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Jeffrey Lucey: Turned Away Seventeen Days Before the End

Jeffrey Lucey asked for help in the open, in the end, with his family standing beside him. He had a private therapist's diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. He had VA progress notes, which his family later shared with reporters, recording that he planned to overdose, hang himself, or suffocate himself. He had been admitted to the VA hospital in Leeds, Massachusetts, involuntarily, as a danger to himself, and kept under observation for four days. Then the same system discharged him, and when his family brought him back four days after that — drunk, despondent, days past wrecking the family car — it sent him home again, this time, his family and later VA's own inspector general said, without a psychiatrist examining him at all. Seventeen days later he was dead. This page is the record of his service, of the three weeks in May and June of 2004 when the institution made the two decisions that frame his case, and of the lawsuit his parents carried — the first of its kind in the Iraq war — until the government paid to end it without ever admitting it was responsible.

The service and the promise

Jeffrey Michael Lucey was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, and raised in Belchertown, the only son of Kevin and Joyce Lucey, with two sisters, Kelly and Debra. He graduated from Belchertown High School in 1999 and enlisted in the Marine Reserves that December — in part, his father told the Boston Globe, to pay for schooling his parents were prepared to finance anyway, and in part to prove something to himself: “He knew the Marines were the toughest branch.” He left for boot camp at Parris Island in May 2000, was assigned to the 6th Motor Transport Battalion in New Haven, Connecticut, enrolled at Holyoke Community College, and drilled on weekends. He was, by every account given afterward, an ordinary reservist with an ordinary civilian life — which is the point of his file. Nothing in it required the system to do anything extraordinary.

His unit was activated in January 2003. Lucey reached Kuwait in February, ahead of an invasion he opposed; his journal, quoted by the Globe, describes a Scud missile landing nearby as the war began: “The noise was just short of blowing out your eardrums. Everyone’s heart truly skipped a beat and the reality of where we are and what’s truly happening hit home.” The 6th Motors moved north into Iraq through the fighting around Nasiriyah, where, the New Republic later reported, a thousand Iraqis including many civilians died. His was a light transport company; his comrades told the Globe it ferried ammunition, food, and Iraqi prisoners of war.

In April 2003 he wrote his girlfriend that he had done “immoral” things and wanted to “erase the past month, pretend it didn’t happen.” What those things were is one of the contested places in this record, and this page keeps it contested. Lucey came to believe, and told his family, two things above all: that he had cradled a dead Iraqi boy clutching a small American flag — a flag, bloodied, that he brought home and was later buried with — and that he had been ordered to shoot two unarmed Iraqi prisoners at close range, whose dog tags he said he kept. The Marine Corps investigated the prisoner claim and, through spokesman Captain Patrick Kerr, stated its finding flatly: “There was no documented evidence to support that he had any engagement with the enemy, whatsoever.” PBS’s Frontline persuaded the Corps to lift its instruction that unit members not talk to the press, interviewed those Marines, and reported that they denied Lucey had killed two prisoners and doubted he would ever have been positioned to do so alone; Frontline also concluded the dog tags were probably of the kind sold as souvenirs by children along the roads. A later account reported the Corps acknowledged it was likely Lucey had helped transport prisoners — his father developed a photograph from his son’s camera showing a hooded Iraqi prisoner under guard before a truck. The record therefore does not establish what Lucey did in Iraq. It establishes what he believed he had done, what he saw around Nasiriyah, and that the belief itself was destroying him. The promise at issue was never about verifying a battlefield memory. It was the standing promise made to every reservist sent home between deployments — his unit expected to return to Iraq within the year, and he was still attending drills in May 2004 — that when the wounds showed, the veterans’ system at Leeds, twenty miles from his parents’ house, would treat them.

He came home in July 2003, arriving by bus at New Haven, tan and thinner and smiling. “We felt so good,” his father said. “He survived.” The exit process had offered one clear chance to say otherwise, and he did not take it. On the first post-deployment forms, his parents later said, he wrote that he had memories of seeing “dead people.” His buddies told him to stop writing things like that unless he wanted to be held at Camp Pendleton for weeks of psychiatric evaluation; his older sister’s wedding was coming up, and he did not want to miss it. On the debriefing questionnaire he checked “no” to whether he needed psychiatric help. That first failure, if it can be called one, was shared: a young man who wanted to go home told the system what it needed to hear. Everything after that, he and his family told it the truth.

What happened

The deterioration is documented month by month in his family’s telling to the Globe, the Associated Press, Frontline, and the Dayton Daily News, consistently across those tellings. He resumed classes at Holyoke Community College and at first seemed, in his sister Debra’s words, relieved and fine. On Christmas Eve 2003 he begged off the family’s visit to his grandparents, sat with Debra in the kitchen, threw the two Iraqi dog tags he wore at her, and said: “Don’t you know your brother’s a murderer?”

By March 2004 he was, his mother said, easily startled to the point of humiliation — when a door slammed in a college hallway he dropped his books and crouched. He was vomiting daily, had nightmares and hallucinations, imagined people following him, could not concentrate, stopped going to classes, and did not take his final exams. He kept a flashlight by his bed because he believed he could hear the camel spiders of Iraq in his room. He drank, in his mother’s words, because “the only way he could sleep was to drink.” In May he found his father’s copy of a book on post-traumatic stress disorder, went down its symptom list — recurrent distressing dreams, reliving the experience, hallucinations, estrangement, inability to sleep, outbursts of anger — and said, repeatedly, “I have that.” He told Debra he had chosen a rope and a tree, probably a favorite maple with a rope swing from childhood, and reassured her he would never do it “because it would hurt Mom and Dad.” He made his mother listen to the song he played again and again, Shinedown’s “45,” and told her that staring down the barrel of a .45 meant, to him, looking down a long dark tunnel. “When you think about it, it’s the same thing,” Joyce Lucey said. “No light.”

He resisted the VA longest of all. He feared the Marines would learn of his problems — neither he nor his parents understood VA treatment was confidential from his unit — and that a PTSD label would cost him a job. In May he began seeing a private therapist, Dr. Mark Nickerson, who diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder and recommended VA care. His family hid the dog leashes, removed his combat knives, and took turns watching him.

On Friday, May 28, 2004, his father and sister brought him to the Northampton VA Medical Center in Leeds. He was involuntarily admitted that night. The medical records his father later pored over, as reported by the Dayton Daily News from the family’s copies, show the admitting judgment in the institution’s own words: he was “a clear and present danger to self and others from PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), depression with psychotic features and suicidal ideation, acute alcohol intoxication.” Over the following days, health care professionals twice answered “yes” to questions about his suicidal tendencies; one note recorded that he “planned to OD, hang himself or suffocate himself.” His parents say a VA psychiatrist later told them he had discussed killing himself while hospitalized. He was placed on suicide watch.

On Tuesday, June 1, VA discharged him. The discharge diagnoses were alcohol intoxication, alcohol dependence, and mood disorder secondary to alcohol intoxication. The PTSD his private therapist had diagnosed — and the admitting note itself had named four days earlier — does not appear in that list. His family says Jeff told them VA could not treat his PTSD until he stopped drinking, a sequence his therapist publicly questioned: it made the drinking, which Lucey used to manage the trauma, the precondition for treating the trauma, where VA’s National Center for PTSD recommended treating the two together. Dr. Gonzalo Vera, Northampton’s chief of inpatient mental health, would not discuss the case but said families actively involved in a veteran’s care are usually involved in discharge planning. The Luceys say no one met with them: “We put our blind faith in the VA, and they just let him leave without telling us anything about his condition.”

Less than three weeks before his death — the Globe dates it only that way — Lucey totaled his parents’ Nissan Altima, running it off the road between two trees. He was not drunk; he had taken the Klonopin prescribed for his anxiety. The lawsuit his family later filed characterized the crash as an apparent suicide attempt; the contemporaneous Globe account does not call it one, and this page records the characterization as the family’s, made in litigation, not as an established finding.

On June 5 came the second presentation, the one his case turns on. It was his sister Debra’s graduation day from Holyoke Community College — a day that would have been his graduation too, had he not stopped going to classes. He insisted on driving there alone and arrived drunk; a firefighter had to escort him to his family. That evening his family brought him back to the VA. What happened inside is told three ways in the record, and the differences matter. The Globe reported that on this occasion Jeff voiced no suicidal thoughts, would not admit himself voluntarily, and did not appear to be a danger to himself or others, so the VA refused an involuntary commitment. The New Republic, summarizing the inspector general’s later review, reported that the medical doctor in charge decided Lucey was not an imminent threat without consulting a psychiatrist, and that the inspector general concluded a psychiatrist should have examined him on the second presentation. The family’s lawsuit, as the Associated Press reported its allegations, charged that he was turned away without a psychiatric evaluation — in some accounts, that a nurse made the decision. The accounts agree on the outcome and on the one fact no party has disputed in print: a man whose VA chart, eight days old, recorded three named methods of killing himself was judged that night, by someone other than a psychiatrist, not to be an imminent danger, and sent home with the family that had brought him in because they believed he was dying.

On June 14, sober and crying on the living room floor, he said, “I don’t know why I’m feeling like this. I feel like I’m going crazy.” His mother telephoned the VA and the Vet Center in Springfield and told them, “My son is slowly dying.” Jeff called the Vet Center himself and went to one appointment. His parents later said he had been put on a list for a bed, and that his life ended days before he was notified one was available. On the night of June 21 he asked his father if he could sit in his lap, as he had a few times in those weeks, and his father held him. “I’m so glad I did,” Kevin Lucey said, “because the next time I held him I was getting the hose from around his neck.”

On the evening of June 22, 2004, Kevin Lucey came home to find the television on, his son’s dog tags on his bed, and the cellar door open. On the cellar floor Jeff had arranged a semicircle of photographs — of his family and his Marine unit — and a note saying he could no longer deal with his emotional pain. He had hanged himself with a garden hose from the rafters. His father lifted him down, laid his head on a folded rug, and held him until police arrived. Jeffrey Lucey was twenty-three. He was buried with the small bloodied flag he said the dead Iraqi child had clutched. His tombstone carries the line from the song he had made his mother listen to: “What ever happened to the young man’s heart / Swallowed by pain, as he slowly fell apart.”

What the institution did afterward

The first institutional response came from the Marine Corps, and it concerned not his care but his credibility: the investigation that found no documented evidence he had engaged the enemy at all — a finding Frontline’s reporting complicated, and that his father spent years answering with a photograph from his son’s camera. VA would not comment on his individual case, then or later; confidentiality was its stated reason. What eventually judged VA’s part was its inspector general. In April 2007, as the New Republic reported, the Office of Inspector General concluded the Leeds medical center had made mistakes in dealing with Jeffrey Lucey — centrally, that a psychiatrist should have examined him on the second presentation. Against that finding stood the Justice Department’s own review that spring, which had concluded no medical malpractice was involved. The family filed suit anyway.

On July 26, 2007, Kevin and Joyce Lucey filed a wrongful-death and medical-malpractice action against the United States in federal court in Springfield, District of Massachusetts, under the Federal Tort Claims Act. Their attorney was Cristobal Bonifaz of Conway, Massachusetts. The allegations were the ones the record above lays out: negligent refusal to treat his PTSD unless he was sober first; discharge on June 1 despite documented suicide plans; and a June 5 turn-away without a psychiatric evaluation. It was, as the Associated Press and the family’s announcement both stated, the first wrongful-death lawsuit filed against the U.S. government for failing to properly treat the mental-health wounds of the Iraq war. Its timing placed it inside a widening reckoning: that same month VA launched its national suicide prevention hotline, and Congress was moving the Joshua Omvig Veterans Suicide Prevention Act, enacted that October — the system-wide build-out the government’s settlement letter would cite eighteen months later.

The case never reached a trial or a judicial finding. On January 6, 2009, Assistant U.S. Attorney Karen L. Goodwin wrote to Bonifaz offering $350,000 to settle it. The letter’s language is the closest the institution ever came to a statement about Jeffrey Lucey, quoted here exactly as the Associated Press and the family’s announcement reported it: “Jeffrey’s suicide while under VA care was a tragedy for the VA and the individual care providers.” As the AP reported, the letter also indicated his suicide had led to changes throughout the VA medical system in suicide prevention. At the same time, Goodwin stated the government’s position without qualification: VA was not admitting responsibility for the suicide. Veterans for Common Sense, which announced the settlement on January 15, 2009, described the letter as acknowledging substandard care; the government’s stated position, given simultaneously, was that it was not responsible. Both are in the record, and this page reports both rather than merging them. The Luceys accepted, and Bonifaz notified the court. Their statements were not about the money. “The US Government killed my son,” Kevin Lucey said. “It sent him into an illegal and reckless war and then, when he returned home, it denied him the basic health care he needed. We hope that this case serves as a wake-up call to the nation that our government must be held accountable for the suffering it has caused thousands of US military families.” Joyce Lucey added: “Until the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) takes the psychological wounds of war seriously, the epidemic of military suicides will continue to grow.”

What the settlement did not contain is as documented as what it did. There was no admission of liability. No court ever adjudicated the allegations. No VA finding on the individual care — the June 1 discharge, the June 5 refusal, the absent psychiatrist — was published beyond the inspector general’s conclusion as reported in the press, and no discipline of any individual provider has been made public. The $350,000 closed the case. It did not close the family’s campaign: the Luceys had already joined Military Families Speak Out, donated Jeff’s boots and a uniform to the Eyes Wide Open exhibit — his boots, his sister said, “for the ones who come back with their souls dead” — and spent years telling his story to reporters, filmmakers, and school audiences. In August 2010 they noted on Democracy Now! a smaller refusal that had outlasted the lawsuit: they had never received a presidential condolence letter. In September 2014 they recorded their memories of the day he deployed for StoryCorps, broadcast on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday.

Where it stands now

As a legal matter, the case is complete and has been since January 2009: settled, paid, and closed, with the government’s non-admission of responsibility as its final word. No later proceeding has added to it. The Northampton VA still operates in Leeds, now as part of VA Central Western Massachusetts Healthcare System, under procedures that did not exist in 2004: suicide prevention coordinators (2007), safety planning (2008), and the crisis line that began in July 2007 and is now reached through the national 988 system.

The wider measure is VA’s own annual accounting. Its 2024 National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report (released December 19, 2024; data through 2022) counted 6,407 veteran suicides in 2022, 17.6 per day — seven per day among veterans who had received VA care in 2021 or 2022, 10.6 per day among veterans who had not. Jeffrey Lucey belongs to the smaller, harder column: inside the system, diagnosed, recently discharged from its locked ward, and brought back to its door by his family seventeen days before he died. The changes the 2009 letter cited — a hotline, coordinators, a prevention apparatus — were built for the moment June 5, 2004 represents: a veteran in crisis, physically present, asking. Whether that apparatus reliably answers at that moment is the question his parents asked a court to answer, and the settlement left formally unanswered.

If you or a veteran you know is in crisis, the Veterans Crisis Line is available around the clock: dial 988 and press 1, or text 838255. You do not need to be enrolled in VA care to use it.

The ledger

The accounting, in three lines — what the record shows has been done, what it shows has not, and what is still being sought.

What has been done

What has not been done

What is being sought

The record, on video

Jeffrey Lucey’s case was told on film twice while it was still unfolding: by PBS’s Frontline, which put his parents, his girlfriend, and his fellow Marines on camera in March 2005, and by Patricia Foulkrod’s documentary The Ground Truth, in which Kevin and Joyce Lucey are among the families who tell their stories. Two films, in that order.

The case itself. *Frontline*'s "The Soldier's Heart," first broadcast March 1, 2005 — Jeff Lucey's parents and girlfriend, his fellow Marines of the 6th Motor Transport Battalion, and the Marine Corps' finding on the claims he brought home. (FRONTLINE.)

The family on film. Trailer for *The Ground Truth* (2006), Patricia Foulkrod's documentary of Iraq veterans' homecomings — the Luceys among the families who tell their stories on camera. (Focus Features.)

Sources

Part of Betrayed, Not Forgotten — this site's accounting for the service members and veterans their own institutions failed. Videos are embedded from their publishers; nothing here is re-hosted.