Redemption Song
Hero with a dark past makes good, in Afghanistan and back home. The decorated National Guardsman combat vet who saved a critically injured motorcyclist’s life is an ex-cop who did time for assaulting his girlfriend. Commenters at the Herald site think it’s unfair to note that past, but at least a couple seem to get there’s a bigger story here. Boston Herald:
An Iraq combat vet hailed a hero for saving a motorcyclist whose leg was severed in a crash was once jailed for kidnapping and assaulting his ex-girlfriend - but has become a decorated soldier as he seeks to turn his life around.
Massachusetts National Guardsman John Melson, 37, was praised by medics for using a belt as a tourniquet to stop the bleeding after dad-of-three Mark Cronin lost his left leg in a collision with a suspected drunken driver on Neponset River Bridge in Quincy early Saturday morning.
But in 1997, while serving as a Boston police officer, Melson hit the headlines for a different reason. The former Marine was jailed for three and a half years after a court heard how he scaled a 13-story building armed with a bayonet, and kidnapped and assaulted an ex-girlfriend.
“I had one bad night. But I have moved on and, I think, tried to move my life in a better direction,” Melson said yesterday. “I live with that guilt every day. I can’t take back what I did.”
When Melson was released in 1999, he said he worked various part-time jobs and went to school, eventually opening his own auto-glass business in Blackstone.
Then 9/11 happened, and his life was turned upside-down once again.
“I had a school friend who died in one of the planes. That night, I went to Norwood to try and re-enlist in the Marine Corps,” Melson said.
But during a medical, he said, doctors discovered a golf ball-sized tumor in his neck.
Melson said he underwent surgery in November 2003 and was accepted by the Massachusetts National Guard just six months later. Soon afterwards, he was sent on his first tour of Iraq.
“I signed up because I can’t sit at home and watch Americans dying, and I want my kids to be proud of me one day,” Melson said.
He was awarded the Purple Heart in 2006 after taking on Taliban militants in a two-day gun battle, despite taking a shrapnel hit to the leg in a rocket attack, Department of Defense records show.
In January 2007, Melson was awarded an Army Commendation with Valor when his brave actions saved the Afghan unit he was training from an ambush in the Mizan Valley, records show.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:19 am on Wednesday, August 27, 2008
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August 27th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
[...] Sometimes it’s a long way back from the bottom. Sometimes you go anyway. [...]