Soldier's Husband Accused of Death Hoax By AVI SALZMAN
Published: February 17, 2004
WATERBURY, Conn., Feb. 16 - The hoax seemed particularly cruel. Edward Valentin, who had been raising three children by himself while his wife was serving in Iraq, told the police that he received an "official-sounding" call last Wednesday: his wife had died in a firebombing in Baghdad.
But a day later, a local newspaper reporter discovered that his wife, Betsy Valentin, a sergeant in the Army Reserve, was still alive. And as the tale played out last week in The Waterbury Republican-American, friends and neighbors wondered who would do such a thing?
On Sunday, the police said they had an answer: Mr. Valentin, 43, was charged with telephone harassment, falsely reporting an incident involving a death and making a false statement, the Waterbury newspaper reported on Monday. The false-reporting charge, a felony, can carry a sentence of up to five years in prison.
A relative had asked the police to go to Mr. Valentin's house on Wednesday, after hearing his distress over the telephone. There, they found him "banging his head against the wall," said Sgt. Scott Stevenson, a Waterbury police detective.
A neighbor of Mr. Valentin's, David Rivera, said he came home around 5 p.m. that night and saw five police cars in front of Mr. Valentin's home. Mr. Valentin was wailing. "He came out of his house, crossed the lawn and said: 'She's dead. She's dead. They killed her,' " Mr. Rivera said Monday at his house.
The next day, Robyn Adams, a reporter for The Republican-American who had been writing articles about Sergeant Valentin's posting in Iraq, sent her an e-mail message. To her surprise, Sergeant Valentin replied.
Ms. Adams told her to call home, and then alerted the police, who returned to Mr. Valentin's home just as he was answering the call from his wife, Sergeant Stevenson said.
He said Mr. Valentin gave every indication of being shocked by the news that his wife was in fact alive. "His reaction seemed genuine," Sergeant Stevenson said. "Tears, friends having to hold him up. His kids were bawling. He's bawling real tears, looking up into the sky."
Sergeant Stevenson said he figured that the Department of Defense had either made a terrible mistake or that someone had played a prank.
On Friday, the detective said, military officials told him that casualty notification officers always contact the families of dead service members in person, never by phone.
Sergeant Stevenson said he checked Mr. Valentin's cellphone records and tracked a call he made around 4 p.m. Wednesday to a Waterbury home. A woman who lived there told him that Mr. Valentin, who is unemployed, had been trying to start a relationship with her for almost a year - about the same length of time his wife had been overseas, Sergeant Stevenson said. But she was not interested in dating a married man, the detective said she had told him.
Sergeant Stevenson said he then called Mr. Valentin to the police station and asked for the truth. "He subsequently confessed that he made the entire story up," Sergeant Stevenson said, adding that Mr. Valentin said he had fabricated the tale because he missed his wife and thought his ploy would persuade the Army to send his wife home.
Family members at Mr. Valentin's home on Monday scoffed at the idea that he was interested in another woman. . "He was going bananas,'' said Diane Valentine, Mr. Valentin's mother, who was taking care of the children. "He was going berserk.''