No end in sight.
An overdose of a California Iraq vet who’d gone to the VA for help:
Iraq war veteran Justin Bailey checked himself in to the West Los Angeles VA Medical Center just after Thanksgiving.
Among the first wave of Marines sent into battle, the young rifleman had been diagnosed since his return with posttraumatic stress disorder and a groin injury. Now, Bailey acknowledged to his family and a friend, he needed immediate treatment for his addiction to prescription and street drugs. “We were so happy,” said his stepmother, Mary Kaye Bailey, 41. “We were putting all of our faith into those doctors.”
On Jan. 25, Justin Bailey got prescriptions filled for five medications, including a two-week supply of the potent painkiller methadone, according to his medical records. A day later, he was found dead of an apparent overdose in his room at a VA rehabilitation center on the hospital grounds. He was 27.
Another to add to the PTSD Timeline. There are others…
Eight days ago, a suicide in Montana:
It took several months of pushing, but finally, Chris Dana was ready. The 23-year-old veteran of the Iraq war, who served with the 163rd Infantry Battalion, Montana National Guard, agreed to see a counselor for post-combat stress. Members of his family, concerned for months about his change in behavior, believed they were starting to get through to him. Their son and brother promised to seek the help they all knew he so desperately needed.
Then Dana canceled the appointment. He began screening his calls. He stopped showing up at drill with the National Guard. He quit his job at Target, cleaned his car and the trailer he shared with a friend. And then, on March 4, he shut himself into his bedroom, put a blanket over his head, and shot himself.
Dana was remembered Friday morning at the Cathedral of St. Helena as a gentle man, a kind soul, and a reflective individual whose brave and selfless service to his country set him apart.
One year ago, a suicide in Wisconsin:
“About 50 times a day we hear from some practitioners that a veteran is thinking about killing themselves,” Richard Gibson, manager of the mental health division at Milwaukee’s Zablocki VA Medical Center, said Thursday. … The VA is trying to come to grips with the problem, especially after several highly publicized suicides involving returning veterans. In March 2006, a Milwaukee police officer and Iraq war veteran used his police gun to commit suicide in the basement of his home.
The officer’s death prompted the local VA to establish a suicide prevention committee headed by Michelle Cornette. A suicide coordinator will soon be hired, and an electronic suicide reporting system is expected to be implemented, Cornette said.
A bit over a year ago, a suicide in Illinois:
A year ago on Thanksgiving morning, in the corrugated metal pole barn that housed his family’s electrical business, Timothy Bowman put a handgun to his head and pulled the trigger. The bullet only grazed his forehead. So he put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger again.
He had been home from the Iraq war for only eight months. Once a fun-loving, life-of-the-party type, Bowman had slipped into an abyss, tormented by things he’d been ordered to do in war. “I’m OK. I can deal with it,” he would say whenever his father, Mike, urged him to get counseling.
A suicide last year in Minnesota:
After David Fickel had been honorably discharged from the Marine Corps, friends and relatives noticed he changed from a fun-loving guy to an anxious, angry man. They urged him to get help. “We tried,” said his stepfather, Mitch Aanden. “He said, ‘No, I’m tough. I am a Marine.”‘
Fickel, 25, took his own life with a shotgun last Memorial Day. He is one of 13 active-duty or discharged servicemen younger than 30 who committed suicide in Minnesota between Jan. 1, 2003, and last October, according to death records. Star Tribune interviews with relatives of 10 of those veterans said their loved ones hadn’t sought counseling. Experts say many suicide victims don’t seek treatment, and surveys show six of 10 servicemen who need mental health counseling don’t seek it.
Suicide by war veterans gained attention after Jonathan Schulze, a Marine veteran who fought in Iraq, took his life Jan. 16. His family says the St. Cloud VA Medical Center turned him away when he talked of suicide. Veterans Affairs officials won’t comment, and officials are investigating.
But his death raised concerns about the needs of 1.4 million troops whose duties in Iraq and Afghanistan can involve intense combat. Recent research found that nearly one in six recent combat veterans reported experiencing depression, general anxiety or post-traumatic stress.
In Iraq and Kuwait, 22 U.S. soldiers killed themselves in 2005, nearly double the national rate, an Army study found.
A 2005 suicide in Iowa:
Terri Jones lost her son Jason Cooper just over a year ago. He was an Army Reservist in the Iraq War. On July 14, 2005, four months after returning home to Iowa, he hanged himself. He was 23.
Since then, Jones flies her American flag upside down, though someone came on her property once and turned it right side up, and another person stole it. Jones says Jason wasn’t the same when he got back from Iraq.
“He was a really upbeat, happy, funny kid” before he left, she says. “You could tell his smile was gone when he came home.” He also had a hard time paying attention. “We did notice right away that he’d space off while you were trying to talk to him,” she says. “His thoughts were floating off somewhere else.”
And the reaction of some of his friends caught him by surprise. “He was excited to see them,” she says, “and he thought they would be, `Hey, Coop, good to see you.’ But instead, the first thing that would come out was, `Jas, you shoot anybody?’ He was so taken aback he didn’t know how to answer. He’d just say, `I don’t want to talk about it.’ “
Two months ago in North Carolina:
The first time that Michael J. Bramer died, he was serving in Iraq, his sister said, and he felt a tranquillity that was elusive in the months after he was brought back to life. “What he talked about in the beginning was the feeling he felt when his heart stopped,” said Barbara Bramer of Boston. “He said it was just very peaceful for him, and that was his expectation of what he would have had if they didn’t revive him.”
Then a sergeant first class in special forces with the Army’s 82d Airborne Division, Mr. Bramer suffered severe head injuries in October 2003, when part of an unstable structure collapsed as he was helping string barbed wire outside Baghdad, his sister said. The impact blinded him in one eye. During surgery, plates were placed in his head. Soon, a series of migraines, each more acute, disturbed his days and nights.
Discharged from the Army in June, Mr. Bramer had been living in a Fayetteville, N.C., apartment. At 23, he had set aside his hopes of attending MIT, where he had taken summer courses during high school in Boston. On Jan. 17, while his roommate and a friend were downstairs, he turned up the surround sound on his television and took his life in his bedroom, his sister said. …
Friends told Mr. Bramer’s mother and sister that he had been suffering anxiety attacks and had a mild heart attack last month. “He was also experiencing the migraines in a greater intensity,” his mother said. “And the doctors told him that they weren’t going to get better, they were going to get worse.”
After being injured in Iraq, “possibly he had convinced himself that he should not have gone on longer after the accident, especially with the pain all the time,” his sister said. Meanwhile, the memory lingered of the peace he had felt when his heart stopped. “I think in terms of how his mind was perceiving, it was a comparison,” his sister said. “He could have that if he died.”
Suicidal in 2005, violence and rage last month in Pennsylvania:
A Fayette County man is accused of setting a mobile home on fire while a young child and two women were inside, then attacking a firefighter who responded.
Salvatore “Sam” Ross Jr., 24, of 382 Hardy Hill Road, Dunbar Township, was charged Tuesday by state police at Uniontown with three counts of attempted homicide, four counts of aggravated assault, three counts of recklessly endangering another person, two counts of arson and one count each of terroristic threats, simple assault and resisting arrest.
Police said Ross was angry yesterday morning because Monica Cherie Kuhns, 23, of 178 Brick Road, Dunbar Township, had left his house the previous night because Ross was using drugs. Ross allegedly called Kuhns several times, threatening to shut off her utilities and burn down her home. …
Ross allegedly knocked Thomas E. Bierer, one of the firefighters who responded, to the ground and choked him. Bierer, 42, assistant chief of the Dunbar Volunteer Fire Department, suffered facial swelling and bleeding, according to police.
State troopers took Ross into custody at the scene. While at the Uniontown state police barracks, Ross, who lost his left leg while serving in the U.S. Army in Iraq, allegedly threatened to use his prosthetic leg to harm a trooper. According to the affidavit, he had to be restrained by several troopers. …
Ross was blinded and lost his left leg when an unexploded bomblet he was disposing of in Iraq in 2003 detonated. Ross’ hometown held a homecoming parade in his honor and a nonprofit group raised enough donations to build him a new house. But he was once the subject of a daylong search after he disappeared from his residence, and he was placed on probation after a series of run-ins with law enforcement officials.
In May 2005, Ross called a mental-health hot line and threatened to harm himself. He then went missing, prompting a daylong search by police, firefighters and volunteers. He was found, unharmed, on the Yough River Trail.
Last year, again in Illinois:
A 24-year-old man described by Riverside police as a former Marine and Iraq War veteran is recovering in Hines V.A. Hospital in Maywood after an incident first believed to be a barricade situation but later determined to be a suicide attempt.
Police first received a 911 call from a man at 10:22 p.m. on April 7, saying that his friend had just cut his arm badly and needed a paramedic. Minutes later, as police arrived at the apartment building in the first block of Pine Avenue, the man said he heard a gunshot fired from his friend’s apartment.
The man told police that he was in his friend’s apartment with two other people that evening, and that the 24-year-old former Marine had been drinking heavily and wanted to call his wife, from whom he was recently separated. When his friends told him that wouldn’t be a good idea, the man reportedly drew a knife and slashed his forearm and then began stabbing the floor of the apartment. …
Moments later, a man who was inside the apartment at the time of the incident came out of the apartment building. He was covered in blood, but said he wasn’t injured; he had been trying to help his friend staunch the profuse bleeding from his self-inflicted knife wound.
Three officers entered the building and encountered a woman, crying and also blood-soaked, on the apartment building’s third-floor landing. As officers assisted her downstairs, the injured man came out of his apartment and started down the stairs before collapsing.
Last year in California:
A 22-year-old Marine who returned from duty in Iraq on Saturday was killed Thursday morning when a minivan hit him while he was standing in the middle of Interstate 15 in Temecula, authorities said.
The Camp Pendleton-based lance corporal, whose name was not released Thursday afternoon, served seven months in Iraq and returned April 1, according to Officer Ron Thatcher with the California Highway Patrol. On Thursday, he was out with friends and had been drinking, Thatcher said.
The Marine was sitting in a friend’s vehicle as it pulled onto southbound I-15 when he opened the door around 3 a.m., according to Thatcher. The driver pulled over and the Marine jumped out, then ran against traffic along the shoulder of the southbound highway in the Temecula area, Thatcher said.
The Marine’s friends saw him run along the freeway shoulder, then lost sight of him, according to Thatcher’s news release. They drove to the next off-ramp, turned around and went looking for him near the Denny’s Restaurant south of Rancho California Road, Thatcher said.
Motorists reported seeing a man jumping into freeway lanes at that point, according to the CHP.
A suicide last month in Colorado:
A woman killed late Thursday while driving south in the northbound lanes of Interstate 25 was a former soldier who had served in Iraq and was troubled with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Jessica Rich, 24, who served in the Army Reserve, was killed at 10:25 p.m. Thursday when her 1996 Volkswagen Jetta smashed head-on into a 2003 Chevy Suburban. Four people in the Suburban were taken to Colorado Springs hospitals, although none of their injuries was life-threatening. They were on their way from Hobbs, N.M., to Denver.
Rich, a heavy-equipment operator in the 52nd Engineering Battalion, was featured in a December 2004 story in The Denver Post about soldiers who had spent months in the medical hold unit at Fort Carson. Rich was medically evacuated from Iraq in January 2004 after serving nine months. Doctors diagnosed lower-back pain and PTSD.
No end in sight.
