Military's failures left recruit to die
Military's failures left recruit to die
August 19, 2003
BY TAMARA AUDI AND DAVID ASHENFELTER
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITERS
Justin Haase wanted to be a Marine.
But he died in boot camp at age 18. A Marine inquiry determined that drill instructors failed to get him prompt treatment as he fell critically ill and that medical workers botched his care.
Now his mother is suing, tortured by the belief that something as simple as an antibiotic could have saved him.
This is Justin Haase's story, the tale of a Michigan kid who signed up to serve and never got the chance.
She heard it in his voice right away, the way a mother does when her child is sick. No matter that this child was 6 feet tall, 18 years old and training to be a Marine hundreds of miles away.
"You sound awful," Renee Thurlow said over the phone to her son, Justin Haase, who was in boot camp at Parris Island, S.C.
It was a week before Christmas 2001, the first time she'd talked to him since he left his Chesterfield Township home in late October.
Some of his letters home had troubled her. He had said he wasn't getting enough food. The drill instructors were mean. Other recruits picked on him. Renee's husband, Scott, a career Air Force man, assured her those were normal boot camp complaints. Maybe her husband was right, she thought.
As Justin talked, he said he was starting to like boot camp. He promised to get his cold, or whatever it was, checked.
He did not tell her about headaches so severe that they made him cry. He did not tell her how exhausted he was. He did not tell her that he never received the antibiotics that all new arrivals to Parris Island were supposed to get to fight infections.
It was the last time mother and son would speak.
One week later, Justin Haase was dead.
An internal military report detailing his final painful days reveals a startling series of medical mistakes, bad decisions, missed opportunities and neglect -- from the time he stepped off the bus at Parris Island to the moment he was pronounced brain dead from bacterial meningitis, with no family member by his side.
Renee Thurlow's son might have lived, according to the military review, if medics had done something as simple as taking his temperature at a crucial point.
The Judge Advocate General investigation, which is done for every military death, resulted in some policy changes on Parris Island and the transfer of Justin's drill instructors to other positions. But his mother and lawyers say the changes were minor.
One drill instructor remains under investigation. But to Justin's family, it's not enough.
Nearly two years after Justin's death, his mother is suing the Navy, two Marine sergeants, a Marine medic and a Navy doctor.
His mother, an Erin Brockovich-style crusader who jokes about her bottle-blond hair and wears her dead son's dog tags around her neck, is taking on a 54-year-old U.S. Supreme Court ruling that basically says you can't hold the military responsible for the death or injury of active-duty service members.
"That law has got to be changed," she said, sitting in the downtown Detroit office of her lawyers, LeRoy Wulfmeier III and Melissa Carr. "We don't want another family to go through this."
Said Maj. Ken White, a Parris Island spokesman: "It's extremely tragic when we lose one of our own, especially a recruit. We conducted an extremely vigorous investigation. We left no stone unturned. We identified people who violated policy and we held them accountable for their actions. That's what the American people expect us to do, and that's what we did."
The suit comes at a time when U.S. soldiers are being called on to serve in a growing number of dangerous roles across the globe, including the war on terror and the rebuilding of Iraq.
Renee's husband, a master sergeant in the Michigan Air National Guard, is angry about Justin's death, but as Renee talked about the way the military mistreated Justin, he leaned over, gently patted her hand and said, "Marines, honey, the Marines. Not the military."
A dream is followed
Military life fascinated Justin even as a grade-schooler in Sacramento, Calif., where his family lived in the late 1980s. His father, Don Haase, and mother separated in 1989. When Scott Thurlow started dating Renee a few years later, he took Justin to an Air Force base near Sacramento. The skinny boy loved being there and would come home excited, telling his mom about the newest, biggest things he saw.
After Renee and Scott married in 1994, the family moved to a condo in Chesterfield Township, only a few miles from Selfridge Air National Guard Base. Once a week, Justin got his hair cut short at a barbershop owned by Ken McCormick, an Army veteran whose business is popular among Selfridge men.
"Justin just took it all in," McCormickrecalled of the atmosphere at the shop, where the men swapped stories and handed out advice to the lanky teen.
By his senior year at Adlai Stevenson High School in Sterling Heights, Justin knew three things: He wanted to join the military, become a cop and marry his sweetheart, Nicole Schlaack.
Justin decided on the Marine Corps. It offered the most intense training, which Justin thought would prepare him for a law-enforcement career.
Justin enlisted in August 2001 and was set to depart for training in October. But when the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks happened, he sped to a Troy recruitment center and begged to be taken then and there. He was told to wait.
"He wanted to go really bad," said Jon Lockwood, a friend who had worked with Justin at a tire store. "He was always talking about how he wanted to go to war and help the country."
On his last night at home, Justin and his stepfather had a private talk in the kitchen.
"The drill instructors are paid to yell at you," Scott remembered saying. "So just let it roll. Don't let anything get to you. You're there to become a Marine. They're there to make you a Marine."
Justin nodded quietly.
Boot camp begins
"Hello. I'm here. I'm OK."
Click.
Before Renee knew what had happened, the line had gone dead. It was 2 a.m. Oct. 29, 2001. Other military mothers had warned her about this. New recruits only get a few seconds to tell their parents they've arrived at basic training.
Like all recruits sent to Parris Island, Justin spent the first few days filling out paperwork, getting his head sheared and being issued his training gear.
Unlike the other recruits, Justin missed out on the dose of antibiotics that recruits are supposed to getupon arrival to ward off infections. It was standard operating procedure -- and the first mistake in a chain of errors that led to his death.
Justin was allergic to penicillin and should have received an alternative. Justin told his girlfriend in a letter that he never did; the Marine investigation found no evidence to the contrary.
During the inquiry, military doctors said the initial antibiotic treatment would not have been adequate to fight bacterial meningitis. But his mother and her lawyers say Justin would likely not have fallen ill in the first place -- and become susceptible to bacterial meningitis -- if he had been treated when he arrived.
Justin's first weeks on Parris Island were difficult. He wasn't keeping up, records show, and his drill instructors rode him to move faster and push harder. One instructor poured water on his food to make a point; another assigned him to watch the rifles while other recruits ate.
"I hate it hear, I'm so hungry," he wrote to his mom in a letter stamped Nov. 10. "All they do is yell, brake our stuff and stick us in a sand box with sand fleas that bite."
Justin's health fades
Life began to improve for him on the rifle range, where he made sharpshooter category, and he began to make the transformation into a solid Marine, according to the military review. But his health was deteriorating.
In a Dec. 8 letter to his girlfriend, he complained that a headache prevented him from sleeping the night before.
"For some reason my head started to hurt really bad and then it moved to my forehead and my face and eye, jaw, and throught," he wrote. "They all hurt so bad my nose got so stuffy and runny and it's still like that.
"I was up all night going crazy then today my SDI said he'd give me medicine cause he saw me crying but he never did," Justin wrote, referring to his senior drill instructor. "I don't know whats wrong but it's sucks."
It appears not even Justin realized how sick he was getting. Later in the letter, he wrote about the future: "Yesterday during our march it was dark when we started and we walked past base housing and I thought of us cause all these houses had Christmas lights up and I started day dreaming of me and you putting up lights on our house, then we went to pinarra bread . . . Honey all I want to do is marry you so we can live together. It would be so cute wouldn't it?"
Justin did not complain about illness to anyone at Parris Island, according to the military records. But recruits are encouraged by drill instructors and by the Marine Corps culture to work through pain. Complaints, in that atmosphere, can be taken as whining.
continued........