Bob Woodruff: 'Where Is the Accountability?'
Woodruff reports: Family talks after soldier son's suicide.
— -- The parents of Master Sgt. James Coons spoke to Congress today to express their concerns over veteran care -- their son committed suicide after he returned from Iraq. They previously spoke with Bob Woodruff about their experience in the following report from April 23.
On July 4, 2003, Carol and Richard Coons had planned to welcome home their son Master Sgt. James Coons, a career soldier who had seen action in Iraq in 2003 and during the first Gulf War. Instead, they found out James was dead.
He had committed suicide in his room at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Walter Reed staff did not find him until at least two days after his death, and only then at the insistence of his family, who were desperate to locate their son.
In their first network television interview since their son's death, Carol and Richard Coons sat down with me to talk about their family's anger and quest for answers. "They didn't take care of my son. They just didn't take care of him," Carol said.
Just a few days earlier, Coons, 35, had been evacuated from a base in Kuwait because he had overdosed on sleeping pills. An Army doctor at a combat hospital labeled the action a "suicidal gesture," according to Coons' medical records.
Coons told medical personnel that he had visited a morgue on the base to pay his respects to the fallen soldiers and had been haunted by one of the faces -- that of a Navy corpsman who had been badly burned and disfigured by an IED.
His parents knew from talking to him on the phone that he was troubled -- they say his voice began to sound different, and they could tell that he was under a lot of strain. "He said, 'The things that I've seen are really bothering me,'" said Carol. "He would see demons and he was trying to control his demons," added Richard.
The noncommissioned officer in charge of the Army's 385th Signal Company, Coons was awarded a Bronze Star for his service in the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. He had served in the military for more than 16 years, and family and friends have said the Army was his life.
