Suicide by Cop or Combat?

…they survive combat but cannot survive back home

By Chaplain Kathie STAFF WRITER

The reports have come out for years. They survive combat but cannot survive back home. We read a lot about suicides when they are discovered by family members hanging at home, lifeless from a bullet wound shot by their own hand and we can attempt to count their numbers but even if we managed to find all of these deaths, we wouldn’t be close. Drug overdoses are inconclusive. We don’t know all the cases involved someone forgetting they took their medications or they wanted to die. Accidents are also inconclusive when we don’t know if they had a regular accident, had a flashback and freaked out or if they wanted to ram their car into a tree or plunge over a cliff. Suicide by cop is another one that we will never really know for sure.

This is one case.

Friday, January 14, 2011

Veteran’s sister challenges law enforcement’s PTSD policies

By Marisa Demarco

Jonelle Ellis hasn’t done much public speaking. She’s never been involved in politics. But for the last six months or so, she’s helped create a bill and convinced legislators in Santa Fe to carry it

Ellis’ brother, a 25-year-old Iraq War veteran, was shot and killed a year ago on Jan. 13, 2010, by Albuquerque police. Kenneth Ellis III stepped out of his car with a gun to his head in front of the 7-Eleven at Constitution and Eubank.

She’d talked to her baby brother just a few days earlier. He wanted to go to the movies. “He was telling me about his son and his life,” she says. “He was very positive. It’s hard to listen to them say ‘suicide by cop.’ ”

But in Portland, there were three in five months. Anthony McDowell’s wife called police for help. Her husband needed them but in the end, he was killed by a cop’s bullet. He was 50.

Thomas Higginbotham, 67, was a homeless Vietnam veteran and Nikkolas Lookabill, 22, was a young Iraq veteran. Different ages, different wars but the same deadly end.

Veteran’s wife call for help ends with death of husband shot by police
Three deaths involving veterans and police may not seem like a huge problem but when you think they happened in five months in the Portland area alone, that is a clear indication there is an alarm screaming WARNING.

Three deadly encounters between vets and police

Published: Sunday, February 06, 2011
By Mike Francis, The Oregonian
Anthony McDowell. Thomas Higginbotham. Nikkolas Lookabill.

Three men who served in the military. Three encounters with law enforcement officers. Three lives ended by gunfire.

These cases, which occurred in three separate Portland-area jurisdictions within the last five months, have alarmed observers.

“It’s really difficult for everyone,” said Gresham Police Chief Craig Junginger, whose officers shot McDowell to death outside his house on Monday. “The United States hasn’t faced this since the mid- to late-Seventies, since the Vietnam War.”

“Military reintegration needs to address this issue further,” John Violanti, a former criminal justice professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, wrote in an email.

McDowell, 50, had been home from war for seven years. His wife called for help, saying he was suicidal and when police arrived, he was holding a rifle. The findings from an investigation into his death, as customary in the case of officer-involved shootings, will be presented to a grand jury later this month.

His funeral service takes place at 11:30 a.m. today at Good Shepherd Community Church in Boring, to be followed by committal at Willamette National Cemetery.

Thomas Higginbotham, a Vietnam War veteran, was 67, homeless and carrying a knife when he was shot to death by Portland police officers at an abandoned car wash Jan. 2. He was intoxicated when he was killed.

Nikkolas Lookabill was 22 and had been home about four months from a mostly peaceful deployment to Iraq when he was shot to death by Vancouver police early in the morning on Sept. 7. The Clark County Prosecutor’s Office reported that he told officers “he wanted them to shoot him.” click links for more

Awareness depends on where these veterans live. Travel across the country, ask a cop or sheriff if they know about PTSD and what they are doing to take care of veterans, and you’ll get a different answer. The problem is, the veterans all served this one nation but coming home should never be up to locals to do or not do for them.

Could they have lived if they had the help they needed? We may never know if there will ever be enough help for all of them but what we do know is when we see numbers of deaths known to be suicides going up, it is not a far leap to figure out there are many, many more we’ll never really know for sure. After wars are over, monuments go into the planning stages and the names are added up. That is, the names of the men and women dying in combat. Missing from the counts are deaths because of the wars. If they counted every death associated with Vietnam, they would be over 300,000 names. Agent Orange counts are missing just as PTSD deaths and suicide by cop. Some weep for the names listed, stunned by panel after panel of white letters on the black stone but for others they look at the Wall and the pain is too deep to release. We know there are so many more lives gone because of Vietnam and wonder when we will ever get it right so that no more names need to be added after the official counting is done.