Veteran Survived 3 Tours, Attempted Suicide But Not Tampa VA Hospital

Mom questions care at Tampa V.A. hospital
News Channel 8
By Steve Andrews Investigative Reporter
Published: August 29, 2015

Robert Bradford arrived at Haley in May 2012. He suffered paralysis from a gunshot wound to the neck. Robert did two tours of duty in Iraq, a third in Afghanistan. It wasn’t an enemy bullet that turned him into a quadriplegic. Suffering invisible wounds from post traumatic stress disorder, he attempted suicide in 2011. By the time he arrived in Tampa, his mother recalls Robert was eating a regular diet, moved about the grounds with his power chair and went on outings everyday. However, his condition deteriorated and in March of this year Monte told V.A. Secretary McDonald, she wanted her son “out of this grave yard.”

TAMPA, FL (WFLA) – The mother of a U.S. Army soldier claims the military sent her son to fight a war at the James A. Haley Veterans Administration hospital without ammunition.

Monte Reinhardt claims her quadriplegic son received substandard care, contracted infections and lived in unsanitary conditions. Her son Army Specialist Robert Bradford was a patient at Haley’s Spinal Cord Injury Center for three years.

“He didn’t really receive top notch care, he really didn’t,” Monte stated.

So earlier this year she fired off a letter to V.A. secretary Robert McDonald complaining of “unsafe staffing levels, no respect for sanitation practices,” pointing out Robert’s gums “are near rotten.”

“When I would brush his teeth, and I would not be rushed, the toothbrush would be bloody,” Monte added.

She wrote McDonald, that Robert contracted “a new infection weekly.”

“He would have a U.T.I.(urinary tract infection) and a couple of times it would get to the point where it was just flat out red,” she explained.

Robert died two days after surgery. His uniform shirt now hangs on a chair in her apartment.

The flag that draped his casket sits on a cabinet beside an urn that contains his ashes. read more here