Daughter Struggles to Understand Veteran’s Actions

For months, and as recently as two months ago, Donna Goins tried to get answers about her father’s long list of ailments, physical and mental.

She often accompanied him on his regular visits to the Veterans Affairs’ sprawling health care facility here, where she said he was being treated for everything from liver and kidney disease to schizophrenia.

In an emotional interview Thursday, Goins said she knew her father, 52-year-old Philip Charles Goins, was upset about what he viewed as lapses in his care.

Now, she has no idea if that played a role in a violent outburst Wednesday on the grounds of the health center that left her father and another man dead, but she knows it had been on his mind.

“I’ve called and written--I couldn’t get answers,” said Goins, a 26-year-old San Gabriel Valley mother of two who did not grow up with her father but described their relationship as close. “He would talk to me about this, and he was very concerned about it.”

Still, Goins said she has no idea what was on her father’s mind when he apparently gunned down fellow veteran Armando Ballesteros, 53, outside a building on the 154-acre grounds of the Sepulveda Ambulatory Care Center and Nursing Home.

“I don’t know what he was thinking,” said Donna Goins, who said her father served a five-year stint in Vietnam and had been diagnosed as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. “I have never seen a violent side to him.”

In what may well have been a chance encounter, the two men exchanged words just outside of a VA building that police said houses an outpatient drug-treatment program in which both were patients. Goins opened fire, police said, fatally wounding Ballesteros, and then took his own life after fleeing into a nearby neighborhood.

Donna Goins said she had never heard her father mention Ballesteros, who lived in San Fernando, and was not sure if the two even knew each other. Those who did know Ballesteros described him as a kind man who cared for his elderly parents and ensured that their yard was well tended.

Goins said she also has no idea when, where or even how her father got the gun he used to end two lives.

“Years ago, he became somewhat of a collector, but he chose not to do that anymore,” said Goins.

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The 1968 federal Gun Control Act prohibits several groups of people, including the mentally ill, from owning guns. Theoretically, that’s part of the reason for background checks.

Police are conducting “a lengthy investigation into the shooting,” said April Archer, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Police Department. That includes reviewing the history of the gun, interviewing any previous owners and “finding out how it actually got to” Goins, she said.

Even though Donna Goins was unhappy with her father’s medical care--saying, “He did something for this country, and I don’t think he got the proper care and attention he deserved”--she was careful not to blame the VA for the shooting.

Beverly Fitzgerald, a spokeswoman for the VA, volunteered Thursday to talk with Goins’ family and said officials would look into her complaint.

“Certainly, if there are issues with any patient’s care, we have mechanisms in place where those patients can go,” Fitzgerald said. “We certainly try to address these issues when they are brought to our attention.”

Goins and Ballesteros were among 17,000 patients being treated at the center.

Goins said her father had left a message on her answering machine the night before the shooting, asking if she could accompany him to the center, but a “breakdown in transportation” kept her away.

Although her father was largely concerned with his physical health, he also had some mental health concerns, she said. The post-traumatic stress syndrome, she said, was a byproduct of his lengthy stint in Vietnam, much of it on the front lines.

He had prescriptions for medications for all his ailments, including mental illness, and as far as she knew, he was taking it.

At the Sepulveda Ambulatory Care Center on Thursday, Veterans Day, veterans in the residential nursing facility ate barbecued hot dogs, listened to band music and talked about the lingering side-effects of combat duty.

World War II veteran and center volunteer Vern Harsch, 78, looked sad and distant as he described the flashbacks he has suffered for years:

“Your mind puts you right back where you were in the service, fighting. You see the enemy, you shoot the enemy. You hear the rifles going off, you hear the cannons. You can smell the gunpowder, and depending on how many dead bodies you got, you can smell them.”

At any given time, thousands of veterans are being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder, said Dr. Michael Mahler, a neurologist and vice president for hospital-based services for the regional VA health care system.

The psychological phenomenon is a severe reaction to stress suffered in a traumatic event, including wars, earthquakes or victimization in a crime.

Symptoms can include anxiety, depression, mood swings, irritability and flashbacks. Extreme cases can include delusions and hallucinations.

“They can hear a loud noise like a car [backfiring] and think it’s gunfire,” Mahler said.

In many cases, Mahler said, outpatient counseling and medication can help veterans cope.

Goins said that, when her father returned from Vietnam, he was “fully disabled” and has been unable to work.

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While some who knew Philip Charles Goins describe a volatile man who was given to heated exchanges with his neighbors in the Sylmar trailer park where he lived with his mother, Donna Goins knew a father who called her religiously to read Scripture passages, who adored his grandchildren and who helped empty trash for elderly neighbors.

“My dad read the Bible everyday,” said a tearful Goins. “We would sit on the phone and [he would] read me Scripture. That’s why this took me as a shock, what he did.”

Now, Goins is doing some reading of her own. She’s rereading a letter her father sent her last week filled with talk of God and family.

“It didn’t mention anything about suicide or taking his own life,” she said. “But it said that, even though he was suffering now, maybe there would be some peace.”