Suicide thwarted at Chesty’s grave

[Vulture6]

Suicide thwarted at Chesty’s grave

By Mathew Paust - The Associated Press
Posted : Monday Aug 6, 2007 5:55:23 EDT

MIDDLESEX, Va. — Russell and his Alcoholic Anonymous companions weren’t concerned when they first saw the stranger lingering in the small churchyard.

They were waiting for the rest of the AA group that meets at Christ Church Parish, off Route 33 near Urbanna, for their weekly 8 p.m. meeting. Seeing someone in the church cemetery wasn’t unusual.

“So many of them come there on a Monday night. I guess they just come to pay their respects,” said Russell, who — in keeping with the AA practice of protecting members’ identities — chose to reveal only his first name.

Russell was referring to one particular grave — that of Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller, which has been a mecca for Marines since Puller’s death in 1971. Puller is revered as the most highly decorated Marine.

On this night, June 25, the man at Puller’s grave was Joseph Allen Keranen, 46, a Marine veteran who had come to end his life.

He had brought two six-packs of beer, a pistol and his Marine Corps ceremonial sword, which he stabbed into the ground between a U.S. flag and a Marine Corps flag at Puller’s headstone.

Keranen failed in what he’d intended to be his final mission, thanks in part to the coincidence of Russell’s ministering and the bold restraint of a Middlesex County deputy.

“I wanted to do it at a place of honor,” Keranen said recently at Middle Peninsula Regional Security Center, where he’s being held without bail on charges of possessing and shooting a firearm on school grounds — because Christ Church School is also on parish property.

Keranen said that he had no idea he was near a school and that he had no intention of hurting anyone but himself.

At the critical moment — gripping the pistol beneath him as he lay on his stomach with someone on top of him — he didn’t shoot because, he said, he was afraid that the bullet might go through him and hit the other person. Nor, he insisted, would he have settled for “suicide by cop,” in which despairing people force police officers into doing what the people can’t quite bring themselves to do.

“I dread the thought he’d have shot me, having to live with that, not knowing I was mentally ill,” Keranen said.

In fact, the desperate drama at Puller’s grave that night came within the twitch of a finger of ending badly.

Sgt. M.E. Epperly was one of several Middlesex County deputies who arrived at the cemetery after one of the AA members saw a gun in Keranen’s belt and called 911.

By then, Keranen had walked away from Puller’s grave “to take myself out.” He’d placed a Marine Corps blanket on the ground between two nearby graves and sat down.

“We could see the top of his head,” Russell said. “A shot went off, then we couldn’t see him. I went over there. I thought I’d find him dead, but he was still sitting there. I said, ‘Don’t do it.’ I said, ‘You wouldn’t want to put that burden on his grave site.’”

Russell said he sat and talked with Keranen until the deputies arrived. The troubled Marine wept as he spoke of his despair.

“He told me a story that’s troubled him most of his adult life,” Russell said. “It broke my heart to hear his story. I said, ‘We’re going to drive you home. Forget about the past.’”

About then, the deputies arrived, and the situation turned into “pandemonium,” Russell said. “I said, ‘Put the gun down.’ He did. He threw it away, over onto the grass, but when I got up, he lunged for it. My stomach just about fell out of my body.”

When the deputies approached him, Keranen pointed the pistol at himself.

“I thought everything was going to go to hell in a handbasket,” Russell said.

Keranen, who said he had drunk most of the beer that he brought with him, says he doesn’t remember shooting the pistol. He does recall lying down on his stomach between the two gravestones as the deputies drew near.

When they piled on top of him, he said, “It felt like I was hit by a locomotive.”

Unable to get Keranen’s gun away from him while he was lying on it, the deputies eased up so he could roll over. When he did, Epperly said, Keranen was still holding the gun.

“He had it pointed right at my chest,” the deputy said.

And the deputy had his pistol out, too — his finger on the trigger, the muzzle pointed at Keranen. The deputy’s other hand gripped the former Marine.

The 10-year veteran law officer said it was the tightest moment of his career.

“I thought about a billion things in a tenth of a second,” he recalled. “I was ready to kill him. I had every intention of killing him.”

From his many hours of tactical training as an officer — and before that in a Coast Guard Reserve drug interdiction unit — Epperly knew that he would have been justified in shooting Keranen.

Epperly had begun to pull the trigger, which on the Glock autoloading pistol that Middlesex deputies carry meant he’d depressed a safety lever inset in the trigger. Had he known what one of his fellow officers at the scene later told him — that Keranen was trying to squeeze the trigger on his own pistol — Epperly most likely would have fired a fatal shot.

Instead, without a thought, he instantly swung a booted foot and kicked the former Marine’s pistol out of his hand, ending the crisis. The lawman said it wasn’t until much later, after he’d gone home at the end of his shift, that “it sort of hit me. I could have been killed.”

In jail, Keranen said he still got suicidal urges.

“I tell them, and they put me on suicide watch,” he said.

He blames much of his troubled life on alcoholism, though he said he’d been without a drink for more than three years before June 25. Buying the six-packs on the way to Middlesex from Farnham, where he co-owns a business with his brother, was an afterthought, he said.

The primary mission was to kill himself, something that he’d tried several times previously. He had just started an outpatient treatment program with the Veterans Affairs Department, but it wasn’t going well, he said. He’d closed up the business early that day “so I could kill myself.”

“Things were snowballing in my head. I was fed up with life,” he said.

Keranen said he’d loved the four years that he spent in the Marine Corps. He would have stayed in except that his first wife, also a Marine, was about to be stationed apart from him. The two returned to civilian life. They had a son, now 17. The couple divorced after five years.

He’d begun having psychiatric problems three years before then, he said. A second marriage failed after two years. He hopes now that he can get long-term treatment, preferably at a VA hospital.

“My life is a hell,” he said. “I need help.”

[Covertness]

You Marines may feel differently but I hope Gen Puller watches over this Marine.

[KARL THE GRUNT]

You Marines may feel differently

We do.

You are to carry out your missions in life not run from them.
Any puke can kill himself.

"“My life is a hell,” he said. “I need help". Poor poor pitiful me. >>Sob..sob..
he is not worth a pimple an a good Marine's azz.
karl.