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VOL. 4/ISSUE 31
THURSDAY, JUNE 2, 2016
Submariners birthday ball Road to Victory plans second D-Day road rally Patrick McCallister STAFF WRITER
pmccallister@YourVoiceWeekly.com
Stuart’s Road to Victory Military Museum is hitting the road for its second annual D-Day Road Rally. “We did it last year,” Michael Roberts, president, said. “It was a very small event. This is our second. We want to make it an annual event, so we want to make it our second annual.” The D-Day rally will be on Monday, June 6, the 71st anniversary of Operation Overlord, the largest air, land and sea operation ever undertaken. The museum has numerous military vehicles, including some from World War II, such as a 1942 Dodge WC51, a 1942 Clarktor 6 MILL-44, a 1943 WC-15 and others. The museum has others from different war eras, such as a 1968 Kaiser Jeep M725 ambulance. The road rally will include both. “We’ll have six to eight World War II vehicles,” Roberts said. “All total we should have 15 military vehicles.” The rally will head up Southeast Georgia Avenue to Southeast Ocean Boulevard then east to North Sewall’s Point Road, which becomes Northeast Indian River Drive. The convoy will turn west on Northeast Jensen Beach Boulevard and head to Northwest Federal Highway. The rally will turn south and head over the Roosevelt Bridge back into downtown Stuart by way of South Colorado Avenue. Then it’ll stop for breakfast at Maria’s Café & Grill, 10 S.W. Osceola St., after passing by the Lyric Theatre on S.W. Flagler Avenue.
See D-DAY page 4
Photo by Roger Scruggs The 2016 annual Submarine Ball was celebrated recently at Snug Harbor, Port Canaveral, co-hosted by the Navy League, and the Naval Submarine League. Here, more than 100 submariners young and old help cut the commemorative cake.
Sheriff makes case for mental-health diversion program Patrick McCallister STAFF WRITER
pmccallister@YourVoiceWeekly.com
Martin County Commissioner John Haddox visited veterans at the Martin Correctional Institution in Indiantown back when he was a service officer. “I know we have some veterans in jail with (post-traumatic stress disorder),” he said at a recent commission meeting. So does Sheriff William Snyder. “We have a lot of vets on the Treasure Coast,” he said in an interview. “It’s unquestionable that they’ll come across my guys.” When PTSD veterans come across deputies during bad moments, it often ends with incarceration. There is a veterans court planned for Martin County to help address that. But that won’t help the deputy who’s
dealing with a low-level offender who doesn’t qualify for transport to a mental-health facility under the Florida Mental Health Act of 1971, better known as the Baker Act. At its May 24 regular meeting, Martin’s top cop presented the commission with an initial plan to create a diversion program to help keep the mentally ill out of the county jail and get them into treatment, which can include veterans court. Snyder said that nationwide about one in five jail inmates has a serious enough mental illness to warrant some form of treatment. About 15 percent of people in state prisons do as well. “We have a de facto criminalization of mental illness,” Snyder said at the meeting. The Martin County jail averages about 525 inmates a day. The Sheriff said, based on
See DIVERSION page 4