Iraq veteran found fabricating stories about Iraq and Ground Zero

Honored Iraq veteran from Verona is found fabricating stories
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Mark Mueller/The Star-Ledger


VERONA — On Memorial Day, as Americans honored the nation’s war dead, Angelo Otchy bowed his head to accept a medal from officials in Verona for his sacrifice and service.

The 35-year-old Army veteran told a reporter that day about his three tours of duty in Iraq. Voice dropping to a near-hush, he spoke, too, about the buried bomb that ripped through his Humvee, injuring him and claiming the lives of three friends, one of them a soldier from Paterson.

“I’m haunted by that day every day of my life,” Otchy told The Star-Ledger.

But Otchy wasn’t in that Humvee. He was at home in New Jersey when the soldiers died. And he didn’t serve three tours of duty in Iraq. He served half of one tour before he was sent back to the States for extended rest and relaxation.

A Star-Ledger examination of Otchy’s claims — including a review of Army records and interviews with military officials, members of his battalion and the blasted Humvee’s lone survivor — show the Verona man fabricated his story.

Otchy’s uncle, a retired Army colonel who now works as a surgeon in Fairfax, Va., alerted The Star-Ledger two weeks ago to the discrepancies in his nephew’s background. Daniel Otchy called his nephew a troubled man who has been in and out of the military all of his adult life and has a need to seek affirmation.

“I have always tried to support my nephew,” he said, “but what he’s done here is just not right.”

Doubt also has been cast on claims Otchy made Sept. 11, 2001, when he was interviewed by reporters near a triage station along the West Side Highway in Lower Manhattan.

Dressed in camouflage fatigues, he said he was a New Jersey Army National Guard soldier who had been conducting search-and-rescue operations atop the ruins of the collapsed Twin Towers.

“I must have come across body parts by the thousands,” Otchy said. His comments, captured by television cameras and picked up in an Associated Press report, were carried in newspapers around the world, translated into German, Japanese and Afrikaans.

A slightly longer account would later be published in the book “America’s Heroes,” about the response of rescue workers on 9/11.

Records show Otchy wasn’t in the National Guard in 2001. In addition, Otchy’s uncle said his nephew told him he didn’t work on the pile at Ground Zero.

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Iraq veteran from Verona is found fabricating stories