Sandon Matthew Sierad; bad behavior from PTSD

About a year ago, this fellow, Sandon Matthew Sierad, got the snot beat out of him by cops in Walmart. You can see the video of the encounter at the link. Mr. Sierad is a pretty big dude, stretched out to 6’7″ I’m sure that influenced the police somewhat. Also, the police had received three 9-11 calls before this happened in regards to Mr. Sierad;

Smith said deputies were called to the store just after 1 p.m. on that day in reference to a man acting strangely and disturbing shoppers at the store. Smith said deputies received three calls about the man, later identified as Sandon Matthew Sierad, 32.

The first call came in at 1:06 p.m. where the caller was inside the Walmart. The second call came in at 1:10 p.m., in which the caller reported a suspicious person. The third 911 call was placed by Sierad, who called to report he could not find his vehicle in the parking lot, Smith said.

In the video at the news story in the first paragraph above, Sierad claims that he suffers from PTSD, of course, and that because he has a dishonorable discharge, he can’t get help from the VA. Well, he did get a dishonorable discharge for persistent drug abuse and for being disrespectful to his sergeants and officers – you know much like he was to the police. You can see from his DD214, down there in the reenlistment code, the Marine Corps didn’t want him to come back.

I noticed in his records that he had a Combat Action Ribbon, but he had no campaign medals to indicate where or when he might have caught the PTSD. The only deployment of 3/2 Marines, the unit which Sierad was assigned during his nearly four years of service was to Kuwait in 2003, and later to Iraq in the Battle of Nasiriyah during the search for the Army folks of the 507th Maintenance Company (Jessica Lynch, et al.). One Marine was killed in that battle. I can’t tell from the records whether Sierad was on the deployment with them or if he was involved in the battle in Iraq, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.

So I thought, maybe it was possible that Sierad was self-medicating, from those experiences. But then I looked at his court martial records, and he’s been self-medicating for a while. The Marine Corps gave him non-judicial punishment more than a year before 3/2 Marines deployed to Kuwait for illegal drug use and his insubordinate behavior.

The Marine Corps tried to get Sierad into counseling for his drug and alcohol abuse, but, as his platoon sergeant said in testimony at the court martial, the only thing that Sierad wanted was a discharge. His complaints that he can’t get treatment now rings hollow since he had the opportunity to get treatment a decade ago.

In the Walmart incident, police were determined to have acted appropriately under the circumstances and no charges were filed against the police, even though one of the officers had already resigned.

And, oh, by the way, a year and a half before the Walmart incident, Sierad was charged with first-degree assault and battery, resisting arrest and trespassing in another adventure with the police.

But these self-diagnosis of PTSD are starting to get on my nerves. For one thing, everyone thinks that veterans are all just one cross word away from going on a killing spree, and for another thing, these people are standing in the way of veterans with real problems, clogging up the system with their long histories of being sociopaths and drug users claiming that they’re so wounded by PTS.

Category: Who knows