Deputies: Man charged after falsely claiming he was a veteran
BY WHAM
August 11, 2016
After a two month investigation, Orleans County Sheriff's deputies said Skellen tricked the VFW Post in the Village of Holley into believing he was a vet, even rising to the position of post commander at one point.
Holley, N.Y. – An Orleans County man accused of posing as a Vietnam War veteran and reaping some financial benefits is facing felony charges.
Earl Skellen, 69, is charged with first degree scheme to defraud and fourth degree grand larceny.
The executive director of the Veterans Outreach Center is outraged by Skellen’s alleged actions.
"It’s an insult to the guys and gals who are currently serving overseas and everybody's who's given a little time of their life to our country," Executive Director Todd Baxter said.
Investigators found Skellen never served in Vietnam or any branch of the armed forces.
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Families speak about military loved ones lost and how we failed them
Herald Sun
Ruth Lamperd
August 13, 2016
“The number of suicides and the incidence of despair, depression and broken lives among our veteran community is a national shame,” Retired Lieutenant General Leahy
Jarrad Brown was in the army and deployed to Iraq in 2007-08 and Afghanistan in 2010. He took his own life in 2015, aged 27.
A SHAMEFUL number of Aussie soldiers return from war zones depressed, anxious, in despair but unable to find help.
Grieving families of war veterans who have taken their own lives say their loved ones might still be alive today if they’d received adequate support from authorities.
Thirteen families of service men and veterans have bravely spoken out to highlight the plight of military men and women at risk.
Their call for more support comes as a Sunday Herald Sun investigation reveals 41 military personnel and veterans died this year from suicide, the same as the number of Australians who were killed in Afghanistan during 13 years of war.
Each family which agreed to be part of this special report lost their sons, husbands or fathers in the past two years.
They ranged in age from 21 to 57. Most of them were in their 20s and 30s when they died.
Almost all had been deployed to overseas operations, including Iraq, East Timor, Afghanistan or served on navy ships involved in border patrol.
The concerns were backed by former Chief of Army and Soldier On chairman Peter Leahy, who said the government needed to “step up and own the problem”.
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Go Into Their Hell To Get Them Out
Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
August 13, 2106
How can you think you will change anything for our veterans if you have not spent time in hell with them? That should be the first question that gets answered if we will ever save more veterans after combat instead of losing survivors of it.
There is no doubt in my mind that most folks have good intentions with all the "awareness" they are trying to raise. Those good intentions have had deadly results because far too many of them did not understand what they were getting into.
The trouble with veterans trying to raise awareness is, while they do understand the trip to hell, they do not necessarily understand what to do or what to say to help their "brother" find hope to heal.
Peer support is vital and works if the veteran is armed with more knowledge than the veteran in crisis. After all, think about support groups for all different issues. These groups are divided up so that everyone in them has been in the same type of situation.
If you have a drug problem, you would not go into a sexual addiction group and expect it would help you with your problems. If you have PTSD from one cause, going into another support group does not work as well as if members of the group survived the same type of event.
Imagine a person with PTSD from abuse in a group where the majority are suffering from PTSD after car accidents. Do the others understand the symptoms? Sure but they do not understand what it is like to have been abused and what that did to the survivor of it.
It is the same thing with PTSD caused by being willing to risk your life for someone else. Firefighters support other firefighters because they understand all of it. Police Officers support other Police Officers for the same reason. Veterans support other veterans because they also understand what it is like no matter what war title is on their hat. What is under their hat are a lot of memories they wish they never had known.
In the line of this work, I have been pulled into their hell but have only stood in the doorway of it watching from a safe distance. I am a family member, so while I can offer other families a deeper level of support than to a veteran, because of the years behind me, I've helped veterans as well as families.
While I have experienced my life on the line for 50 years with very different types of trauma, I have never been in combat and have never been in the service. I just spent my life with veterans. I understand them, but only to a point. I can help them because while I do not understand combat, I can understand what it did to them as much as they can understand what my life did to me. What I cannot do is offer them the same level of support as another veteran can.
I can help them understand what PTSD is and why they have it and I can help them begin to heal but then I have to get them to the point where they go for professional help and into more support than I can give.
That is what has been lacking all along. Good intentions without enough knowledge to what to do and when to do it has produced deadly outcomes for far too many.
If you are a veteran, then you are the best source of support for other veterans. Time to live up to it.
It is great to be willing to call a buddy and be there to listen to them. Most of the time a veteran in crisis just needs to know they matter. That gets them from one minute but what about the next if they are left lacking any more knowledge on how to heal so that tomorrow will be better than "this day" was?
Spend time learning what PTSD is and then go one step further to learn how to help them heal. That is the only way to get them out of the hell they are in right now. If you really want to change what has been happening, then understand what had happened over the last 40 years when researchers discovered what works best along with what failed. So far the failures have been repeated and the successes have been obliterated.
Leading Cause of Death for Veterans is Us
Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
August 13, 2016
Experts spent enough years knowing no one will ever really know how many veterans commit suicide. As bad as the reported numbers of "22 a day" or the most recent "20 a day" according to the VA, there are far more no one ever puts into their spreadsheets.
CDC 10 Leading Causes of Death covers suicide by age group as well as other causes. The total in 2014 was 42,773 suicides in America. While most Americans face crisis situations, they were not "trained" to survive them. Young veterans were trained. Older veterans were not.
They have been trained in "prevention" for a decade yet these young male veterans are triple their peer rate on suicides. Young female veterans are twelve times their civilian peer rate. Every state has been reporting their suicide rate for veterans is double the civilian population and the vast majority of them are over the age of 50.
So look at the CDC numbers, use the math and you arrive at over 26,000 a year, but you are still not near the true number.
The word "veteran" is debatable and some do not consider themselves "veteran" if they were in the National Guard or Reserves or the Coast Guard.
Some were given less than honorable discharges and they are not counted.
Some "cause of deaths" are not so obvious like overdoes, single vehicle crashes and the ones who simply vanish.
Then there are the times when a veteran faces off with law enforcement. They are not counted as a price of providing retention of our freedoms.
Ron Smith turned to the crisis line. He ended up dead after a confrontation with police officers. They had to be called because he was suicidal. One of those nasty rules that have to be followed when someone is a danger to themselves or someone else. It is one of those things that we know we have to do because we cannot just say the words "we are raising awareness" and then go watch TV.
Folks working at the Crisis Line face far more every time they pick up the phone. They know the call could be something as simple as listening to a veteran in the middle of the night trying to make sense of a nightmare. Or a veteran needing to talk just because he needs someone to let him know he still matters.
It the right thing to do when there is a life on the line. It is also one of the hardest things to decide needs to be done or not. Guess wrong and either a veteran is pissed off because they were not "serious" or do not call and they pull the trigger.
Calling police means the veteran is facing a life or death moment but you also know you are subjecting police officers to it as well. Sometimes it ends up good, the veteran puts down the weapon, no shots are fired and he/she gets the emergency care they need to stay alive and be pissed off at you. Other times it does not end so great.
Ron Smith ended up dead and Kevin Higgins ended up dead too in Wisconsin.
In the last eight days before Kevin died, he tried calling six different crisis hotlines to simply vent his thoughts. Nicole’s phone shows multiple calls to the lines, though Kevin's phone is still in possession of the police and the crisis lines are anonymous.
“There was one, a combat crisis hotline that we found,” Nicole said. “And a veteran on there did speak with him from a little before midnight until like four in the morning… All he wanted to do was talk. He just needed an outlet.”
On July 17, Kevin robbed the Union Avenue Tap and raised an assault rifle at officers who responded, prompting them to fire six bullets into him.
She doesn't blame the officers who shot her husband to death that night. She said the officers were just defending themselves from a crime, but that the incident could have been stopped long before July 17.
But it isn't just about calls to the Crisis Line. It happened in South Carolina when James Jennings Jr. ended up dead.
Kirk Shahan, Marine Iraq veteran faced off with police officers in Detroit. He ended up living and was taken to the hospital.
In California it was another suicidal veteran facing off with police
"deputies confronted another 26-year-old man — who they later identified as a veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder — after he was spotted waving a machete at passers-by in Shingletown, they said.
Dispatchers just before 1 a.m. received reports of the man waving the machete near Reed's Market on Highway 44.
Deputies found the man walking along the highway and spotted him holding a machete.
He put down the machete and knelt to the ground on deputies' orders, before putting a knife to his neck and telling deputies he wrote a letter, which they took to mean a suicide note, Ruiz said.
Deputies talked to the man in an attempt to get him to drop the knife, which he did after several minutes, according to the Sheriff's Office.
They detained the man, eventually learning he was a veteran from another California county who had been unable to find work since his release from the military, Ruiz said."
Month after month reports from all over the country come in and it all adds up to there are more dead after war than during them. What was learned after Vietnam has turned into a shorter life as "veteran" survivor because what experts spent years understanding so they could actually change the outcome has been tossed aside, much like our veterans have been.
If you want to know who is to blame for this suicide, this sums it up.
Davenport vet's suicide at center of VA talks
Woody's counterpart in Cedar County, Iowa, Patty Hamann, talked about the frustration of referring veterans to VA programs that no longer exist. Word didn't reach the trenches. She also talked about a VA doctor who died suddenly. Some vets had built an enormous bond with this psychiatrist and had been seeing him for years.
"We eventually were notified by mail," she said.
In Brandon's case, Hamann said, someone should have reached out to him when he went home.
The 33-year-old was a Marine and Army sergeant and served three deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. We know for sure that he asked for an emergency appointment. We know he was suicidal. He died alone.
Even though Brandon had been diagnosed with PTSD, was taking anti-depressants and had been battling alcohol and drug addiction, the Army sent him to Afghanistan for his third deployment.
Ask the Vietnam vets. They'll tell you that was crazy. They'll tell you it's no wonder so many of our young veterans are coming apart at the seams. The country has asked too much of them, and when they ask back, the country isn't there.
Barb Ickes wrote that on Quad City Times today. She has been doing a good job of telling a story that did not have to happen. Brandon Ketchum became dead because too little attention has been paid to what has been happening all along.
They are also to blame for many, more more. These veterans, along with current military, were trained in "prevention" yet it turns out they have been prevented from healing. But, hey, just keep talking about them as if they are just numbers. Anything that lets you sleep at night because facing the truth has been a nightmare for our veterans.
Family remembers veteran killed in confrontation with Pickaway County deputies
WCMH News
By Olivia Fecteau
Published: August 10, 2016
That crisis line communication was what brought Pickaway County Sheriff’s deputies to Ron Smith’s house in Mount Sterling. Deputies said when they arrived, they found Smith with a long rifle. Smith died after a confrontation with the deputies, both of whom were military veterans themselves. Sheriff Robert Radcliff said it was not clear who fired the fatal shot.
CHILLICOTHE, OH (WCMH) — Military service ran in the family for Ron Smith. He survived a war, serving in the United States Army during Desert Storm. His father and other relatives were also in the service.
Now, his family is grieving after the 45-year-old was killed Tuesday in a confrontation with Pickaway County Sheriff’s deputies.
Diane Smith, Ron Smith’s mother, said her son was receiving care at the Columbus Veterans Affairs medical center as recently as last week, as well as the VA center in Chillicothe and Grant Medical Center in Columbus. She said the family was not happy with his care through the VA.
“It seemed like they could just never figure out what was going on,” Diane Smith said.
Her husband, Ron’s father Larry Smith, said they received a call from their daughter-in-law early Tuesday morning telling them Ron had been in a confrontation with deputies and did not survive.
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