Kristina Goetz reports:
[…]
In the early morning hours of April 2, 2007, Jared Rhine had a choice: Pick up a gun and end it all, or pick up a phone. He chose the phone.
Rhine dialed the number for the Memphis Veterans Medical Center and demanded to speak to clinical psychologist Sidney Ornduff, who was at home, asleep. He refused to talk to a crisis intervention counselor.
After some argument, a medical administrative assistant patched Rhine through to Ornduff. The patient and psychologist talked for more than two hours. Rhine cried, yelled, swore. But he finally agreed not to hurt himself and to go to bed and keep his appointment with another psychologist the next day.
[…]
A tangle of questions and conflicting stories about the early morning events surrounding that phone call would, over the next year and a half, alter Rhine’s life and wreak havoc on Ornduff’s career. It would leave veterans wondering what happened to the popular doctor removed without explanation.
And it would spur one congressman to take the case all the way to Washington.
After agreeing to go to bed, Rhine hung up the phone, took off his uniform and fell asleep. The next thing he knew, police officers were in his bedroom.
“I was looking down the barrel of nine guns and had two Taser marks in my back,” Rhine said.
At Ornduff’s home, the phone rang again. The administrative assistant who’d patched Rhine through was on the line, Ornduff recalled. The West Plains police wanted to speak to her.
“She told me she had listened in the entire time, and not only that, but that she had also patched in members of the police department in the small community in which this veteran resided,” Ornduff said.
Read more on CommercialAppeal.com