The Kentucky News-Enterprise has a piece this week on jailed Wisconsin veteran, Keith Roberts.
Sister takes up brother’s fight for freedom
By JOSHUA COFFMAN
RADCLIFF —Sally Harrod is crunching numbers that stretch beyond her job as an accountant. She oversees a legal fund for her brother in two legal cases regarding benefits he sought as a Navy veteran.
Keith Roberts, 60, is in a Minnesota federal prison, convicted of fraudulently receiving electronic funds from the department of Veterans Affairs.
Government prosecutors contend the he lied to get more than $200,000 in disability payments.
But Harrod, her family members and other veterans’ advocates disagree. They fear the VA sought retribution against Roberts for seeking decades of back pay for post-traumatic stress disorder and criticizing the agency’s slow response to approve or deny his medical claims.
Harrod, of Elizabethtown, moved to the Heartland eight years ago after meeting her husband, Mike, online. She has set up a legal defense fund at a Radcliff bank to help pay for Roberts’ appeals.
His criminal appeal has been argued and awaits supplemental briefs to be filed, while a VA appeals court will later rule on the claim prosecutors say he fraudulently filed to get benefits.
Roberts’ advocates contend that his fighting a case on the same grounds in two different courts violated his constitutional right to due process.
“It’s been very stressful for me. This is my bother,” Harrod said. “I’m trying to help with family problems, family finances and trying to give emotional support to them.”
She has trouble watching her 80-year-old mother constantly stay upset as her brother sits in a prison cell for seeking disability benefits. “It’s hard on all of us,” Harrod said.
Keith Roberts claims he saw his friend and fellow sailor Gary Holland fatally crushed under the nose wheel compartment of a C-54 airplane in Naples, Italy, in February 1969.
Ten months later, in December 1969, Roberts suffered an alcohol-fueled psychotic episode that resulted in him being put into a straightjacket and injected with Thorazine.
Harrod said she lived with her brother in the early 1970s in Lansing, Mich., shortly after he was discharged from the Navy.
She said he often mentioned the accident that killed his friend.
“Gary was still alive when he first got there (to the hangar),” she said, recounting Roberts’ retelling. “That always seemed to bother him. They stopped him. He felt like he could’ve done something more — should’ve done something more — if they hadn’t stopped him. The trauma of something like that is just unbearable.”
Though she heard the story right away, no official record of Roberts talking with a doctor or VA official appeared until March 1991, court documents show.Documentation came four years after he sought a claim on the subsequent December 1969 incident when he was held in a straightjacket.
Medical opinions differ on whether Roberts suffered mental illness before enlisting, court documents show, with some mentioning only one of the 1969 incidents or the other.
Roberts’ attorney, Robert Walsh of Battle Creek, Mich., contends that either by itself could qualify for VA assistance for PTSD.
He also argues that Roberts cannot be convicted of fraud until his appeals process runs out with VA.
Roberts’ benefits were revoked, Harrod said, after he requested back pay stemming to the time he was released from the Navy.
Shortly after, she said, an investigation began into the validity of his claims, later leading to charges.
During his trial, federal prosecutors called several witnesses stationed in Naples with Roberts and Holland.
The witnesses said Roberts was not there when the accident happened and minimized the closeness of the two.
Harrod, sitting at a desk in her Wilson Road office, said Friday she believes her brother still would be receiving benefits if not for his request for retroactive pay.
She said she believes Roberts’ story completely and noted that others who served in Naples with her brother have since come forward, putting him in the hangar at the time of the accident.
But those people never testified.
Holland and Roberts served together at stations in the United States before deploying to Italy and, Harrod said, that alone should be enough to show her brother suffered from PTSD while in service.
“He doesn’t really have to prove his entire involvement in it,” she said. “He was there and it affected him.”
So far, she said, her brother faces at least $50,000 in legal debt. Her fund, at Kentucky Neighborhood Bank, had $45 in it last week.
Harrod hopes to get in touch with national veterans’ groups to speak out for Roberts. Area soldiers and military retirees act shocked when she tells them her brother’s ordeal, she said.
And, once it is all settled, she hopes her family can help veterans in similar situations.
“It’s unbelievable to all of them,” she said. “If they can do it to my brother, they can do it to anyone at any time.”
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