Friday deserter
Leading off the day, there is an Army SFC Shantaya Williams whose attorney is raising hell about a drug-lord style raid on his deserter.
Recently released body camera footage of the 2022 arrest of an Army reservist in her home on a desertion charge shows police breaking down the door of the woman’s home at gunpoint as she cared for her 1-year-old child.
“The Army has ignored my repeated requests to have her medically separated and processed for her PTSD and post partum depression that started this entire process,” her attorney, Sean Timmons, wrote in an email response to Army Times. “Her command is grossly negligent, completely derelict and vindictive as evidenced by repeated bad faith refusals to negotiate a reasonable plea agreement in good faith.”
“The allegation that she is a deserter is defamatory, outrageous, salacious and unsupported by any evidence,” he said.
Seems US Marshals and local Grand Prairie police arrested her pretty heavy-handedly – smoke grenades, broke her door in, entered with weapons drawn behind flash grenades. Bad Army! Oh – anyone notice a lack? Yep, the warrant was turned to the Marshals and Grand Prairie police…this was not an Army action, this was Marshals reacting to a fugitive warrant.
Williams is an Iraq War veteran who entered the Army in 1997. She fought her transfer from 2nd Battalion, 381st Army Regiment in Texas to the 497th Combat Sustainment Support Battalion in Virginia. At the time she cited post-traumatic stress disorder treatment, a new baby and child custody struggles she hoped would help her appeal the transfer.
“The Army has ignored my repeated requests to have her medically separated and processed for her PTSD and post partum depression that started this entire process,” her attorney, Sean Timmons, wrote in an email response to Army Times. “Her command is grossly negligent, completely derelict and vindictive as evidenced by repeated bad faith refusals to negotiate a reasonable plea agreement in good faith.”
Damn! The lawyer wants to do something and the Army didn’t want to.
She fought her transfer from 2nd Battalion, 381st Army Regiment in Texas to the 497th Combat Sustainment Support Battalion in Virginia. At the time she cited post-traumatic stress disorder treatment, a new baby and child custody struggles she hoped would help her appeal the transfer.
She was charged with desertion on Oct. 29, 2022, and Grand Prairie police and U.S. Marshals arrested her under allegations of desertion on Nov. 30, 2022.
The Army first notified Williams in February 2022 of her transfer, Timmons said. She was ordered to her new unit between Sept. 28 and Oct. 28, 2022.
The sergeant continued to petition the transfer and was alerted that she would be put on AWOL status, Timmons said. Army Times
I will be the first to admit the Army does not always do as you would wish…but that doesn’t mean you ignore orders, fail to report, etc. Over 16 years in the Army and she wants to what, cut her own orders? Miss a transfer, fail to report for over 60 days? (I have been at duty stations where being over 2 hours late to work sent MPs to your quarters to find you. 24 hours got you a desertion charge.)
Was the raid heavy-handed? Absolutely. But the root of this seems to be that she feels the Army owes her a disability/PTSD award they don’t think she deserves, and having made up her mind, she feels justified in blowing off orders and transfers ‘cuz “she doesn’t want to”.
H/t to Jeff LPH
Category: "Teh Stoopid", Army, Dick Stepping
She probably does have mental health issues. Not from combat deployments, she never had any of those, but from not turning down the assignment and simply retiring at 20. That would be stupid and crazy. She is trying to claim whistleblower status but that probably won’t go anywhere.
Everybody wants to be in the Army until it’s time to do Army stuff.
Everybody wants to be gung ho until the hoes gun you down.
Or.. you know… the thing.
Come on, man…
From this report you would think she’s worse than Bergdahl.
And nobody wanted to just “U” her out and send her IRR?
A lot missing here.
Is she AGR?
Because the reserves don’t transfer you between units unless you are promoted and it is with in the mileage radius you select or you voluntary transfer.
If she is AGR, then she is Active Duty in all but name and they can transfer her. Though that only tends to happen at promotion.
My last Reserve unit had 17 no shows every BA we had been trying to get to show up or kick out. But USARC really did not want to because they got $ in the budget for them that could be used elsewhere.
I heard last year the reserves did a purge of these chronic U’s and this year saw their budget cut to the point all training is down to the minimum.
Your Tango Alpha Hotel name is “Cloudy.”
AW1
Army is not Burger King; you don’t get it your way.
I seem to recall a cadence with those lyrics…. I think it was followed by “wait right here, I’ll be right back! Left, right, left, right, left, right….”
I won’t lay claim to knowing much about the Reserve Components, but it sounds like she is an AGR Soldier who was simply given PCS orders she refused to accept. When I started recruiting, our USAR Recruiters–all AGR–were stabilized. Around 2010 or so, the Army started making them PCS. Active or Reserve, if you’re collecting full-time pay and benefits at the federal level, you were subject to playing the Active PCS game. Not to take the deserter’s side here, but my sister had the joy of a custody battle in TX, and if she moved more than two counties away from her ex, she had to forfeit joint custody. Regardless, orders are orders. I’m sure she could have given up her AGR status, but that’s a huge pay cut from Active E-7 pay with over 20 years and BAH, etc. to Reserve E-7: at least $6k, or $72k a year lost.
Every time I read or hear about SNCOs doing this sort of BS, I’m glad I got out when I did. I also really question the promotion system even more than I did while serving. I’ve known plenty of outstanding NCOs who retired as SSGs, and there are too many to count, me included, who only made SFC late in our careers despite having above average service records. Yet, time and again, we see the average (at best) support types get their second rocker ahead of us, then draw upon their victim status when they are unable to perform or prove themselves less than professional.
She is an HR Senior NCO, at least in rank and title. She should know the ins and outs of the personnel system, to include reassignments, and should know the proper ways to defer or delete orders. You don’t just say, “well, I dun my part and if the Ermy don’t like it, they can pay me to sit at home. I ain’t gonna go nowhere.”
You beat me to the AGR question by seconds.
There has to be more to this story. There’s enough “leeway” in USAR assignments that, were this fully legit, this SFC and her CoC could have reached an agreement that worked for all involved.
The article doesn’t specify, is she AGR?
I think any reservist of any rank would raise justifiable hell at an out-of-state transfer for one weekend a month pay.
As for the raid….what in the actual fuck. For those that don’t know, Grand Prairie, TX is smack dab in the middle of DFW, Dallas / Fort Worth. I’m willing to be that’s a pretty target rich environment for actual violent fugitives.
This raid is all that the Marshals assigned to DFW had to do that day?
Once the Feds finally got Alexander Smirnov in handcuffs for making a false statement to the FBI, they were able to marshal (see what Hack did there) federal law enforcement personnel to take down this threat to America.
yup
Fuck you Sapper3307….just happily scrolling throught he thread and then got here annnnnndddddd
this
On a related note, I have noticed that there is a trend in America in which people are having children increasingly late in life.
I don’t know why, but the parents of my Soldiers tend to be much older than me, having the kids in their 40s.
This is not healthy for a society.
Why do you think this is happening?
I have little idea. I started young. I turn 46 less than a month after my oldest turns 26, and my youngest will be 14 this year.
I do have some thoughts on this, though. Many of us are ingrained with the thought of finding personal and financial success, then finding a life partner and starting a family. Think about it like this: we finish high school, then go on to college, and sometimes graduate school. By the end of it all, we’re mid-to-late 20-somethings looking for that good career that will sustain us and our future family. Maybe we get married in our late-20s or early-30s and start planning out a family, but depending on how things work, we might be pushing 40 by time our first child is born.
Note how SFC Deserter requested senior year stabilization for her daughter (another indication she might be AGR). She’s a mother of four, so this implies that she started having kids at least in her early-20s. I’m not trying to judge, but her nametape in one of the photos is different from her current name, so that brings up the possibility of multiple baby daddies. Maybe she looks at men like Pokémon and wants to “catch ’em all” by having their offspring. No telling, I know women like that, but most of them started as barely teenaged county dumpsters.
What’s really unhealthy are the geriatrics having kids, like DeNiro and Pacino. Hell, even my aforementioned sister has the nephew we tried taking care of, born when she was 40 and the dad was in his late-50s.
Yep… 31 by the time I got married, then got divorced w/ no kids at 41. Finally with someone compatible, now we’re too old.
There’s multiple factors. Education is the strongest indicator of a later start on having kids. More money would be the next. As the middle class expands, they have kids later and later. Both also tend to have fewer children too.
There’s the societal element. Gen Z or whatever they’re called have grown up in a world of selfishness and instant gratification. They spend their 20s living in decadent hedonism.
Medical science’s advances don’t help either. It’s no longer unusual for a woman well past 35 to have a child. It used to be that you had this mental wall at 30, where you had to have kids before that. Now, that wall is 40+. People 30-35 aren’t in any rush to start a family because of that.
I didn’t find someone who was willing to put up with me and my career choice until I was 27, I married into a readymade family with a step daughter who doesn’t remember her biological contributor, but knows me as Daddy, and we created 3 sons after that. She is now 60, I will turn 59 this year and our grandsons range from 14 to 15 months old. Just in time for me to teach the younger crew about fishing, and relaxing.
Call me crazy, but the lawyer’s overblown, talking-point-filled, hyperbolic language is far more irritating than her desertion or the over-the-top unnecessary raid to take her in.
The lawyer sounds like Jackie Chiles
I’m glad I read all the comments before posting.
The “salacious” word was all I needed to hear Jackie in my head.
I had a Jackie comment about to drop into the tube.
Sure glad that the US Marshall’s Service is more concerned about some gal that decided she didn’t want to play Army anymore instead of going after gang banger or terrorist illegals. I will sleep easier tonight.
Taking her on is probably much less risky and fraught with peril than arresting criminals.
“We get to go home in safety and collect our retirement”
That’s what I was thinking, they get to go in all gang busters and play at being bad-ass “operators” with little to no actual risk of getting shot for their trouble.
Her attorney is probably really upset with the new orders the young man received.
Shantaya Clarice Harris Williams’ Mugshot as of 01 December 2022.
https://kaufmantx.mugshots.zone/shantaya-clarice-williams-mugshot-12-01-2022/
She was born in September 1978 in California.
She is an Active Guard Reserve (AGR) US Army Soldier, 42A (Human Resources Specialist), who was temporary promoted to E7/SFC in November 2021.
Her ETS date is currently 31 March 2026.
https://ncosupport.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Nov-21-Sr-NCO-List-AGR-USAR.pdf
According to her Linkedin Account, she joined the US Army in May 2012, even though other articles stated she joined at the age of 17 (most likely around 1995):
https://www.linkedin.com/in/shantaya-williams-a0b4557
In this December 2022, Shantaya Clarice Haines Williams is depicted as being a Mother of 4 children who entered the US Army in 1997 and has served for 20 years:
https://www.cbsnews.com/texas/news/army-veteran-awol-arrest/
In this 14 February 2024 CBS News Texas video that features her arrest via Body Cam Video, Shantaya Clarice Haines Williams is identified as a Mother Of Six (6) Children, who served in Iraq, was partially detained at Fort Sill, OK and (according to her lawyer) “was medically incapacitated at home, in quarters, breast-feeding her baby when US Marshals and local police smoke grenaded her house, railroaded down her door and flash grenaded her property like it was a raid on a drug lord,”
https://www.cbsnews.com/texas/news/body-cam-videos-released-from-arrest-of-decorated-army-reservist/
Interesting article piece from a 6 December 2022 Grand Prairie News about Shantaya Clarice Haines Williams.
Within the article, one can see a copy of a “Doctor’s order” for her
“Sergeant First Class (SFC) E7 Shantaya Williams, who enlisted in the US Army as Shantay Haines when she was 17 years old, is a combat veteran who served in the Iraq War.”
“Williams had initially been assigned to a unit in Texas, but after receiving medical orders to stay in Texas, she was suddenly reassigned to a unit in Virginia after asking for high school stabilization for her teenage daughter during a family custody battle.”
“Atty. Timmons is fighting for his client, who was only following the doctor’s medical orders for rest because of extreme anxiety and combat stress trauma. She was under medical care and advised not to work.”
“Her attorney had reached out to facilitate a solution with the U.S. Army Human Resources Command, but instead, he says, the Army retaliated. The U.S. Marshall Service and the local police department descended upon SFC Williams’ home in Grand Prairie with guns drawn and pointed at her face; and the faces of her children ages 1, 16, 18 and 22.”
“The lawyer also states that the Army is guilty of tampering with a witness to Congress, regarding SFC Williams’ repeated attempts for a congressional inquiry request into the corruption she had reported in good faith.”
https://gptxnews.com/seeking-justice-whistleblower-shantaya-williams-20-year-army-vet-charged-with-felony-desertion/
“medical orders for rest because of extreme anxiety and combat stress trauma.”
A “Human Resources Specialist” with combat stress trauma? Ya know, I am not a people person, and I find dealing with people sometimes difficult, but combat stress trauma??? And with everything digital these days they don’t suffer the horrors of paper cuts. Guess I should count myself lucky I was 11B/C Infantry and missed all that combat stress.
Fuck her. She had plenty of time to put in her retirement papers if she didn’t want to leave Texas.
More information on Shantaya Clarice Haines Williams and her AWOL charges (16 December 2022)
https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/grand-prairie-army-reservist-awol-arrested/287-2dd0b98e-d40d-4968-a3c6-b31bc26ae4c0
“Sergeant First Class Shantaya Williams said she was breastfeeding her 1-year-old daughter, Journi, on the night U.S. Marshals and Grand Prairie police broke down her front door and arrested her.”
“The 20-year Army and Army Reserves veteran had been given transfer orders from the Grand Prairie Army Reserve center to a facility in Virginia. But with two children in high school in Grand Prairie and with medical issues that include treatment for PTSD, she was appealing that transfer order.
Her attorney said she had been given until Sept. 28 to report to the new location in Virginia. However, the human resources specialist continued to report to the Grand Prairie office until Nov. 14.”
“And to put a gun to her forehead while she’s nursing a baby. This is the most shocking and egregious abuse of power I have seen in 14 years of litigating military cases,” attorney and military veteran Sean Timmons told WFAA on Monday.”
“For a week, Williams was held in the Kaufman County Jail and was later confined to base at Fort Sill, Okla.
But late Wednesday night, after two weeks in custody, the Iraq War veteran was released and allowed to return to her family, pending a hearing on her case.”
While awaiting approval from Admin to post another article with comments, here is continuation of that article:
“U.S. Army spokeswoman Cynthia O. Smith gave this statement:”
“The Army Reserve dropped Sgt.1st Class Shantaya Williams from unit rolls according to law and regulation. Her command remained in contact with her while she was away from the unit and made several attempts to address her concerns. On Oct. 29, a deserter warrant for Williams was initiated after her chain of command confirmed her absence without leave for 60 days. On Nov. 30, the U.S. Marshals Service executed the warrant pursuant to USMS policies and regulations. On Dec. 10, the USMS transferred her to the custody of the U.S. Army Personnel Control Facility at Fort Sill, Okla. The Personnel Control Facility is responsible for the processing and disposition of absent without leave Soldiers returned to military control. Williams is presumed innocent until guilt is proven in a court-martial.”
“Williams completed all administrative requirements at Fort Sill’s personnel control facility and was placed on leave to be with her family during the holidays. She is scheduled to return to Fort Sill on Jan. 9, 2023, and will continue to be provided due process under the law and treated and dignity and respect while she awaits disposition of her situation.”
https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/grand-prairie-army-reservist-awol-arrested/287-2dd0b98e-d40d-4968-a3c6-b31bc26ae4c0
“her children ages 1, 16, 18 and 22.”
Something doesn’t add up here.
The arrest caught on the Body Cam.
About 3 minutes.
So far, we do not see law enforcement putting a “gun to her head” as her lawyer claims.
Yep….
Yep….
There’s something missing or maybe times have changed. There was an A1C who deserted from my unit in 1975; I asked if the OSI was going to be sicced on her. The answer was no, she would get caught bouncing a check, or speeding, or shoplifting. She did get caught bouncing a check. Each deserter I knew of was caught in a similar way.
OK, you say, that’s the USAF not the Army. My buddy’s cousin deserted and skipped out of the country to avoid paying child support. I heard about it because my buddy wanted to know if his cousin was in trouble. Since my buddy and I both agreed his cousin was beneath anal warts in the social ladder I called the CID for advice. The CID said it wasn’t their problem and I should get a hold of the MPs at the post from which the deserter fled. My buddy wouldn’t tell me from where his cousin fled (I figured he let his family ties get in the way of his good judgement).
Smoke grenades, breaking down the door, weapons drawn for desertion. What’s the rest of the story?
Public Information.
Shantaya Clarice Haines Williams’s Husband’s name is Jackie Clifton Williams, Jr. born August 1980.
He has various address listings ranging from Grand Prairie, TX to Compton, CA, Los Angeles, CA, Memphis, TN, Garland, TX, Long Beach, CA, Hayward, CA and Downy, CA.
Shantaya and Jackie share the same address/home in Grand Prairie, Texas (Tarrant County).
Shantaya may have been stationed at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama from 2011-2017 since she had various addresses with “Huntsville” as the city listed. She also has various CA address (her birthplace).
Shantaya Clarice Haines Williams is seen posting with this gentleman in 2 pictures. Here is picture Number 1.
Picture Number 2 is next.
Both gentleman resemble this guy featured in this 1 minute April 2022 YouTube video:
“Jackie Williams, an Army Veteran, pastor, and musician from San Antonio has used music to help himself heal after waking from 6 months in a coma. Here he performs “What the World Needs Now Is Love” in a rehearsal for the National Veterans Creative Arts Festival.”
https://www.facebook.com/Sports4Vets/videos/texas-pastor-survives-covid-with-help-of-music/1159287251474446/
Picture 2.
It also looks as if she is wearing a “Combat Patch”
Really wondering what all is going on here. Stabilization at current duty assignment for high school senior children is a valid thing, and generally not denied.
Even if the gaining unit is mobilizing (unknown, haven’t checked), a 42A4O isn’t exactly a critical vacancy that couldn’t be filled via a Tour of Duty posting to request a volunteer.
Would love to hear the other side of this story.
Ya, I retired way back in 1995, if a EM, became gone, the unit of assignment would report the EM in AWOL status in the SIDPERS system. After 30 days, the EM would be DFR’ed. Once the EM is in that status, the person is flagged in law enforcement data bases as a deserter. Should that person come to the notice of LEO’s, if that person is flagged, would notify the nearest military authority and return that person to military control.
There is a butt load of information missing from the story that would be needed to understand exactly just what the hell is going on.
That person is a candidate for administrative discharge unless the command has no sense of humor.
Believe it or don’t, a lot of them get caught at a military health care facility. I didn’t believe it until I was shown the list of AWOLs & deserters at the base hospital. The missing folks get sick, show their ID cards at the clinic, and think no one will check.
Nothing worse than missing a dental appointment. First sergeant puts on a ghillie suit and hunts you down or crawls up the sewer pipe to come out of the sink drain when you’re brushing your teeth.
It’s like when bad guys being chased by the cops signal their turns. Some habits just get baked too deep. 🙂
FORT BRAGG CID/MPI would have the unite send a troop to the TMC for a made-up emergency of they needed to round them up.
Is that a Sheriden? Used to ride on top with a breach team. It really freaked out big ARMY seeing that in the 90’s.
Is that common for Army Reservists to be transferred a unit in another time zone/State involuntarily?
If she was SECDEF, this would not have happened.
She got the PTSD from not having enough Ranger School recycles.
And where the fuck is General George and CQ Brown when you need them???