PTSD On Trail:Joseph "Pat" Lamoureux

Iraq war veteran awaits shooting trial as wife looks for help

Wife says husband's post-traumatic stress led to shootout with deputies
Joseph "Pat" Lamoureux couldn't erase from his mind the sight of the young Iraqi girl walking up to his heavy equipment transport truck and blowing herself up.

"Her body parts were all over his vehicle," his wife, Sue, said about the 2003 suicide bomber attack.

She said her husband was knocked down from the blast and later was evaluated for traumatic brain injury. In a benefits claim he filed with the Department of Veterans Affairs, Lamoureux wrote that the Iraqi girl, who was 12 to 14 years old, "came out of nowhere."

Then there was a firefight near the Baghdad airport and, later, an old man with a donkey who wouldn't stop when soldiers hollered at him. "He was 'lit up,'" Sue Lamoureux wrote in a July 1 e-mail. "To this day Pat believes the old man may have been deaf, and the image of him haunts Pat."

She said it was the weight of post-traumatic stress from these and other incidents that caused her 46-year-old husband to mentally collapse last September.
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Iraq war veteran awaits shooting trial as wife looks for help