Blake Hall
Iraq War veteran Thomas Young was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder after he returned home in 2004, and he struggled with alcohol abuse ever since. His attempts to seek help at a VA hospital were fruitless because at the time he was not suicidal.
Fast forward to July 2015 when Young did become suicidal. He called the Veterans Crisis Line (VCL) to seek help, but was sent to voicemail. That week, he committed suicide by lying on train tracks near his home, leaving behind a wife and daughter.
A day later, the VA returned his call.
Sen. Mark Kirk described this tragic anecdote last Thursday at a Senate hearing on the VA’s troubling record of dropping calls from suffering veterans. The VA knew that suicidal veterans were being sent to voicemail without being helped four months before Young’s death, but did nothing to fix the issue. In Kirk’s story, the trail of causality leading from a faulty phoneline to a veteran’s suicide were made all too clear.
The VA Inspector General’s report found that Young wasn’t the only veteran sent to voicemail.
We found 3 of the 41 complaints made to the VCL in FY 2014 were claims that calls were transferred to a voicemail system. Our review identified over 20 calls that were routed to voicemail at 1 of the backup centers. When VCL management investigated these complaints, they discovered that the backup center staff were not aware the voicemail system existed; thus, they did not return these calls.
Kirk’s office told CNN that the senator is demanding the heads of every VA employee who contributed to this problem.
“Every person who oversaw the hotline for the past nine years should be fired because the GAO and VA OIG (Office of Inspector General) have repeatedly noted the crisis line’s failure,” Kirk said.