During her second and final day of testimony to the Military Police Complaints Commission, Fynes says the thought of her son, Cpl. Stuart Langridge, making last requests of which his family was unaware, angers her still.
“I had this image of my son going through a shopping list of those who were important to him,’ said Fynes, her voice breaking with emotion. “I thought what a horrible lonely place he must have in when he wrote that note. The image of him writing that note breaks my heart ... and nobody thought to give it to us”.
Fynes and her husband Shaun have filed a series of complaints against the military’s National Investigation Service (NIS) claiming that three investigations into their son’s death were compromised, biased and concerned only with protecting the military’s reputation.
The suicide note was addressed to his mother and stepfather and in it, Langridge asked specifically for a simple family funeral. Unaware of the request, the family never objected to a military funeral.
Langridge, a troubled Afghan and Bosnia veteran, hanged himself in March 2008 after failed efforts at hospital treatment for drug and alcohol addiction.
He spent his last weeks doing menial jobs at CFB Edmonton — subjected, say his parents, to a rigorous workload he was in too fragile a state to handle.
Doctors and Langridge’s superiors from the base have testified that his colleagues did all they could to save him from himself.
“We went to the wall for Stuart,” said one.
Fynes told the inquiry that she and her husband are not pursuing financial compensation, even though they have spent thousands of dollars battling for information.
Nor did they want the costly and time-consuming public inquiry, she said.
“We wanted someone to sit down with us and have an honest discussion and tell us what happened,” she said. “We just want someone to acknowledge that lessons need to be learned from his death ... and how things will be different in the future for soldiers with PTSD.
“Someone give us some honesty,” she added, “and tell us what lessons have been learned. My son was like a hamster on a wheel (looking for help). He was very sick.”
The military has not formally apologized for withholding the suicide note, added Fynes, saying she had met Defence Minister Peter MacKay during a visit to Ottawa two years ago and “he danced around it.”
Fynes was guardedly critical of the military witnesses from CFB Edmonton who defended themselves and their colleagues.
“It’s like they were all singing from the same songbook,” she said. “I expected everyone would come with their own point of view and protect their own little pieces of turf, but I hadn’t expected people would go to the lengths that they did.”
Challenged by government lawyer Elizabeth Richards who asked whether she was accusing the soldiers of lying, Fynes responded.
“I’m suggesting they told the truth as best they could under the circumstances”.
Richards also challenged Fynes’s version of events surrounding the panning for 28-year-old Stuart’s funeral.
“You actually had more input into Stuart’s funeral than you have represented,” she said.
Fynes said she had some input but the big decisions were made by Langridge’s estranged girlfriend Rebecca Starr, who the military considered his common-law wife and had designated his next of kin.
The couple had lived together for about a year before separating and, according to Fynes, the relationship was finished in the months before his death.
“I felt Rebecca was an ex-girlfriend,” she said, “and as such should be accorded whatever an ex-girlfriend is accorded.”
When she and her husband arrived at the funeral it caused “a kerfuffle,” added Fynes, because they was no place reserved for them to sit. They event sat ion a row behind Rebecca’s family.
Starr is due to testify Thursday.
The military, which insists that Langridge’s core issue was drug and alcohol abuse and not PTSD, says there is evidence that the soldier had been a drug and alcohol abuser since he was a teenager.
Fynes said she once caught her teenaged son with “grass” and grounded him.
Stuart was a successful and exemplary army cadet and took part in several international military exchanges, she said.
“He couldn’t have been such a high achiever if he had been a drug addict and alcoholic,” she said.
Richards said she wasn’t suggesting he was an addict, just a user.
After the hearing, Fynes said she was “glad it’s over.
“Hopefully people heard what I was saying — about what really has hurt us,” she said. “It isn’t about whether Stuart doing drugs or how sick he was, it’s about people not doing the right thing.”
Original Article
Source: ottawa citizen
Author: CHRIS COBB
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