| | A Hero’s Welcome
The parade, on a sunny day in late summer 2003, was spectacular. Hundreds of flag-waving locals lined the streets. Mr. Ross had just turned 21. Wearing his green uniform and burgundy beret, he rode in a Jeep, accompanied by other veterans and the Connellsville Area Senior High School Marching Band. The festivities included bagpipers, Civil War re-enactors and a dunking pool.
“It wasn’t the medals on former Army Pfc. Sam Ross’s uniform that reflected his courage yesterday,” The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote. “It was the Dunbar native’s poise as he greeted well-wishers and insisted on sharing attention with other soldiers that proved the grit he’ll need to recover from extensive injuries he suffered in Iraq.”
For a little while, “it was joy joy, happiness happiness,” Mr. Ross said. He felt the glimmerings of a new kind of potential within himself, and saw no reason why he could not go on to college, even law school. Then the black moods, the panic attacks, the irritability set in. He was dogged by chronic pain; fragments of metal littered his body.
Mr. Ross said he was “stuck in denial” about his disabilities. The day he tried to resume a favorite pastime, fishing, hit him hard. Off-balance on the water, it came as a revelation that, without eyesight, he did not know where to cast his rod. He threw his equipment in the water and sold his boat.
“I just gave up,” he said. “I give up on everything.”
About a year after he was injured, Mr. Ross enrolled in an in-patient program for blind veterans in Chicago. He learned the Braille alphabet, but his fingers were too numb from embedded shrapnel to read, he said. He figured that he did not have much else to learn since he had been functioning blind for a year. He left the program early.
Similarly, Mr. Ross repeatedly declined outpatient psychiatric treatment at the veterans hospital in Pittsburgh, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs. He said he felt that people at the hospital had disrespected him.
After living with relatives, Mr. Ross withdrew from the world into the trailer on the hill in 2004. That year, he got into a dispute with his grandfather over old vehicles on the property, resolving it by setting them on fire. His run-ins with local law enforcement, which did not occur before he went to Iraq, the Fayette County sheriff said, had begun.
But his image locally had not yet been tarnished. In early 2005, Mr. Murtha held a second Purple Heart ceremony for Mr. Ross at a Fayette County hospital “to try to show him how much affection we had for him and his sacrifice,” Mr. Murtha said.
A local newspaper article about Mr. Ross’s desire to build himself a house came to the attention of Homes for Our Troops.
“He’s a great kid; he really is,” said Kirt Rebello, the group’s director of projects and veterans affairs. “Early on, even before he was injured, the kid had this humongous deck stacked against him in life. That’s one of the reasons we wanted to help him.”
Mr. Ross, who had received a $100,000 government payment for his catastrophic injury, bought land adjacent to his grandfather’s. Mr. Rebello asked Mr. Ross whether he might prefer to move to somewhere with more services and opportunities. But Mr. Ross said that Dunbar’s winding roads were implanted in his psyche, “that he could see the place in his mind,” Mr. Rebello said.
A Life Falls Apart
In May 2005, Mr. Ross broke up with a girlfriend and grew increasingly depressed. He felt oppressively idle, he said. One day, he tacked a suicide note to the door of his trailer and hitched a ride to a trail head, disappearing into the woods. A daylong manhunt ensued.
Mr. Ross fell asleep in the woods that night, waking up with the sun on his face, which he took to be a sign that God wanted him to live. When he was found, he was taken to a psychiatric ward and released after a few weeks.
The construction of his house proved a distraction from his misery. Mr. Ross enjoyed the camaraderie of the volunteers who fashioned him a cabin from white pine logs. But when the house, which he named Second Heaven, was finished in early 2006, “they all left, I moved in and I was all alone,” he said. “That’s when the drugs really started.”
At first, Mr. Ross said, he used drugs — pills, heroin, crack and methadone — “basically to mellow myself out and to have people around.” Local ne’er-do-wells enjoyed themselves on Mr. Ross’s tab for quite some time, his relatives said.
“These kids were loading him into a car, taking him to strip clubs, letting him foot the bills,” his uncle, Joseph Ross Jr., said. “They were dopies and druggies.”
Mr. Ross’s girlfriend, Barbara Hall, moved in with him. But relationships with many of his relatives had deteriorated.
“If that boy would have come home and accepted what happened to him, that boy never would have wanted for anything in Dunbar,” his grandfather said. “If he had accepted that he’s wounded and he’s blinded, you know? He’s not the only one that happened to. There’s hundreds of boys like him.”
Some sympathy began to erode in the town, too. “There’s pro and con on him,” a local official said. “Some people don’t even believe he’s totally blind.”
After overdosing first on heroin and then on methadone last fall, Mr. Ross said, he quit consuming illegal drugs, replacing them with drinking until he blacked out.
Mr. Ross relied on his brother, Thomas, when he suffered panic attacks. When Thomas was jailed earlier this year, Mr. Ross reached out to older members of his family. In early February, his uncle, Joseph Ross Jr., persuaded him to be driven several hours to the veterans’ hospital in Coatesville to apply for its in-patient program for post-traumatic stress disorder.
“Due to the severity of his case, they accepted him on the spot and gave him a bed date for right after Valentine’s Day,” his uncle said. “Then he wigged out five days before he was supposed to go there.”
It started when his brother’s girlfriend, Monica Kuhns, overheard a phone call in which he was arranging to buy antidepressants. She thought it was a transaction to buy cocaine, he said, and he feared that she would tell his sister and brother.
After downing several beers, Mr. Ross, in a deranged rage, went to his old trailer, where Ms. Kuhns was living with her young son, he said.
“He started pounding on the door,” said Ms. Hall, who accompanied him. “He went in and threatened to burn the place down. Me and Monica didn’t actually think he was going to do it. But then he pulled out the lighter.”
Having convinced himself that the trailer — a source of so much family misery — needed to be destroyed, Mr. Ross set a pile of clothing on fire. The women and the child fled. When a volunteer firefighter showed up, Mr. Ross attacked and choked him, according to a police complaint.
A judge set bail at $250,000. In the Fayette County prison, Mr. Ross got “totally out of hand,” the sheriff, Gary Brownfield, said. Mr. Ross’s lawyer, James Geibig, said the situation was a chaotic mess.
“It was just a nightmare,” Mr. Geibig said. “First the underlying charges — attempted homicide, come on — were blown out of proportion. Then bail is set sky high, straight cash. They put him in a little cell, in isolation, and barely let him shower. Things went from bad to worse until they found him hanging.”
Now Mr. Geibig’s goal is to get Mr. Ross sentenced into the post-traumatic stress disorder program he was supposed to attend.
“He does not need to be in jail,” Mr. Geibig said. “He has suffered enough. I’m not a bleeding heart, but his is a pretty gut-wrenching tale. And at the end, right before this incident, he sought out help. It didn’t arrive in time. But it’s not too late, I hope, for Sam Ross to have some kind of future.”
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