ACLU's lawsuit against the VA is a step in vet's recovery

ACLU's lawsuit against the VA is a step in vet's recovery
steve.lopez@latimes.com
Greg Valentini hopes the case will help other veterans who ended up traumatized and homeless


Combat veteran Greg Valentini slept in Wednesday morning in Hollywood, the day he sued the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

Actually, Valentini didn't file the suit himself, and he was only one of four plaintiffs in what could become a class-action case. The ACLU of Southern California argues in the suit that the VA has mismanaged and underutilized its sprawling West Los Angeles campus even as mentally impaired homeless vets sleep on the city's streets.

If there's money to wage two wars, there ought to be money to restore abandoned medical buildings at the VA and fill them with some of the estimated 8,200 homeless veterans in Greater Los Angeles, as well as provide them the rehab services they need. That's how the ACLU's Mark Rosenbaum described the thinking behind the lawsuit to me this week.

As the suit notes, the VA campus has enough space for private companies to store buses and rental cars and for a hotel laundry facility, but no permanent housing for veterans, even though the property was deeded to the government more than 100 years ago specifically to house veterans.

As for Valentini, his involvement in the lawsuit came as a surprise to me, even though I've been shadowing him for several months in a series of columns about his efforts to rehabilitate himself. He told me he was sworn to secrecy until the suit was filed.

On Wednesday morning I visited him at the Hollywood rehab center where he has lived since last August along with a few dozen other veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Valentini, 33, hadn't seen the lawsuit, so I delivered a copy.

Valentini, who grew up in Lakewood, wasn't entirely comfortable being named in the suit. He doesn't enjoy reviewing the harrowing details of his combat tours in Afghanistan and Iraq and his later descent into suicidal fantasies, homelessness and drug addiction. But he was willing if it would help others.
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ACLU's lawsuit against the VA is a step in vet's recovery