{"id":60590,"date":"2015-06-27T09:00:22","date_gmt":"2015-06-27T13:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=60590"},"modified":"2015-06-27T06:24:58","modified_gmt":"2015-06-27T10:24:58","slug":"melvin-lloyd-speed-another-phony-air-force-lieutenant-colonel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=60590","title":{"rendered":"Melvin Lloyd Speed; another phony Air Force Lieutenant Colonel"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Melvin<\/a><\/center><\/p>\n

Melvin Speed passed four years ago and his family planted him at the Houston National Cemetery. His gravestone reads that he was a Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Air Force. Someone who knew the dearly departed, says nope, he was a Lieutenant Colonel but he’d been commissioned in the Texas State Guard (not to be confused with the Texas National Guard). Sound familiar? <\/p>\n

Well, at least Melvin had some military service in the Air Force. He worked in the traffic control tower, but he was an airman third class, not a Lieutenant Colonel.<\/p>\n

\"Melvin<\/a><\/center><\/p>\n

His Air Force career appears to have been cut short of the regular three year enlistment by about six months. It looks like he had some problems in his later years after a career as a deputy sheriff, fire marshal and county emergency management coordinator, as some of these links<\/a> indicate. He died during a six-year prison sentence for a possession of child pR0n beef;<\/p>\n

\"MELVIN<\/a><\/center><\/p>\n

The interesting part is that the VA says he’s buried in the Houston Cemetery;<\/p>\n

\"Melvin<\/a><\/center><\/p>\n

But the Cemetery<\/a> doesn’t have a record of him buried there on their website;<\/p>\n

\"Melvin<\/a><\/p>\n

The VA says<\/a> that he’s still eligible for burial in a veterans’ cemetery, because he wasn’t convicted of a Tier III sexual offense (which would have involved actual contact with a victim);<\/p>\n

Under 38 U.S.C. \u00a7 2411, interment or memorialization in a VA national cemetery or in Arlington National Cemetery is prohibited if a person is convicted of a Tier III sex offense, who was sentenced to a minimum of life imprisonment and whose conviction is final. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But, he’s not a Lieutenant Colonel in the Air Force. According to the National Personnel Records Center some of his records were lost in the 1973 fire, but the Air Force records that were involved in the fire were for people who left the service before 1963, he wouldn’t have made LTC between 1958 when he was an Airman and 1963 when he would have had to leave the service for his records to be in the fire.<\/p>\n

So, this case has been a learning experience for me, and now you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Melvin Speed passed four years ago and his family planted him at the Houston National Cemetery. His gravestone reads that he was a Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Air Force. Someone who knew the dearly departed, says nope, he was a Lieutenant Colonel but he’d been commissioned in the Texas State Guard (not to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":60591,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-phony-soldiers"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/Melvin-Lloyd-Speed.jpg?fit=276%2C350&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4ozh1-fLg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=60590"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60590\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/60591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=60590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=60590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=60590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}