Ohio Police: SEAL lied about attack
Reader Ohio sends us a link to the Daily Mail in regards to SEAL Christopher Mark Heben who we wrote about when he was shot in Ohio back in April and then again when his brother, Thomas, was outed as a phony SF dude. Well, according to the Daily Mail, the police have determined that Christopher Mark Heben lied about the shooting. That he had indeed been shot, but not in the manner that he had reported to police;
Christopher Mark Heben, 44, has been summoned to appear at Bath Police Department in Ohio today after being charged with obstructing justice and falsification.
Police Chief Michael McNeely told MailOnline today despite vast evidence against Heben’s claim that he was shot in the stomach following a fight with three men, the veteran maintains he is telling the truth.
[…]
Chief McNeely told MailOnline today that a detective had worked on the case for 30 to 40 hours a week and uncovered inconsistencies between what Heben told the police over several interviews and the media reports he gave.
Cell phone records also showed he was not at the mall at the time he claimed the shooting took place.
The police followed up on numerous tips that had been called in regarding the assailant’s ‘gray sports car’ – but they led nowhere.
Chief McNeely confirmed that Heben did have surgery for a gunshot wound but could not say when it took place – only that it did not happen in the parking lot of the Mustard Seed Market.
*shrug* I dunno.
Category: Crime
The last sentence mentions he lost his Physicians Assistant license for writing up fake prescriptions.
Drug deal gone bad? Purely speculative, and I hope not, but this is bad enough.
Got busted for forgery and writing fake scripts? Now lying to the cops?
What happened to integrity?
What a fall. He goes from being a SEAL, then a PA and loses it for writing BS prescriptions. Then he’s pimping cars on the back of his SEAL credentials. Now this shit with getting shot and lying to the investigators. I know we should give him the benefit of the doubt but this reeks of drug dealings. How the mighty have fallen.
Are we sure he really was a SEAL? His brother is a phony, he’s lying to the cops and media, and has a documented history of dishonesty. Has Chief Shipley weighed in on this asshole?
Minor (perhaps) detail, but the location of his cell phone doesn’t really prove or disprove his location.
Otherwise, no argument with the observations of others here.
Sounds like bullshit runs in the family.
This may not be a popular thought but it’s what happens we place people on a pedestal.
SEALS, delta force, special forces…any one. We forget they are human. Subject to the same frailties as everyone else. We ask our best to push themselves to the limit. Love on that hairy edge for years. It’s bound to do something to you ESPEICALLY if you have left your mates.
Being or having been in uniform is not a silver bullet against making bad decisions.
Sometimes being in uniform is a barrier. It provides that aspect of being accountable to someone or some ones. Once removed? All hell breaks loose.
if somethig happened in his life and he broke the law…yeah he needs to make it right but he shouldn’t be thrown to the wolves. If one of your privates fucked up you didn’t toss him on his ear. You punished applied corrective actions and tried to move on. Only when the private proved to be untrained able was removal an option.
I have made bad decisions in the past. Paid for them, corrected them. I will continue to make bad decisions (preferably not the same ones) because I am human. Not perfect.
I don’t know everything that happened but he is owed a chance to have his say and it looks like court is that chance. If he did wrong….yeah. Make him serve.
But I don’t believe in hero to zero in civilian life. There is supposed to be room for more. Room for understanding and moving on.
From my own personal experience I have seen Director’s of Nursing get nailed for drug interdiction and tons of others including physicians get nailed for misusing Oxy and similar medications.
Drug addiction cuts across all lines of society and leaves wreckage in the lives of those that have the unfortunate luck of becoming addicted.
I came close to it, but gave it up completely before it got out of hand after I had a very painful surgery that damn near killed me back in 2005.
I am one of the lucky ones though. It is a very strong addiction and literally controls and destroys lives.
Three observations:
(1) As Thunderstixx above observed, the attraction of drugs can be incredibly strong. People who get hooked can do incredibly stupid things.
(2) Adrenalin can be just as damned addictive as opiates. When someone leaves a high-risk, high-excitement profession, they can have the same issues as someone going thru withdrawal.
(3) As Steadfast and Loyal observed, military’s structure and discipline acts as a supplemental restraint for individual character. However, the supplemental restraints imposed by the military structure and discipline end when someone retires.
I knew an ER doc who got undone by his habit of trading BJ’s for Oxy prescriptions. Seems his practice outside the ER had a high percentage of hookers for clients(No,he was not an OB/GYN) and one of them turned on him to get out of a 5 year stay at the Detroit House of Corrections.
I think that the problem lies with our current hero worship of the military. The same thoughts that make us want to out the phonies in this world for claiming honors they don’t rate influences our feelings when someone who has done the time and wears the tattered shirt falls from grace. It can feel like a betrayal of our trust. We forget that when it all boils down to it, we’re all still just human, subject to the same tempations and tribulations everyone else is. We’d like to think that our military service has set us up to survive and even thrive, but in the end, it’s still up to each of us to make the right choices. Sometimes we just don’t.
We do, however, have a tendency to cut slack to those who’ve worn the uniform honorably and then fail in civilian life. What would we be saying about Heben if he was never a SEAL and was just a Joe from the street ?
Better said then I.
To answer I would have the same response.
Let’s assume for a moment that he was buying drugs but we don’t really know what was what. If he was then I would want to know why. The why is important. The why is what puts justice in our laws. If if laws were simply a matter of black and white then we would all have served time at some point in our lives, but because of justice (and a dose of compassion) our laws are allowed to merciful and bend here and there.
To anyone I would offer the branch of understanding to try to get a glimpse of why they did something. Context reveals all.
IN Heben’s case, he probably deserves a pound of understanding….not for being let off a crime if committed BUT for the punishment for it. Laws must be upheld. Without them there is chaos but the understanding must temper the punishment.
This is true for anyone. This is Sharia law is something to feared and destroyed. It is an aberration of a nature state of man.
stupid autocorrect.
Last sentence should be:
This is WHY Sharia law is something to feared and destroyed. It is an aberration of a NATURAL state of man.
Very good point, although I think the principle applies more broadly. I think that a person who does good things in his life (through military service or otherwise) can build up a sort of reservoir of goodwill, such that if that person stumbles, we’re more willing to be forgiving and give that person another chance. That goodwill is not present when a person who has been a screw-up his entire life screws up again.
I don’t agree about he hero worship aspect as the root cause. This incident involves only one former Seal and there have been many other Seals both before and since who appear to have somehow managed to not get involved with any alleged illegal activities. If the charges turn out to be true, I would remind folks that there are $hit birds in every MOS, and the failure falls on him as an individual. I would also be interested to find out if there were any warning signs that his command either didn’t see or possibly overlooked while he was still in the military – or if this is all post .mil related events….. I tend to think if he is guilty, this type of behavior has been ongoing for some time since in my experience people rarely actually change…
This is going to make most of you angry, but it has to be said.
To add to this discussion about these operators being human, I think we should also keep in mind that we tend to make guys like this out to be more than what they are. Their training is incredible, and their operational experience does make them heroes in many cases, but many of these guys leave the service as relatively junior enlisted sailors with very specific operational experience and very little of what many would call normal life experience.
I find it interesting that this is the third former US Navy SEAL operator that is a has been demonstrated to have lied or at the very least embellished their stories quite a bit.
Mr Heber lied about his gunfight and high speed chase (not to mention his forgery and fake prescriptions or the obvious question that he must have known something about his brother’s lies).
Marcus Luttrell lied in his book, and then in public, about the events captured in ‘Lone Survivor’ (the vote on whether or not to kill the goatherders never happened, he embellished the numbers of Taliban present, and he inflated the importance of the target).
Chris Kyle lied about the ‘Scruffy Face’ (Jessie Ventura) incident as well as another incident involving a killing at a gas station in Texas.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/07/30/the-complicated-but-unveriable-legacy-of-chris-kyle-the-deadliest-sniper-in-american-history/
To me, this does not speak well of that community, especially in light of their eagerness to talk to the press and sell books and movies about their supposedly secret missions.
Why do these guys, who arguably have the ultimate credentials as warfighters, have to embellish their stories?
I have to add that it is disingenuous to give Heber and others a pass on lies and embellishment on events that occurred in their civilian lives when we mercilessly go after other bona fide veterans that embellish their service, even to the point of reading obituaries and pointing out inaccuracies.
Unverified doesn’t mean they lied.
And why don’t you ask Marcus what happened, since you seem to know so much more than what he does, dickweed?
Listen up Chump …
Marcus was awarded the Navy Cross and his OIC was awarded the MoH.
I served in and supported the community for 13 some odd years.
Your comments are neither amusing nor factual.
So KMRIA and GFY!
I’m curious as to how you know exactly what transpired between Luttrell, Murphy, Axelson, and Dietz. Given that three of the four did not survive the day. Also, nothing he claimed about Operation Red Wings has ever been refuted. Some things cannot be verified, obviously, but much of his story has been.
As far as him supposedly inflating the number of enemy combatants they faced, those four SEALs were heavily outnumbered and inflicted significant casualties on the bad guys in the face of overwhelming odds. There were no manned or unmanned aircraft overhead to verify the enemy head count. The hajjis removed their own dead before any other US personnel ever got there. And don’t tell me you actually believe the Taliban’s version of events.
The summary of Danny Dietz’s autopsy is public record now. Just look at how many wounds he received before he died, and from how many different angles. What are you suggesting, that he was break-dancing in front of one guy with an AK? Because that’s pretty much the only way to get that many wounds from that many angles unless he was surrounded by lots of hajjis.
Yes, the movie had several inaccuracies, mostly regarding Luttrell’s time in Mohammed Gulab’s village. That’s Hollywood for ya. What, did you think they were going to spend another 45 minutes explaining the ins and outs of Pashtunwalai in general and Lokshay in particular? Or laying out the awkward and dangerous position of the village elders harboring an American, with Taliban members entering the village at night to beat and torture Luttrell, challenging their adherence to the tribal code at the risk of every man, woman, and child? Hell no, they weren’t going to do that! So instead they did a condensed, simplified, and yes *inaccurate* scene of attempted execution followed by an attack that was actually prevented by the rescue of Luttrell, and the movie ended up not being 5 hours long. Would YOU have sat through that? Read the book.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot. If you want to call Chris Kyle a liar because the court ruled in Fat Fuck Janos’s favor, just remember that the court also said that OJ was innocent.
As far as the number of Taliban the 4 man SEAL team got hit by, the numbers I heard range from 100 or so ( and thats what appears to be in the movie) to as few as 12. Generally accepted number is about 30.
Any Special operations Unit forced to fight in the open without supporting arms against decently trained opponents with an edge in weapons (Light Machine guns, Rocket propelled Grenades and light mortars) arent going to stand a chance. That the guys they were fighting were seasoned Taliban with knowledge of the terrain and coordinating their attack through walkie talkies pretty much sealed their fate.
Maybe you should read the original thread again, dickweed.
The people here might be a lot of things, but hero worship ain’t among them.
Mark you sound ghey … Read your own words.
You are in the wrong blog …
You are looking in the wrong TAH blog …
TAH … “Tight Ass Hunks” probably what you are looking for.
Not that there is anything wrong with that … But you man love language is better suited over there!
One thing that is constantly reported about the man is that he is a “retired Navy SEAL”.
Unless I am mistaken he decided to EAS after ten years. He is not “retired” but “former”. It could be a typical media screw-up but there is a difference.
It looks like he did his time then decided to get out and “cash-in” on his service and talents as a speaker.
Not that there’s anything wrong with doing that, Ive known people who get out about the halfway mark for family reasons or to simply make a better living on a skill they picked up ( Avionics is great for that).
He fed on his “celebrity status” and reveled in the lime-light.
The drug charges ( and that’s exactly what they were, prescription or not) shows a large character flaw.
The police would have no reason to drum up crap to down him. This wasnt something that a beat cop pulled out of his butt at the spur of the moment.
The police probably threw a lot of assets at this investigation, as he was a celebrity and the area he was in was known as a low crime area. It caused a big uproar at the time.
Im sure as the dectective went through the evidence he was as deeply shocked and disappointed as anyone that Leben’s story didnt add up.
It goes beyond that. Police were looking for 3 black males in a gray car… If someone had been fasely arrested for the shooting how far would Leben had taken his story?
Mark appeared on FNC Judge Pirro Show a couple weeks ago along w/ MG Bob Scales discussing the alleged rescue attempt of James Foley. Be interesting to see if being a lying liar gets him booted off as a regular guest contributor.
Thanks to the appreciated cover offered by a certain retired MCPO, I am spared the need to post defensively. This is good, as I doubt I would come across as even-keeled as he did. I will say 3 things. 1. Marcus still walks the earth. If you think you have an issue with the contents of his books, or something he has said, he is very accessible via the internet and in-person at book signings and such. You should feel free to bring up any issues with him directly. If you’re respectful, you’ll most likely receive a reasoned response and you may even have an enlightening discussion or two. Until you’ve watched your Best Friend and Brother Warrior die bloody and terrified in an attempt to save your a$$, I’d kindly recommend some introspective thought to temper your judgement. 2. I will neither confirm nor deny someone getting KTFO at McP’s (I don’t want to add any potential legal drama to SFC Lilyea’s pack, I already saw the AW guys give him some belts). But if you read the reports on the trial closely, the jury was told to ignore the actual alleged well-deserved 1-punch KO. They were told only to focus on if the ‘story’ damaged someone’s reputation, etc. 3. It is generally considered bad form to discuss in-house sh!t in the open. So you are never going to get all the details on the internet. What I will say is that Heben is not conducting himself like an ‘old school’ ‘quiet professional’. This is not a crime, but there are no small # of SOF-types who do not endorse such conduct. I would ask that you not paint them with the same brush. The professional members of any unit do not want excuses made for erroneous behavior by one of their own. If the final judgement shows his conduct and motives to be disgraceful, then he is a disgrace and will be treated accordingly. War and/or strenuous, stressful duty can affect even the most resilient Men. The vast majority of them still conduct themselves in an honorable, rational… Read more »