Eric Swenson died of natural causes in his sleep this past Nov. 21 at Liberty Village in North Amityville, two months after a ribbon-cutting ceremony there celebrated the opening of the 60-unit development for formerly homeless veterans. He was 47.
Swenson is one of hundreds of veterans that fall through the cracks. He served in the Army from 1986-’89 and was injured in a vehicle accident in Germany, suffering what the Army diagnosed as a concussion but was later diagnosed as having a traumatic brain injury (TBI). The injury led to erratic behavior by Swenson, including reporting late and to the wrong duty station, for which he was dismissed from the service with a “less than honorable” discharge.
“That caused him to spiral into homelessness,” said Frank Amalfitano, director of Bay Shore-based United Veterans Beacon House, which runs 29 shelters for homeless veterans. “He had a rough life, he couldn’t work, he was cheated out of his inheritance by relatives, suffered from mental illness due to the TBI. We had a neurologist check him out.
He has documentation from the neurologist saying it was TBI; it never goes away…Eric was in and out of various institutions. He had odd jobs but couldn’t keep a job. He lived at one of our houses in Bay Shore for about 18 months. He had a pile of [medical] documents that was a foot thick.”
At the time of his death, Amalfitano said, Swenson was living on a small disability check from Suffolk County Department of Social Services. “He was a good-natured, compliant, nice person,” Amalfitano said. “The VA paid us to house him but he was not allowed to go to the VA for any additional services.”
Beacon House paid $7,360 for Swenson’s funeral and $600 for flowers and food after his wake. It was reimbursed $2,000 by the nonprofit Concern for Independent Living and $3,000 by an anonymous donor. Concern for Independent Living built Liberty Village. Amalfitano is trying to raise $2,500 to $3,000 for a headstone. Since Swenson was not discharged honorably, he was not entitled to burial at Calverton National Cemetery and instead was buried at a private cemetery in Amityville. Amalfitano and Tom Ronanye, director of the Suffolk County Veterans Service Agency, have been working to have Swenson’s discharge upgraded so his body can be exhumed and reinterred at the military cemetery.
“They got rules and regulations for everything,” Amalfitano said, “even death. I’m just trying to give him some peace…There’s a board [at Calverton] that could have allowed his burial and they chose not to. They didn’t want to hear any argument, they just looked at the discharge papers. His body was at the morgue so long…and there were no relatives [on Long Island] that I felt it was in everybody’s best interests to not fight and just get him buried.”
Amalfitano said Beacon House has buried about 20 of its former clients over the past two decades and “He was the first one I couldn’t get in. All the others went to Calverton.” A secretary at Calverton took my phone number and said the cemetery director would call me, but he did not do so by press time.
Ronayne, a veteran of four years in the Navy from 1979-83, said he has petitioned the Department of the Army to upgrade Swenson’s discharge. “We were working on it before his passing,” Ronayne said, “and will continue the process. This can take three to five years. Our belief is that Eric suffered a traumatic brain injury that was not diagnosed as such until after he was separated from service…culminating in a series of events and a pattern of [erratic] behavior. …Why do I care? Because as a fellow veteran and advocate for veterans, I feel a moral and ethical responsibility that he is made whole. I have a responsibility to make sure that wrong is righted, even in death.”
Jim Smith, 66, of Williston Park, is a Vietnam War veteran and has been a contributor to the Mineola American since 1988. He retired Dec. 31, 2014 after being a Newsday reporter and editor since 1966.
