident, who first got work at the remote outpost in 1978.

The man’s body was discovered on Monday, according to Peck’s statement.

About 2,000 civilians work and live at the 45-square-mile base that straddles Guantánamo Bay, the vast majority of them foreigners hired by Defense Department contractors as laborers.