Wife: Missing Iraq Veteran Jerry Beck Showed Signs of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

Uncertainty, fear and anger overshadow the life of Jennifer Beck as she awaits word — any word — about her missing husband, U.S. Army Specialist Jerry James Beck, whose green Toyota Corolla was found abandoned on Interstate 75, underneath the Leroy Selmon Crosstown Expressway outside of Greater Brandon.

The Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office is treating this disappearance as a missing-person case and is seeking the public’s help. So are police in Hinesville, Ga., near Savannah, where Beck, 35, was stationed at Fort Stewart.

Beck’s car was first spotted by Road Rangers for the Florida Department of Transportation, who tagged the car as abandoned April 27, one day after Beck’s disappearance and the same day Jennifer Beck reported him missing.

It wasn’t until April 30 that the car was linked to Jerry Beck, who used to live in Florida and has friends in the Tampa Bay area.

As it turned out, Jennifer Beck was driving from Georgia to Naples, to stay with her parents, when she got the call that her husband’s car had been found on Interstate 75.

“My father called me and said, ‘Jen, the car is here,’ and when he told me where, I about fell over,” she said. “I was driving from my home to Naples and I was just 25 minutes from the exit.”

Beck told her three children that they would be seeing daddy’s car, but not the father they had been missing since coming home from school April 26.

 “We love him, we need him home,” Beck said. “He’s got three children asking questions. They ask, ‘Are we ever going to see daddy again? I don’t know. It was heart-wrenching for us to see his car on the side of the road.”

Beck said she believes her husband is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition she said she has been researching tirelessly for days.

“He’s the most loving guy, loves his children, and now they just have questions,” said Jennifer Beck, in a phone interview May 3, a week after she last saw her husband of 17 years at their home in Georgia. "They ask, ‘Where’s daddy?’ And all I can say to them is, ‘I don’t know.’ I tell them, ‘Daddy’s sad, maybe he needs to be by himself to figure stuff out.’ He might think he’s over in Iraq, and he thinks he’s on a mission.”

Beck said she saw signs of the disorder throughout April, “his fourth month back from a year-long deployment in Iraq,” with her husband “doing things that were odd and weird.”

 “He was angry and aggressive and he’s not an angry person,” Beck said. “He was sleeping in the middle of the day and he was up all night doing things around the house or outside the house. I asked, ‘What’s going on with you? And all he’d say is, ‘I’m stressed out, leave me alone.’ "

Beck’s life now is a mixture of emotions.

“I’m sad and scared and now I’m in the angry mode, too,” she said. “I just feel the way the car was found, tagged on the 27^th but not identified until three days later, made us lose valuable time in trying to find my husband.”

Beck remembers vividly the morning she last saw her husband.

“My husband is better than punctual,” said Beck , a public school teacher. “He left 5:30 in the morning for physical training and that’s the last I saw of him. I got a call at school at around 10:30 in the morning from his commanding officer, asking me if I knew where my husband was, he was late for work. I called home, he didn’t answer. His cell phone went right to voicemail. I went home and there was no car. But his PT (physical therapy) clothes were in the hamper and his towel was wet, which means he must have taken a shower.”

 According to Al Cato, detective for the Hinesville, Ga., police department, Jennifer Beck received a letter from her husband, with a St. Petersburg postmark, and that prompted Cato's call to the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office for assistance.

In the letter, Beck reportedly told his wife that his car had “broken down or blew an engine and that it wouldn’t go any further so he just left it at that,” Cato said. “Nobody’s heard from him since the letter.”

Jennifer Beck said she does not want to comment on the letter.

“We’ve been together 17 years. I know him and he knows me. We know each other better than anybody,” she said. “Everybody jumps to conclusions and thinks there was an extramarital affair. Absolutely not. He was not a young soldier. He’s a specialist. He was a tanker. He was in Iraq, seeing a lot of action. Now he has something wrong with him and we need to help him.”

Cato said there were no signs of foul play and that Beck’s keys were found inside his car.

Anyone with information is asked to contact the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office at 813-247-8200. Or, the Hinesville Police Department at 912-368-8215.