The VA missed serious warning signs that presaged local vet’s violent breakdown

Walking Wounded: The VA missed serious warning signs that presaged local vet’s violent breakdown

By Michael Barajas
PUBLISHED: NOVEMBER 30, 2011

COURTESY PHOTOS
Adan Castaneda in 2005 after joining the Marine Corps.

Early in the morning of May 27, 2011, Adan Castaneda grabbed his .45-caliber semi-automatic pistol and called a taxi to drive him from his San Antonio apartment to his mother’s Spring Branch home, roughly 30 miles north of the city. Standing at the end of the dark driveway, Castaneda raised the pistol and peppered the house with gunfire as his mother and stepfather slept inside. He fired 23 rounds into the one-story country home, bullets buzzing through curtains, shattering windows and digging into walls, door posts, and framed family photos. Police found him wandering the streets four blocks away.

Castaneda’s arrest that night marked the unsettling finale of a breakdown that began with his return from the Iraq War more than two years earlier, says his mother, Maria Anna Esparza. Discharged days after Christmas in 2008, Castaneda had become increasingly depressed, paranoid, and delusional, Esparza says. He’d begun to hear voices, violent voices.

Now after nearly six months in solitary confinement in the Comal County Jail without mental health treatment, a judge declared Castaneda incompetent to stand trial on November 10, the day the Marine Corps celebrates its founding. When he completes a 120-day state hospital stint in the hopes of restoring his competency, Castaneda will likely go back to court to face charges that, if not dropped or reduced, could put him behind bars for over a decade.

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