Letter No. 6 — To Secretary Doug Collins

Status: Installment No. 5 of The Count Continues — a new open letter to the Secretary every three days until the Department answers in writing. Published November 3, 2026, and emailed to the Department the same day (Fastmail, sent 11:25 AM ET, from care@bowmanwebservices.com to customercare@va.gov, with a copy to the District 7 Medical Examiner's office). The copy emailed to the VA Office of Inspector General Hotline was rejected by its mailbox; the letter was then filed with the OIG the same day through its official hotline form, as a supplement to Case 2026-04020-HL-1166, and the form's confirmation of receipt was received. Day 19 of the silence that began when Letter No. 1 reached the Secretary himself on October 15, 2026.

Secretary Collins,

My father, Thomas Alan Bowman Sr., died on October 31, 2026, at the Emory L. Bennett Veterans Nursing Home. He was 84 years old, a United States Navy veteran, and rated 100 percent service-connected. I am his son and his sole personal representative.

I first wrote to you on October 15. I have written five letters. Your office has answered none of them. Today is Day 19 of that silence.

I am writing now about his body, because there is still one thing your office can do for him, and it can be done with a single phone call.

My family believes there was foul play in the care that ended his life. I state that as our belief and our demand; what caused his death is a question I have formally reserved to the Medical Examiner, where it belongs. The documented ground under the belief is this: hospice was approved on the afternoon of October 30, and he died hours later, before the hospice provider ever arrived — not one visit. In the second week of his stay at Bennett he was left unsupervised in a bathroom, fell, and struck his head. In eight weeks there, I never once spoke to his attending physician.

On October 31 I filed a jurisdiction report with the District 7 Medical Examiner, with written supplements covering his asbestos exposure history and the fall. The Medical Examiner is reviewing. As of today, there is no decision.

A veteran who dies like this is owed an autopsy, and the VA owes him this one. Your office can end the stall today: make the call, direct that a full examination be performed, and fund it. The private market has already answered my family’s inquiries — written quotes begin at $7,000, which this family cannot carry. The minimum examination we seek is a targeted one: the head, and the contusion from his fall, and whether it healed; the wound on his back, photographed; and the liver and gallbladder surgical site from his December 2025 operation. If the United States will not pay to look at what its system did to him, it should have to say so on the record.

He lies tonight unembalmed and refrigerated, held under his own written directives, because I will not let him be buried or burned before someone with authority looks at him. Time is the enemy of every answer an examination could give. Every day of that time is a day of your silence, and I am counting those too.

Answer this one, Secretary Collins.

Thomas A. Bowman Jr. Sole personal representative of Thomas Alan Bowman Sr. care@bowmanwebservices.com · (386) 278-1896

P.S. Copies of this letter go today to the VA Office of Inspector General, which holds case 2026-04020-HL-1166 on this family’s complaints, and to the District 7 Medical Examiner’s office, where the jurisdiction decision is pending.