Florida Veteran Marine Committed Suicide, California Military Surplus Stepped Up

Oceanside Military Surplus Store Donates Dress Blues to Family of Marine Who Committed Suicide
The Marine's funeral is on Tuesday in Florida
NBC San Diego
By Brie Stimson
Feb 17, 2018

The Marine Foster helped this weekend committed suicide, which hit home for him because one of his cousins who was a Marine, killed himself when Foster was still in high school. “I’ve always remembered him and I remember the heartache that it caused for our family, and unfortunately it’s an epidemic that is going through every branch of the military,” he said.

On Thursday, a customer reached out to Gearhound Surplus, a military surplus and used uniform store, saying the family of a Marine he’d served with needed dress blues to bury him in.

“We stopped everything we were doing here, grabbed all the uniforms, mounted the ribbons for them and sent it straight over to the post office overnight, and it arrived about two hours ago so the Marine will be buried in his uniform on Tuesday,” Joseph Foster, the owner of Gearhound, told NBC 7. “The family was just ecstatic that it arrived on time and that they’re going to honor the Marine how he wanted to be honored.”

The fallen Marine’s “step-sister called just to see if we could have everything and really stressed that the funeral is Tuesday morning and they needed the dress blues right away,” he explained. “When I called her back she was like, ‘how much do I owe you?’ And that’s the biggest relief for us and for them, just saying, ‘no, we’re not taking money from you.”
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