PTSD on Trial: Iraq veteran returns home for new start

Ex-soldier returns to Virginia Beach for new start
By Corinne Reilly
The Virginian-Pilot ©
April 4, 2012 VIRGINIA BEACH
When the plane carrying Daryl Beamer home finally landed, the passengers around him scrambled to check messages and gather luggage. Beamer just waited. He had no cellphone and only a handful of belongings to his name. In the terminal at Norfolk International, he passed a soldier in uniform, and he thought, That should be me. That's how I wanted to come home.

But it had been years since Beamer wore those clothes. Now, in late March, he was in a T-shirt he'd bought at the Wildwood Correctional Center commissary in Alaska and a pair of jeans a fellow inmate had given him.

His eyes met his mother's. She rushed to meet him, wrapped her arms tightly around him, and spoke to God.

"Praise the Lord!" she called out. "My baby is here!"

As she held her son, shaking and crying, hurried travelers paused to stare.

She didn't care. Her boy was home.

The last time The Virginian-Pilot published a story about Beamer and his mother, Ozawa Skipper-Coleman, was in July 2010, several months after Skipper-Coleman called the newspaper pleading for help for her son, an Iraq war veteran who was then 26.

A tough but warm woman from Virginia Beach who'd raised Beamer and his two brothers mostly on her own, she was desperate to save her middle child from a fate that was beginning to feel inevitable: years of prison time, or worse, a jail-cell suicide.

If only she could get someone - the Army, the legal system, her congressman - to see Beamer for what he really was, a mentally ill combat veteran in urgent need of treatment, not a common thug.
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