Gunman at VA Clinic Was Never Violent, Daughter Says

An unemployed Vietnam veteran who fatally shot a man outside a Veterans Affairs clinic in the San Fernando Valley and then killed himself had been treated for schizophrenia and drug addiction and was diagnosed as having post-traumatic stress disorder, his daughter said Thursday.

Donna Goins said her father, Philip Charles Goins, 52, was upset about what he believed were lapses in his care, but she has no idea what motivated him to gun down fellow veteran Armando Ballesteros at the Sepulveda Ambulatory Care Center and Nursing Home.

“I don’t know what he was thinking,” said Donna Goins, whose father lived off and on in a Sylmar trailer park with his mother. “I have never seen a violent side to him.”

Philip Goins exchanged words with Ballesteros on Wednesday in front of an outpatient drug treatment clinic, where both men were patients, police said. Goins opened fire, fatally wounding Ballesteros, and then took his own life after fleeing into a nearby neighborhood.

Donna Goins said she never heard her father mention Ballesteros, 53, of San Fernando, and does not know if the two men were acquainted. She said she often accompanied Goins on his regular visits to the sprawling health care facility, where he also was being treated for liver and kidney ailments.

Donna Goins said that as recently as two months ago, she tried to get answers about her father’s complaints regarding the care he had received.

“I’ve called and written. I couldn’t get answers,” said Goins, 26. “He would talk to me about this, and he was very concerned about it.”

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.

Police are investigating the shooting, said Los Angeles Police Department spokesman April Archer. Among other things, they want to know how Goins got the gun. The 1968 federal Gun Control Act prohibits several groups of people, including the mentally ill, from owning a gun.

The post-traumatic stress syndrome, Goins’ daughter said, was a result of five years spent in Vietnam, much of it on the front lines. She said her father returned from Vietnam “fully disabled,” and has been unable to work since.

Some neighbors at the trailer park where Philip Goins lived part-time described him as a volatile man who was given to angry exchanges. Donna Goins described her father as a religious man who read the Bible, adored his grandchildren and helped empty the trash for elderly neighbors.

She read from a letter her father sent her last week.

“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.”