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“Outstanding service. They were extremely careful delivering the extra large container into our driveway.” -- A. L. GARNER
The Mission Continues’ city impact manager.Williams always knew he’d somehow serve his community this way because that’s what his father, a Vietnam veteran, did.Stewart D. Williams Sr. was killed near the end of the Vietnam War in 1970, when Stewart Williams was just 3 years old.“I grew up hearing stories about him and thinking about how I could continue his legacy of service to our country,” Williams said recently.And so after graduating from high school, he headed to Hampton University, where he joined the active ready reserve of the U.S. Marine Corps during his freshman year.“I figured it would be a great way to connect with my dad,” Williams said.He graduated from Hampton in 1989 with a criminal justice degree and was in graduate school there when his unit was activated to serve in Desert Storm.No fan of war, his mother encouraged him to seek “sole survivor of a deceased veteran” status to get an exemption, but Williams wouldn’t hear of it.“I looked at my mother and said, ‘Absolutely not’,” he recalled. “I raised my hand. I’m going to serve my country.”For the next three years, Williams, a member of the Norfolk Amphibious Battalion before being reassigned to the 3rd Battalion Fifth Marine division, drove an amphibious vehicle in Iraq. When the war officially ended in 1991, his unit remained and was charged with seeking out and eliminating the elite division of the Iraqi Republican Guard who, due to the lack of a communications system, weren’t aware the war was over.After the surrender of Saddam Hussein, Williams headed back to Kuwait but was diverted to a humanitarian effort in Bangladesh to help with relief efforts. He finally made it home in summer 1992, went back into the reserve and completed graduate studies at Hampton. In 1994, Williams married his best friend, Rhonda Williams.He would get a second master’s degree at ... (Washington Times)
The Tulsa World began an investigation after the Oct. 3 death of Vietnam veteran Owen Reese Peterson, who was found with maggots in his body and later died from sepsis at the same Oklahoma Department of Veterans Affairs nursing home.Health care workers from the highest to lowest levels of patient care at multiple ODVA-run nursing homes say the problems are systemic, not limited to Talihina.The sources provided the World with detailed accounts and documentation of systemwide reductions in medical and nursing staff, outsourcing of lab work and one-size-fits-all, top-down medical directives and policy changes they said are compromising patient care and safety.Investigators from the Oklahoma State Department of Health looking into Smith’s choking death found that the Talihina facility “failed to provide sufficient staff” to protect his safety.They also found that higher-ups there failed to investigate low-level workers’ reports of an incident in November in which Smith passed a portion of an examination glove in a bowel movement.ODVA officials have said that four employees of the nursing home have been reported to their respective licensing boards for possible disciplinary action in the case.“We are still awaiting a decision from the licensure board,” ODVA spokesman Shane Faulkner said Thursday.Smith served as a radar technician in the U.S. Navy for five years during the Vietnam War, earning the Vietnam Service and Vietnam Campaign medals. He had been a resident of the Talihina center, about 150 miles southeast of Tulsa, since January 2014.His niece, Cornwell, said she was stunned last week to receive an invitation from Eva Dukes, administrator at the Talihina center, inviting family members to a Memorial Day ceremony there recognizing “residents that have expired at this facility since Memorial Day 2016.”“I thought that was kind of odd,” Cornwell said.She said she and Smith’s other nearest relatives are plagued by grief and even guilt.“It’s the what-ifs you think about,” Cornwell said. “What if I could have been there every day? Would they have taken better care of him knowing that the family was coming in every day? Sometimes I think that has a lot to do with the care that patients get.”#ndn-video-player-3.ndn_embedded .ndn_floatContainer { margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 20px; }... (Tulsa World)
