Mom Searches for Missing Veteran Son

Mom Searches for Missing Veteran Son

By DAN BARRY,The New York Times
Posted: 2008-01-21 15:15:38
Filed Under: Nation News

KENNESAW, Ga. (Jan. 21) -- The man emerged from the night’s anonymity to sit at the counter, across from the stainless steel grill and the stacks of white plates. He wore a blue jacket appropriate for the January cold, but his left hand was covered with writing of some kind. And, ever so softly, he was talking to himself.

It was 3:20 on the second morning of a new year indistinguishable still from the difficult one just past, in a 24-hour chain restaurant on Highway 41 called the Huddle House, where pie and respite are served to the hungry and solitary. The tired waitress, Patsy Schirmer, pulling a rare overnight, approached the customer and asked:

What can I get for you?

The man accepted this open-ended question in terms of food only, muttering an order of scrambled eggs and grits and requesting water, with lemon. He ate everything on his plate, continuing his private conversation all the while. He paid his bill, left no tip, and slipped back behind night’s curtain.

A woman walked in 20 minutes later, carrying leaflets. Her name was Sheryl Futrell and she had been searching for weeks for her disoriented son, an Iraq-Afghanistan war veteran named Gary Chronister. Here is his photograph, she said — and you know the rest.

Soon the waitress was wailing Oh my God, he was just here. Soon the mother was making frantic telephone calls, searching for a flashlight to beam into the brush out back, bouncing between sorrow and joy. Yes, my son always orders scrambled eggs. Yes, he always asks for lemon with his water. Yes, he is so off his meds that he would be talking to himself.

Faint hope found in a Huddle House.

Two months ago, Mr. Chronister’s green Ford pickup truck was found here in Cobb County, where he used to live, in a convenience store parking lot a couple of miles from the Huddle House. Since then, Dr. Futrell has driven up, down and around Highway 41, looking for her 33-year-old son, the troubled vet, missing in action at home.

More StoriesShe has arranged search parties, talked with dozens of shop owners, handed out hundreds of fliers, and festooned intersections with sad little signs that bear his photograph. “Missing Gary Chronister,” the signs say. “Confused & Unable to Call Home.” In searching the surrounding woods of this prospering county just northwest of Atlanta, she has come upon homeless veterans in lean-tos, living lives of invisibility.

But the longer her son remains missing, the more complex his story becomes. Last week the sheriff’s office in Cherokee County, to the immediate north, issued a warrant for his arrest on charges that he molested a young girl last summer. Dr. Futrell says it is untrue, unfair — un-Gary.

She also maintains that he is not on the run. For one thing, she and the child’s mother both say that investigators told everyone months ago that there were too many inconsistencies to prosecute a case. For another, Mr. Chronister was living in Bibb County, 100 miles to the south: if he was on the run, why would he run toward his pursuers?

“Because my son has disappeared, and is talking to himself, then he’s guilty,” Dr. Futrell says. “He’s not running; he’s walking.”

Or so the sightings say. Here he is, walking near the Circle K convenience store on Highway 41, a big smile on his face. And here he is, at a stoplight on Wade Green Road, trying to cross the street but not making it, walking out a few feet and then back, out and back, head bowed, smiling.

The smile, his mother says, voice breaking, “seems to be a hallmark of my son.”

Dr. Futrell returned recently to the Huddle House, driving up in her son’s pickup that she hopes he might recognize from the road. Stacks of “Missing Gary Chronister” signs, each one adorned with a small American flag, sat in its bed.

She is 53, stout and tired, with a ready smile conveying disbelief at what her life has become. A school psychologist by profession, now a manhunter by circumstance. That is why she chose a back booth: she wanted to see everyone and everything.

Her ever-ringing cellphone rang again before she could take a bite of her meal. “This is Gary’s mom,” she answered, hopeful, then not. “No, no, that wouldn’t be Gary ... I so appreciate you calling, though. Thank you so much. Keep your eyes open, sweetie.”

Dr. Futrell said her son has a great intellect, a mild case of Tourette’s syndrome and a sense of right and wrong so rigid that he sometimes struggles through the grays of life. He is also a loner. Asked if he ever had a girlfriend, his mother said with a note of reluctance, “Not really.”

After earning a bachelor’s degree in English in 1998 from the University of Tennessee, he enrolled in a seminary in Kentucky to pursue “full-time Christian service,” his mother said. But things didn’t work out there, and he had a lot of outstanding college loans. So, several weeks before 9/11, he joined the Army.

Over the next three years he spent several months in Afghanistan and several in Iraq, helping to erect guard towers, install light fixtures and build memorials for dead soldiers. Although he saw no combat he came home different, his mother said, with the only telltale sign a check mark on a military document, next to the words “personality change.”

Mr. Chronister disappeared many days into his bedroom, which he kept boot-camp spotless. He had trouble holding jobs. Then came his first psychotic break, in which he quietly disengaged from reality. Tests revealed an unspecified brain injury. Was it from being beaten up when he was 16? Was it from something that happened in the military?

After several go-rounds with the Department of Veterans Affairs, Mr. Chronister finally received medication that seemed to work, but only for a while. “This is the first day of my healing,” he wrote in his journal on Nov. 8. Within two days, he was gone.

Now the police are looking for Gary Chronister, up, down and around Highway 41. And so, still, is his mother, who hasn’t forgotten one of their last conversations. He had said he was having trouble again controlling the thoughts, and she answered, “Son, I’m here.”