The mom of the military vet accused in an
unprovoked hatchet attack on an ATM customer in Manhattan said Wednesday that he suffered from “pure madness” he blamed on his combat experience.
A distraught Sarah Garcia said her son, Aaron Garcia, 37, spent six years in the US Army, with his last tour of duty in Iraq.
“A few years after he came back, he started showing signs of decline,” she said by phone from her home in The Bronx.
“At first, I thought he was just being obnoxious. He’d put the blame on me for not realizing that he didn’t go into the Boy Scouts, he went into the Army, seeing dead bodies,” she said.
Sarah, 64, said Aaron received some mental-health treatment at a Veterans Administration hospital but that it had no effect on his declining condition.
“I would bring it up, saying, ‘What is it the doctor told you?’ He’d say, ‘They think they’re evaluating me, but I’m evaluating them,’ ” she said.
“You know, pure madness. But he was always articulate that way.”
Aaron was
charged with attempted murder and assault in a caught-on-camera rampage during which an unsuspecting customer was
struck on the head and leg with a hatchet inside a Chase bank late Sunday afternoon, the NYPD said Wednesday.
Sarah called the terrifying attack “tragic” and said she “can’t make an excuse” for her son.
“No human being would want to see that happen to a dog, much less a human being,” she said. “I’m truly saddened and troubled, of course.”
“I can’t say the Army is the reason,” she said of her son’s alleged crime. “But I know that he was having trouble.”
The Army said it couldn’t immediately confirm whether Aaron had served as a soldier. But a source familiar with his record said he was in the Army from 2002 to 2009 and was deployed to Iraq.
“He was supposed to go to college, but then he said he wanted to go to the Army,” his mom told The Post.
“The recruiters were banging on the doors at his school, and he was one of the ones who was interested. We tried to talk him out of it, but he insisted.”
Aaron’s mental illness included a delusional belief about a looming natural disaster, she said.
“For a while, he was talking about some volcano that was going to erupt in Yellowstone [National Park], and he wanted me to pack, along with the good people I have around me, and go someplace safe,” she said.
nypost.com
nypost.com
