Veteran Daniel Somer's

After veteran Daniel Somers’s suicide, his family has a new mission: Improve VA services

Katherine Frey/The Washington Post - Howard and Jean Somers have been meeting with VA officials and congressional staffers to tell their son’s story. “If your system is so difficult to get into,” Howard Somers asked, “how the hell are you going to prevent suicides?”

By Steve Vogel, Published: August 23 E-mail the writer

Shortly before his death on June 10, Army veteran Daniel Somers wrote a note for his family, asking his wife, Angel, to share it as she saw fit.
“I am left with basically nothing,” he typed on his laptop at their Phoenix townhouse. “Too trapped in a war to be at peace, too damaged to be at war.”

Daniel Somers with his wife in June of 2006.

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His service in Iraq, including multiple combat missions as a turret gunner, left him with severe post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury. But the government, he wrote, had “turned around and abandoned me.”
Somers felt frustrated in his efforts to get mental health and medical care from the Department of Veterans Affairs. An antiquated scheduling system at the Phoenix medical center left him waiting, often in vain, for a postcard with the date of his next mental health appointment.
And he was caught in VA’s notorious disability claims backlog, which at its peak in March included more than 900,000 compensation requests from veterans, two-thirds of them waiting for more than 125 days. When Somers died, his case seeking full disability for his PTSD had been awaiting resolution for 20 months.
“Is it any wonder then that the latest figures show 22 veterans killing themselves each day?” Somers asked in his note.
Around 9 p.m. on June 10, while his wife, a nurse, was working, Somers took a handgun from his home and walked to a street several blocks away. When Phoenix police arrived at the scene, he shot himself in the head, police and family members said. He was 30.
Now his parents, Jean and Howard Somers, are determined to use their son’s death to expose what they see as critical deficiencies in the VA system for treating mental illness. They met with congressional and VA officials in Washington this month and opened Somers’s records to The Washington Post. It is an effort, they say, to show how the agency failed their son and a way, maybe, to help someone else.
“He was one of those million vets who didn’t get the care they needed,” said Jean Somers, 62, a former health-care administrator.
In a speech Aug. 10 to the Disabled American Veterans, President Obama declared a need to “end this epidemic of suicide among our veterans and troops,” and he announced $107 million in new funding to better treat PTSD and traumatic brain injury.
The daily average of 22 suicides by veterans, found in a VA study in February, was 20 percent higher than a 2007 department estimate. Suicides among active-duty troops reached 349 last year, the most since the Pentagon began closely tracking the number in 2001.
‘Turned upside down’
Howard and Jean Somers were in New Jersey visiting family when Angel called with the news.
“Our whole lives have been turned upside down,” said Howard Somers, 65, a retired urologist who lives with his wife in San Diego.
After arriving in Phoenix, their grief turned to anger as they read through Daniel’s papers documenting his interactions with VA. The family shared Daniel’s story with local media, and his note was posted June 22 on the Web site Gawker.
For veterans’ organizations, Daniel Somers’s death is a case study in how federal agencies continue to fail veterans.