Vietnam Veteran Called To Report A Suicide, His Own

Troubled Nogal man calls in his own fatal shooting
Ruidoso News
Dave Tomlin
July 19, 2016

“There is a suicide,” he told the dispatcher who took his last call. The dispatcher reported that “when asked where and who, he advised his address and that it would be him in about five minutes.”

A deeply troubled Nogal man made a chilling call to the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office early this month in which he told a dispatcher he was going to shoot himself, then hung up and pulled the trigger before deputies could reach him.

Owen D. Blackman, 63, had been struggling with severe medical problems and overuse of pain medications in the weeks leading up to July 1, when he was found outside his home at the wheel of his parked truck with a single gunshot wound in his chest.

“He was a delightful person until he got sick,” said his grief-stricken wife, Judy Blackman, in a telephone interview Tuesday. “Fine and full of laughter and joy. He loved to fish, he loved to hunt. He was a sweetheart.”

But Blackman told the sheriff’s dispatcher on July 1 that he was in severe pain and wanted to make it stop.

“He then advised me he was going to hang up now so I don’t hear the shot,” the dispatcher wrote in her log report of the call.

Judy Blackman said her husband, a military veteran and retired U.S. Postal Service worker, was suffering from lingering medical issues that arose from injuries he suffered in Vietnam.
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