Veteran’s suicide stuns family and friends

Veteran’s suicide stuns Hill Country family and friends
My San Antonio
BY WAYNE WRIGHT
Posted on May 15, 2014

His friends say that D.J. was the kindest person you’d ever want to know. That makes his death all the more difficult to bear.

“He went out of his way for everybody. He always put them first,” says Anne Robinson, President of the Texas Chapter of Paralyzed Veterans of America. Robinson is one of those mourning his loss.

Donald Charles Redden – D.J. was his nickname – was an Army veteran who seemed well-adjusted despite a spinal cord injury. He had his downtimes, according to Veronica Espinosa, the 32-year old girl friend with whom he planned to spend the rest of his life. But the 31-year old hid his troubles well, “sucking it up” like the good soldier he was.

“There were moments when he would share his emotions with me…but for the most part…he was a man’s man, you know, too tough to cry,” Espinosa says. She is still in tears every day.

D.J. was in the midst of a difficult divorce, Espinosa says. He hadn’t seen his kids in months. She also says he had “bad insomnia, PTSD, a traumatic brain injury and was 100 percent disabled.” Still, she says on most days he joked around and seemed okay.

She met him at her parents’ home in New Braunfels where she had moved after her own divorce. D.J. was a close friend of Espinosa’s father, Alvin Guerrero, who is also disabled. Guerrero is an Air Force veteran who was paralyzed from the waist down after an accident at a base in Blytheville, Arkansas where he was stationed from 1982 to 1984.

Espinosa said D.J. was always fun to be around. They were close in age and had so much in common. Shortly after they met, he moved into the guest house in her parent’s back yard. They saw each other every day.

“He was like a member of the family,” she says. ”I thought he was happy.” She believed he had long since won the toughest battle of his life – preventing his own suicide.

“Two years before, he had tried it. He said he would never do it again. He said he knew it was not the way out. It wasn’t the way to erase the pain,” she says through her tears.
read more here


Hero After War from Kathleen "Costos" DiCesare on Vimeo.