A grand jury will consider the case of a U.S. Marine Corps veteran charged with murder in the fatal shooting of a woman following a traffic accident near Cleveland.
Twenty-nine-year-old Matthew Desha (DESH’-uh) is being held on $1 million bond as his case moves to county court.
Cleveland.com reports Desha’s attorney declined to comment after Wednesday’s hearing.
Police say Desha repeatedly shot 53-year-old Deborah Pearl, of Twinsburg, with an AR-15 rifle after running a red light and hitting Pearl’s car on Aug. 27 in Solon. Police say there’s no indication the two knew each other.
Records show Desha served two tours in Iraq and received treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. Police were asked to check on him a few years ago after he stopped attending PTSD group therapy sessions.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.
PTSD is widely over-diagnosed and is applied to such things as situational depression or anxiety (which, far from being a psychopathology, is simply a normal reaction – It’s NOT “PTSD” if you watched your dog get run over and now you’re sad about it…). However, it is a real condition. It can remain hidden for years (it was almost 38 years before mine first manifested, without any “trigger” so far as I can tell). It can be almost immediately apparent (as was the case with my ex-son-in-law, who did multiple back to back deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq). It can result in a permanent degree of dysfunction and demoralization or it can be intermittent. We don’t know enough about this man or this case to sit in moral judgment on him. What we do know is that a woman (someone’s wife, mother, daughter, sister, friend) is dead, through no fault of her own. He ran the red light. He hit her. He got angry. He shot and killed her. And she is just as dead and her friends and family just as bereaved as she would be if this was simply a random act of violence, unjustified by claims to some form of disability. The military has been singularly callous in its treatment of those suffering psychological issues from their exposures to war and the VA is a worse than a joke – it is virtually a criminal organization adding its own appetites to the quest for loot and power and status which motivates so many bureaucrats at the expense of their duties to the public, but, in this case, there is only one actor. Put simply, I may feel for this man and his actions may have arisen from an unrecognized and unrewarded service-related disability, but responsibility comes first and he cannot hide behind his past injuries as cause to inflict injury on others. Give him treatment or give him jail, but there being no question of his culpability, he cannot be declared not guilty. And the next time the government consigns men to a needless war, it should accept the responsibility for proactively providing treatment rather than passively waiting for them to seek help (particularly when an admission that you might need it will become a “black mark” on your service record).
I can’t add much to what you have said. Mr. Desha faces either a long prison sentence or a long residence in a mental facility. No good outcomes here. He was screwed when he was sent to fight a worthless war that our politicians didn’t allow him and comrades to win. And now a moment of rage will ruin the rest of his life. Does Ohio have death penalty? I think any worthwhile Marine would rather be executed than to live in a cage.