Reply #38: NYT, tomorrow: Kin of Marine... Ask if He Is a Casualty of War

[Rose Siding]

Kin of Marine Who Shot Policemen Ask if He Is a Casualty of War

snip>
"He walked over to where Sergeant Stevenson laid suffering from several gunshot wounds and shot him in the back of the head," said Lt. Bill Heyne, the lead investigator on the case for the Stanislaus County sheriff. "It was an execution of that officer."

The marine, Lance Cpl. Andres Raya, 19, who spent seven months in Iraq last year as a motor transportation operator, then walked to a muddy alley around the corner, a place where he used to pick oranges as a student on his way to Ceres High School. He slipped from one backyard to the next, telling some residents they were "innocent civilians" and would not be harmed.
...
"There is a general sentiment among some people against authority and against the police," said Father McFalls, who accompanied Corporal Raya's parents and a dozen other relatives to the police station on Tuesday where they prayed at a memorial to Sergeant Stevenson. "This young man in his earlier life would not have encouraged any of this anti-police rhetoric."

Corporal Raya grew up in The Camp, a neighborhood of subsidized housing near the high school where Mexican immigrants, including his father, found shelter for their families while working in the nearby fields. For many teenagers in The Camp, a job fighting in Iraq is considered a dream ticket to somewhere better, which has made ever more poignant the mystery about why one life from The Camp ended so badly.

http://nytimes.com/2005/01/14/national/14marine.html

Seems pretty clear he was in some kind of war related state of mind- how else to interpret the "innocent civilian" remark? Denying it won't make us any safer (or the police who will continue to deal with it) We'll end up with hundreds of thousands of ticking bombs in our neighborhoods.

There needs to be some kind of safety net made available to returning troops, to guage their fitness whether they are returning or home for good. Bush is bad enough, but with this new VA chief is even worse- all I read about are cuts for vet services.