PTSD cited in vet’s murder acquittal

JOHN DAY, Ore. – When Jessie Bratcher’s fiancee told him the baby might not be his, that she had been raped two months earlier, he went quiet.

The former Oregon National Guardsman hung his head for the longest time. Then he went into the next room, put the barrel of an AK-47 in his mouth and took it out again.

He told Celena Davis not to expect to get any sleep that night. He walked up to her with a pair of scissors and slowly cut off her hair.

Two mornings later, they drove to the hardware store. While Davis waited in the truck, Bratcher went in and bought a gun. He came out, loaded it and asked: Do we go to the police? Or go find the guy? “Police,” Davis said.

Except that it was a Saturday, and the main door to the station was locked. Bratcher and Davis didn’t know there was an emergency door on the side of the building.

So they headed for Jose Ceja Medina’s trailer. At first Medina, standing on his porch in running shorts, denied knowing Davis. Then he said they’d had sex, but that he hadn’t raped her, and he offered to take care of the baby.

He ended up with six hollow-point bullets in him.

At Bratcher’s murder trial, the district attorney argued that the 27-year-old one-time grocery clerk had hunted down and killed Medina. But Bratcher’s lawyer said that when his client held the gun that morning, he was more than a furiously jealous boyfriend. He was a trained killer who’d been taught by the Army to mow down threats without much thinking – a man whose diminutive stature, quiet politeness and once-cheerful nature disguised the fact that he was, in the words of a sociologist who testified in the case, “a walking time bomb.”

In what veterans’ rights leaders say is the first major criminal exoneration linked to post-traumatic stress disorder, a jury in Canyon City, Ore., in October found Bratcher was legally insane when he shot Medina.

Wars have always sent home haunted souls – their anger, nightmares and flashbacks known at various times as shell shock, combat fatigue or, beginning with the Vietnam War, PTSD. But many trauma experts say Iraq and Afghanistan are producing a troubling hybrid of stress and traumatic brain injury because of the roadside bombs that have become part of warfare. And today’s soldiers are sometimes serving three or four combat deployments.

“We’re getting ready to face an epidemic,” said Floyd Meshad, president of the National Veterans Federation.

New attitude

Bratcher was born and raised in Prairie City, just east of John Day, on land that rolls off the timbered mountains of Eastern Oregon. His father, a Mexican farmworker, left almost immediately. His mother wasn’t up to raising him, so he lived with his grandfather, David Baughman, a logger and auto body mechanic.

Baughman took his grandson hunting, but Bratcher never wanted to do the killing. “It was violence to him,” Baughman said. “He just didn’t want to see anything die.”

After Sept. 11, 2001, Bratcher joined the Oregon National Guard. Bratcher boarded a plane for Kuwait early in 2005 and spent the next 11 months at Forward Operating Base Warrior in Kirkuk, Iraq.

“Jessie was always the type of individual who talked to all the Iraqis, wanted to take pictures. Real happy,” said Martin Castellanoz, 43, a fellow Oregonian who was Bratcher’s platoon sergeant. “But after the first rocket attacks, I could see in Jessie’s demeanor already that he was beginning to get scared.”

Bratcher also angered several of his fellow infantrymen when he refused to open fire on what he believed was an unknown target in the village of Tarjil, then contradicted their story when an investigation was launched.

“Because the other three individuals found out what he had wrote on his statement, he was basically seen as (a) snitch,” Castellanoz said.

One soldier Bratcher trusted was a fellow Guardsman from Oregon, John Ogburn III. On patrol one day, Ogburn’s Humvee rolled over in an accident. Bratcher watched as his friend was crushed to death.

“I started seeing big changes in his attitude after that,” Castellanoz said. “… We went out on patrols then, and he was hyper-alert. I’d hear him say things that I’d never thought I’d hear Bratcher say: ‘I’ll shoot ’em. I’ll kill ’em.’ ”

‘A different boy’

When Bratcher came back to Prairie City in late 2005, he got a job stocking shelves at the local supermarket. But he would become resentful, even furious, when customers would reach back and take newer jugs of milk after he had carefully stacked the older ones in front.

He soon was fired. For days at a time, Bratcher lived in the woods, setting up military-style perimeters and patrolling them with modified assault rifles.

“When my boy come back, he really come back as a different boy,” Baughman said. “… At night sometimes he’d jump out of bed real fast, and he’d holler.”

Bratcher went to the Veterans Administration hospital several times. Doctors rejected his first claim of PTSD, though they later declared him 70 percent and then 100 percent disabled. They sent him home with medication to calm him down and help him sleep.

In November 2006, Bratcher and Davis, now 20, moved into an apartment in John Day, and things seemed to get better. Davis took a home pregnancy test, and when it turned out positive Bratcher was so happy he grabbed the test kit and kissed it.

On the night of Aug. 14, 2008, Davis said, she was lying in bed, with Bratcher sitting nearby. She decided she needed to come clean. During the trial, the judge ruled that whether there was a rape or not was irrelevant. Nothing mattered except what the ex-Guardsman thought had happened.

Nobody had deprogrammed Bratcher when he got home, Grant County Public Defender Markku Sario told the jury. He was the same hair-trigger killing machine he had been trained to be around Kirkuk.

“In previous wars, soldiers were told to aim carefully till you knew what you were shooting at. In this war, that’s not the case,” Sario argued. “The one thing they always emphasized was instant reaction to threats. If there’s a threat, eliminate it.”

There’s still a victim

In another small trailer not far from where Medina died, his parents and two brothers have been trying to figure out why Jose is dead and nobody’s to blame.

“There’s no proof he was having a flashback, which he complained about. But there’s proof he bought the gun, and there’s proof that he used it,” said Francisco Medina, 19. “We understand he has PTSD. But does that give him the right to just go murder somebody?”

Prosecutor Ryan Joslin said Bratcher’s Army experience should never have been the centerpiece of the trial.

“The defense attorney spent a lot of time criticizing the military, and justifiably so. Blaming this whole issue on their failure to act, and treat his PTSD,” he said. “My response is: Baloney. He used it as an excuse for his actions.”