Jon Hammer

[WillowTree]

is back in America.

 

[The Infidel]

Good news !!!

No thanks to our leadership in DC.

 

[Sallow]

Good news !!!

No thanks to our leadership in DC.

 

[WillowTree]

 

[The Infidel]

Good news !!!

No thanks to our leadership in DC.

Ya care to dispute it with facts or are ya just going to be an asshole again?

 

[WillowTree]

Good news !!!

No thanks to our leadership in DC.

Ya care to dispute it with facts or are ya just going to be an asshole again?

Merry Christmas Mr. Infidel.

 

[The Infidel]

Knowing he will be back home with his family is a great gift for Christmas.

 

[WillowTree]

Knowing he will be back home with his family is a great gift for Christmas.

His father met him at the border It's a long way to Florida, I hope they have time. I wonder if he needs medical care?

 

[LadyGunSlinger]

Fox News with Bill O'Reilly bringing so much pressure and attention was instrumental in bringing about the release of Job Hammer. I strongly believe that the prayers of millions of Americans is what truly turned the page for this soldier. So at Christmas, I'd like to give thanks to God and a warm thank you to Fox News for being the instrument God used to bring our fellow citizen home!

 

[RoadVirus]

Welcome home Jon Hammar

 

[waltky]

Hammar released right before Christmas...

Marine vet says inmates threatened to behead him in Mexican jail
January 3, 2013 — Only days after U.S. Marine veteran Jon Hammar was thrown into a Mexican prison for carrying an antique shotgun into the country, gangsters in the jail warned him of his likely fate — beheading.

“They threw every threat in the book at me,” Hammar said Thursday in his first public remarks since his release Dec. 21 after more than four months in prison. “They’d cut my head off, they told my family,” he said. The gangsters demanded money to let Hammar, 27, remain alive, and the beheading threat was a scare tactic that harkened back to his tours of duty as a U.S. Marine in Iraq. Mexican authorities arrested Hammar on Aug. 13 at the Texas-Mexico border when he crossed into Mexico in a motor home with a vintage shotgun that once belonged to his great-grandfather. Authorities slapped weapons charges on him. A traveling companion went free.

Hammar’s ordeal, first brought to light in a McClatchy Newspapers story Dec. 6, sparked outrage in the United States, where fellow Marines demanded his release and members of Congress called for a boycott of Mexican tourism. The outpouring has left Hammar feeling grateful. “In America, we have people who care,” he said in a telephone interview from his family home in Palmetto Bay, south of Miami. “I’m really grateful. But at the same time I kind of expected that from Marines,” he said. “Marines don’t just throw each other under the bus. They look after each other.”

Despite his release just days before Christmas, Hammar only now is recovering from a stomach virus and dehydration that required hospitalization that he blames on the conditions he encountered during his incarceration. When his father received him at the Texas border, the two began the 22-hour drive to Florida to join his mother for the holidays. Once they got to Lafayette, La., Hammar began developing a fever, and they spent much of a day in a hospital there. Shortly after arriving in the Miami area, Hammar spent several more days in a local hospital. “I think it was just an accumulation, just not being in a good environment,” Hammar said.

After Hammar’s parents complained to the U.S. Consulate in Matamoros, Mexico, of the gangster threats against their son, the younger Hammar was moved out of the general prison population to a loosely guarded cage, where he spent months with his ankle handcuffed to a bed frame. Once physically separated from the gangster inmates, the threatening phone calls to Hammar’s parents stopped, he said. “Jail is bad no matter where you are,” Hammar said, “and when you add the variables of Mexico and what is going on down there, it just gets worse every corner you turn.”

MORE

 

[waltky]

Mexicans snatch another American citizen...

Another US Marine shackled in Mexican prison on gun charges
May 2, 2014 - Prison authorities in Tijuana, Mexico, have shackled a decorated U.S. Marine veteran of two combat tours in Afghanistan to his cot in a prison infirmary, restraining each of his limbs, on charges of introducing outlawed weapons into Mexico.

The Marine reservist, Andrew Tahmooressi, 25, who is from Weston, Fla., outside Miami, drove his black Ford F-150 pickup through the San Ysidro, Calif., border crossing into Tijuana on April 1, carrying his worldly possessions, including three U.S.-registered firearms. Tahmooressi, who suffers from what his mother calls “directional dysfunction,” got lost near the border after dark. He and his family say he took a wrong turn into Mexico. Mexican prosecutors have slapped three firearms charges on him, and his fate has been clouded by an attempt to escape the La Mesa penitentiary April 6 that involved ninja-style scaling of a wall topped with coiled barbed wire.

Tahmooressi’s situation parallels that of a another Florida Marine veteran who was held for four months in a Mexican border prison in 2012 for carrying an antique shotgun in his motor home on his way to surf in Costa Rica. A media uproar and pressure from U.S. legislators helped win the freedom of that Marine, Jon Hammar, who grew up in Miami. In a statement that he signed earlier this week, Tahmooressi said he had crossed the border inadvertently while he was looking for housing in the San Diego area so he could begin treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder at a nearby Veterans Affairs facility. Tahmooressi had received his official PTSD diagnosis on March 20. “I accidentally drove into Mexico with 3 guns, a rifle (AR-15), a .45 cal pistol and a 12 gauge pump shotgun with no intentions on being in Mexico or being involved in any criminal activity,” Tahmooressi wrote in a signed privacy waiver this week for the office of U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., a Marine veteran himself whose district is near the border.

Marine Sgt. Andrew Tahmooressi sits astride a Harley Davidson on Sept. 4, 2011, near his Florida home. Tahmooressi is currently in a Tijuana prison on weapons charges.

Tahmooressi grew up in a gated community in Weston and graduated with honors from Cypress Bay High School in 2007. He earned a pilot’s license at age 17, then headed off to Alaska’s Kodiak Island, where he fulfilled a dream of joining a commercial fishing crew. “They went out into the Bering Sea. They pulled up something like 20,000 pounds of halibut a day,” said his mother, Jill Marie Tahmooressi, a nurse at Miami Children’s Hospital. After returning to Florida and entering a local community college, Andrew Tahmooressi decided he wasn’t ready for schooling, and joined the Marines in 2008. He served two combat tours in Afghanistan, winning a rare combat field promotion to sergeant in Helmand province. Earlier, in Marjah district, a homemade bomb upended his combat vehicle but he survived.

In 2012, Tahmooressi mustered out with an honorable discharge but he remains a reservist with a commitment until 2016. He returned to Weston to be with his father, Khosrow “Paul” Tahmooressi, an Iranian-born engineer, and his mother, and to pursue a dream of training as a professional pilot at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach. But the demons of war dogged him. “He had been struggling for all of 2013,” his mother said. He borrowed the family’s Ford pickup and drove to California, where he received an official PTSD evaluation at a VA facility.

MORE

 

[OKTexas]

Maybe these Marines need to invest in a GPS, especially those directionally challenged.

 

[AvgGuyIA]

How do you accidently cross the border? At some point it has to be obvious what you're doing.