On Saturday, March 19th 2016 an Egg Harbor Township Veteran doused himself in gasoline before lighting himself on fire only 75 feet away from a Department of Veterans Affairs Clinic in New Jersey. The clinic was closed that day.
The man, identified as 51-year-old Charles R. Ingram III, left no note of explanation for his actions. He was airlifted by helicopter to the Temple University Burn Center in Philadelphia in critical condition. News of his death wasn’t reported until Tuesday and even then the expected outcry has been muffled at best. Veterans advocate, Benjamin Krause posted:
“VA and the major news networks are not reporting on the suicide with any degree of detail you would see with most suicide stories.”
Krause cites the lack of coverage on what he perceives as:
“the linkage between reduced psychiatric care quality, availability and telemedicine.”
Ingram was reportedly receiving treatment from the Atlantic County Community Based Outpatient Clinic (CBOC), part of the Wilmington VA Medical Center system, via their newly implemented telemedicine psychiatric platform. The system was implemented at the Northfield VA clinic in 2011 to increase veteran access to care through improved technology. The telemedicine model is cheaper, but more technology dependent. The results, tragically, speak for themselves.
What could drive a man to seek self-immolation as a means of escape? We may never know for sure, but nobody deserves to die this way, and certainly not someone who had served our country. Many people are pointing to this as just another failure on the VA’s part to care for veterans.
“We have been asking the VA in Wilmington for years for Saturday appointments and late Wednesday night appointments, and were told it was going to be taken care of,” Atlantic County Veterans Affairs Director Bob Frolow, told The Press of Atlantic City. “As of today, it is still not.”
This is not an isolated incident. In 2014, Navy veteran Kevin Keller, 52 shot and killed himself outside of a Wytheville VA clinic. In constant pain after being weaned off of his medication, Keller left a note blaming the VA for his suicide. The suicide rate of recent veterans is reported to be 50 percent higher than that of non-military civilians. We need to do more because these men and women deserve better.
Featured image via disabledveterans.org
