Chong Hwan Kim; vet targeted by ICE
Mark sends us a link to the story of Chong Hwan Kim, a legal immigrant from South Korea and a US veteran of the Iraq War who has been arrested in Portland, Oregon for attempted arson and, as a result, is being held by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) while his immigration status is investigated. He immigrated with a green card when he was 5 years old, he served in the Army, and now this felony charge;
Records show Kim has been arrested on several charges, including a mixture of felonies and misdemeanors, over the last 5 years. In 2016, he was convicted of attempted arson and possession of a destructive device.
Meyers said he knows about Kim’s criminal record, but said his friend has been working to clean up his act for some time now.
“We don’t leave anyone behind,” Meyers said. “Chong put his life on the line, he put himself in danger to sacrifice for our country. Regardless of maybe having a few issues here and there, we can stand behind him and help him in his recovery.”
Kim’s father said a judge told his son, if he kept getting into trouble with the law, his immigration status could be in jeopardy. Now his family is worried about what could happen if gets deported back to South Korea where he is unfamiliar with the language, the country and its people.
I don’t really have an opinion on the subject – I don’t like criminals and the claim that he has been “working to clean up his act” is too familiar. While I commend his service to his adopted country, his behavior since that service hasn’t exactly been worthy of his own sacrifice. Being a veteran doesn’t insulate you from answering for your bad behavior.
His buddy, Navy veteran Jordan Meyers, blames his bad behavior on PTSD, but PTSD doesn’t normally display itself in criminal behavior. If being in the US was so important to Kim, he should have applied for naturalization.
Besides, being deported to South Korea isn’t like being deported to El Salvador.
Category: Veterans in the news
He’s 42 years old. He got a General, Under Honorable Discharge from the NG, which is usually for when they don’t seek a punitive discharge for someone who is being a bit of a fuckup and they want out, or being AWOL discharged with no punitive action.
General Discharge = Shitbag.
I don’t think the criteria for general discharges have changed much in the past 45 years. But back in my day, a general discharge meant you were a dick-stepper. I had a clerk in my company that was a thief and found in possession of heroin; he received an Article X general discharge in lieu of a court martial, after I sent him to the stockade in the Viet of the Nam.
.Not sure how one gets “general discharge, under honorable conditions”.
I also thought those could,at least sometimes, be upgraded to “honorable” after time and good behavior.
This guy apparently lacks some self control, and basic judgement.
We all know that even an honorable discharge following a term of exemplary service is not a get out of jail free card. That said, I think it would be wise of the Trump administration to back away from this situation and let the locals deal with him as they would any other criminal lest they hand the Democrats an immigration issue that can be used to generate opposition to the new stricter policies.
Agree ^^^^^^
150 percent
Everybody must follow the same rules, or their is anarchy. At least theoretically … and why politicians thumbing their nose at the law is so very NOT GOOD for the long term health of the Republic.
He should know that.
Time to grow up or pay the price, sonny.
I’m guessing that Chong Hwan Kim or Jordan Meyers have never heard of the concept of “personal responsibility”? Love the line about Kim having “a few issues here and there”… dude sounds like a 42 year old spoiled child that has run out of options in the legal system.
“Play stupid games, win stupid prizes”
Indeed, Senior Chief. The best way to avoid all that shit is to avoid all that shit. Kim is suffering from self-inflicted wounds.
So, he has been here since he was 5 and never got his citizenship?
I smell a Democrat.
A true patriot would become a citizen, renounce his previous citizenship, and be loyal to the flag on his right shoulder in his uniform.
Once you raise your right hand and speak the right words, there is only one loyalty to the day you die, and anything less should be persecuted with the full weight of the law.
I have no room for criminals, traitors, and cowards.
Dude,
“Democrat” is not the same as “shitbag”. Plenty of principled folks identify as “D”. They may start with different premises, but quite a few of them love the USA, same as most folks here.
Better to persuade and debate, than alienate, eh?
The antagonist of the article can certainly be called “criminal”, the GD usually gets equated to “shitbag”, but where is “coward” or “traitor” coming from?
Why drag “democrats” into this thread?
Are you just looking to be on the wrong side of everyone you meet?
Ted Cruz came to the U.S. at four and didn’t renounce his Canadian citizenship until 2014 when he was 42 years old.
Just sayin’, your True Patriot test.
I’ll give you an Amen Nomad and 11-B. I registered as a Republican because there were no Republican Judges here in Cook County. I’m just as comfortable with a Blue Dog Democrat or Independent Label. Much as I despised most things I’ve read about Alexander Hamilton, I think he was right about not having political parties…but what the hell. We’ve got em.
Considering he never claimed canadian citizenship, never lived there past 4 years of age and had no idea he was a DUAL citizen as opposed to an alien immigrant I think he gets a little leeway.
I don’t understand why they don’t take care of this on deployment to Iraq. Multiple guys I served with began the paperwork when they were gearing up for deployment and were flown to Baghdad for a swearing in ceremony about halfway through the tour.
Then if they turn into a criminal shitbag later in life, they can’t be deported. No sympathy from me because he is a veteran.
But, I also don’t understand the logic of repatriating someone to their ‘native’ country they’ve got no memory of, have never been to school in, and may not speak the language. I feel like its returning a mattress you’ve been sleeping on for six years.
Same here. Military service can accelerate the naturalization process. I can’t believe he didn’t know that – his chain-of-command would have almost certainly had to know he was not a US citizen, and would have explained that to him.
Moreover, if he is 42 now he’d have to have had been in his late 20s or older when he served in Iraq. Given his background, I’m pretty sure he’d have met the criteria for naturalization nearly a decade earlier, the day he turned 18 – if he’d have requested it. It would have been essentially automatic.
I’m forced to conclude that his lack of naturalization was voluntary on his part.
I certaily infer from his track record that his dart board is largely marked “make poor choice”.
He throws -many- darts.
I am not convinced deporting him is the -just- thing to do, versus simply processing him like any other ding-a-ling.
Still considering this one.
Catching the PTSD dosent make one an arsonist. Substance abuse is more the norm. Substance abuse often leads to more criminal behavior though.
I have seen one guy with the PTSD go down the substance abuse road and then turn his life back around. Once someone starts down that road it is tough to bring it around. Not saying that is what happened here. I dont know what happened here. Just sayin…
There are studies that show concussions can cause impulsive behavior, aggression, and other issues that are more likely to lead to criminal behavior. These effects can linger and the more concussions the more likely the effects and the more severe they are likely to be.
In my first 15 or so years we paid little to no attention to concussions. We just shook them off and drove on. Usually with no medical clinic visit so no documentation. We really do not have enough data to say for sure that concussions are a cause of some of these issues. Though the evidence is accumulating. Particularly with respect to impulsive behavior among athletes involved with sports that are likely to lead to concussive impacts.
Sometimes I wonder if the “PTSD” diagnosis is a misdiagnosis of various severities of post concussive syndromes. Many doctors tend to assume that the brain is “healed” over time but that does not seem to be the case.
Another interesting fact I see as related is that a woman exposed to violence while pregnant is more likely to an aggressive child. The evidence suggests exposure to violence and the physiological responses triggers developmental changes in the fetus of the child. It is as though the child is developing in the womb to be better prepared to survive in a violent environment.
It would be interesting if many post concussive syndromes were natural adaptations to exposure to violence. In other words victims of trauma are more likely to have physical brain changes that make them more prepared to act aggressively and quickly to threats.
“There are studies that show concussions can cause impulsive behavior, aggression, and other issues that are more likely to lead to criminal behavior. These effects can linger and the more concussions the more likely the effects and the more severe they are likely to be.”
Sometimes it’s associated with temporal lobe seizures….often not diagnosed until actually in prison. It is rare though.
A green beret faced a similar disintegration and was finally diagnosed with prion disease, which is about one in a million and universally fatal as it was in his case. Sadly he wasn’t vindicated while functional but only after his death.
They should thoroughly investigate the case.
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3541410/ns/health-alzheimers_disease/t/misdiagnosed-green-beret-demoted/
It’s on the net…so no privacy issue
Geez. Literally a one in a hundred million longshot – of the extremely bad sort. Sad case.
But still, you’d think think the folks running the NBC News website could get the link right. CJD isn’t in any way Alzheimer’s, nor to my knowledge has it been linked to Alzheimer’s.
One form of degeneration due to concussions mimic CJD. It is called CTE and it is very similar to CJD and rapid progression alzhiemers.
It also has fairly high prevailance rate among those tested for it and thus suspected of it.
Yes, CTE is something that should especially be considered when given a history that brings it up on the differential as well as considering it in younger people or people with dysfunction, but an otherwise negative history for other forms of dementia or neurodegenerative diseases.
Oh, but that takes effort.
The symptoms of all 3 are indeed broadly similar. However, my understanding is that the causes are believed to be dramatically different.
As IDC SARC notes below, CJD is due to prion formation in the brain, while Alzheimer’s is due to buildup of a completely different type of abnormal protein. Don’t think the specific mechanism that produces CTE has been identified yet (other than it’s known to be linked to repetitive brain trauma), but I could be wrong about that last.
I dunno why it was assigned that way either. Alzheimer’s is different than prion disease/spongiform encephalopathies in many ways. The only real parallel is in abnormal protein formation, but it’s beta amyloid in Alzheimers, which is not the same in prion disease.
That’s just the first place I found the article. I never read any articles about him previously. The info I had was from one of his team mates that I worked with on Bragg.
This was a sad story and it demonstrates the kinds of failures the assumption of Army mental health programs lead to.
I read this incident when it happened and it was tragic that he died feeling abandoned and maligned by the special forces community. Completely unjust outcome.
Agreed it was a sad case. But I’m not sure I’d place too much blame on the SF or Army medical communities for not catching that one earlier.
Literal hundred million to one longshots are by definition exceedingly rare, and the individual apparently showed no family or medical history indicating the possibility of CJD prior to onset. Further, the time it took to diagnose the individual appears to be in the general ballpark of the norm for typical CJD.
Hindsight is always 20/20. Foresight? Not so much.
Sometimes bad things happen to good people, and there’s not much one can do about it.
“Hindsight is always 20/20. Foresight? Not so much.”
true, but people with changes in behavior and/or a history of military service, injury, sports participation, seizure, Hypertension, abuse…other redflags, should at least be screened by a neurologist.
Primary care types regularly perform only the most rudimentary of neurological evaluations and often in haste. They miss subtle signs.
No argument about that. But how often does even an experienced military neurologist see a case of typical CJD in a 25 y/o patient, given its occurrence rate of 1 in 100M individuals aged 25 or less?
Could he have been diagnosed earlier? Certainly. Is it reasonable to expect he should have been diagnosed earlier? Different question entirely.
As you know better than I: medical personnel, like everyone else, are only human. They’re not infallible deities – even though some act as if they believe themselves to be exactly that.
I meant they should be properly screened for any of the myriad CNS injuries and pathologies that can go otherwise undiagnosed, not just the one in a millions.
That’s one of the reasons primary care exists, as an advocate to properly funnel patients to the appropriate specialist.
Agreed – and if the individual wasn’t ever referred to a neurologist, then someone dropped the ball.
Still: a 1-in-100M chance is exceedingly rare. Assuming 1/2 of the active duty strength of the US military is age 25 or less, that works out to about a 1-in-142 chance of having a single such occurrence in any given year. That in turn means that you’d only have a bit over a 19% chance of seeing one or more such cases in any 30-year period (cumulative binomial, #successes >=1, p-success = 0.00704, 1 year = 1 one trial) in the entire active duty US military.
In a perfect world the man’s condition would have been caught earlier. But in reality? Given those odds, I’m a bit surprised it was caught before autopsy.
I’m not getting my point across here.
CJD is 1 in a million, not one in a hundred million and prion disease in general is rare, but not that rare. Look up Fatal Familial Insomnia (FFI), there’s more proof God loves us.
Statistics aside, I highlighted the case because it was extreme and involved a service member, not to somehow infer that prion disease was rampantly misdiagnosed. The problem is the consideration of neurological and other pathologies not being investigated in aberrant behavior.
Thyroid or pancreatic dysfunction for example can also cause psychotic behavior and to have someone jailed, deported or otherwise judged without a proper medical and mental screening is something we need to guard against.
It’s not that they didn’t diagnose the CJD definitively earlier. But neuro degenerative processes or multisystem disease should have been on the radar sooner.
I understand why you highlighted the case, IDC SARC. But I think you’re wrong about the prevalence of CJD in people of military age, which is the age group on which military medical personnel concentrate. And I also think that you’re missing my point – which is that this one was that rare one in 100M “corner case” that no one could reasonably have been expected to see coming. Stuff that’s that rare is going to get missed fairly often, simply because no one has ever seen a case before. (More on that “1 in 100M” number below.) You are correct that the overall incidence of CJD is approximately 1 in 1M. However, like many diseases, non-variant CJD appears to be primarily a disease of older individuals. The risk of acquiring the disease rises with age. It is apparently unknown in persons younger than age 21, and only exceedingly rarely occurs before age 30. The median age of death is 68 years; 97% of CJD deaths occur at age 44 or older. (Onset is typically a bit earlier in familial CJD, but I believe even that is essentially unknown before age 30.) http://www.bseinfo.org/cjdincidencecases.aspx Since the disease generally progresses fairly rapidly and onset typically occurs at age 44 or older, that means that virtually all cases that are diagnosed are diagnosed in persons outside the usual military age demographic. So it’s not something that military medicine would exactly have “on the radar” – even military neurologists. As I noted earlier, that works out to only about a 19% chance that there would be a case in a given 30 year period (it’s actually a bit over 17% for exactly 1 case and a bit less than 2% for 2 or more). And I’m guessing that’s very likely an overestimate, since I’m pretty sure well over half of the active duty military population is 30 or younger. Regarding the prevalence under age 30, from the article you quoted: Doctors believe he has the classic form of the disease, which develops spontaneously. It affects just one in 100 million people under 30, according… Read more »
@both
-is- there a fix? What is it?
People are now surviving stuff that used to kill them DRT. Thus they live to experience Neuro trama.
What must change in our processes? Do we have stats to guide that Q? Are we collecting the data? Tracking long term?
Total layman here, but i sense a gap.
Someone just invented an injectable wound-compresssing foam. Game changer? Somebody smart changed a process. It sounds like something any medic can use, and maybe trained CLS?
What would “Brain Bonk Buster” look like?
A quick search of court records show some of his issues seem to be domestic (read; wife/divorce) related, and a refusal to stay away from her when ordered by the court to do so.
Personally, I’m thankful for his service, and I honestly hope he has been trying to clean up his act.
Nevertheless, play stupid games, win stupid prizes … and in this case the prize very well could be a plane ticket to the old motherland.
Fuck this dude.
You make mistakes or make bad choices; deal with it and live with it.
Cunt punt this felon and don’t look back.
I hate to say this but we… own this problem and deporting is probably not a good option at this point, why he did not seek citizenship 7 years ago while in Iraq or before makes me wonder but the OTH Could have played a part in that. Of note to all in 2009-2011 the number of OTH and dishonorable discharge’s being handed out in the Iraq/Kuwait area was up 75%
Over the previous period, some of the reasons in my book seemed a little lame but the Army was shifting gears because Obummer was chopping it to pieces or to the bone
All true, Skippy. But if the guy deployed in 2009-2011, that means he did so in his mid-30s. That in turn means he’d had a decade and a half to decide whether or not he wanted to be a US citizen. Makes me wonder why he never “pulled the trigger” and applied to be naturalized – unless he didn’t want to do that for some reason.
Damned hard case. Glad I’m not the one stuck with making the call.
Roger on that one Hondo
I definitely second your thoughts on that too
One of the reasons that the discharge rate was so high was to get rid of all the below standard soldiers that were kept in to fill the ranks. I deployed in 2010 with an E-6 that had two DUI’s and habitual alcohol problems. The day he returned he got a third DUI. He had gotten by before but out the door he went.
Guys that were overweight, PT failures and all that got the ax. The Army had been keeping them on the books for years to the point where they felt there would never be repercussions.
I remember it like it was yesterday we had a unreal number of
PT failures and Fat body’s we also had a few that lost
A half a deck of cards also. One was beyond “Bat Shit Crazy”
And should have never been deployed
Military service gives you expedited priority to citizenship. There is no way he didn’t know that.
https://citizenpath.com/expedited-citizenship-through-military-service/
He prolly didn’t see the need to do the paperwork and the bother of getting naturalized. After all, the Dhimmicrats let you vote, get welfare, medical care, obamaphone, and food stamps, etc., even if one is not a citizen.
I think it is -well- established the dude had a deficit in the “judgement” area.
11b-mailclerk: replying to your last comment here, as the comment-indent limit has been reached above making following who’s talking to whom difficult. CJD is a fascinating and, frankly, terrifying disease. It’s caused by what are essentially normal proteins in the body that somehow “go rogue” and transform into a second stable form (prions), not unlike a different stable phase of a metal alloy. Those distorted proteins are toxic, and build up in various body organs. In the brain, they cause spongiform encephalopathy, which drives the victim mad. In other organs they may do other damage. The disease is invariably fatal, typically within a year. It’s a pretty nasty way to go. There are no known effective treatments. There are four variants, each of which can be transmitted to a person with great difficulty. Sporadic CJD occurs spontaneously in someone with no family history of the disease; it’s thought to occur when a protein in the individual’s body spontaneously “folds” itself into the dangerous prion form (this form apparently can induce other normal form proteins of susceptible type to do the same). The reason for the initial spontaneous fold into the lethal form is unknown. This is the form of CJD the individual referenced by IDC SAR in the discussion above is believed to have suffered from. Familial CJD seems to “run” in families and have a genetic link. There are several gene mutations that appear to make an individual somewhat more susceptible to acquiring CJD. These cases tend to have somewhat earlier onset (understandable as the individuals have a genetic mutation making these individuals more susceptible), but still have an incredibly low rate of occurrence before age 30. Iatrogenic CJD is CJD transmitted to an unfortunate individual via medical procedure or treatment. The misfolded protein that causes CJD is incredibly difficult to destroy, surviving routine sterilization procedures (it’s not actually alive, so the protein molecule itself must be largely physically dismantled to render it harmless). A small number of cases are transmitted that way. The number of iatrogenic cases was larger a couple of decades ago – the medical community… Read more »
This is a case where I do not know enough to ask the right questions.
The “wicked problem” sounds a bit like the “orphan drug” part of Pharma. There is a clear unmet need, but no one can figure out how to make a buck treatin for curing it, so the patients languish untreated. Charitable foundations and money donors can make a difference, sometimes, but often not.
Example, Neuroblastoma, a pediatric cancer. (A Horror…)
I was more pointing at the brain injury situation for servicepeople and veterans.
But the low-probability brain illnesses have to factor in there too, especially if that community has higher frequency of occurrence.
How many “shitbags” will turn out to have been concussed into uncontrollable personality changes? I have first-hand experience with acquaintances suffering head trauma, who seem like whole different folks afterwards.
(Nor do I want to excuse genuine shitbaggery, nor give it cover. Dilemma….)