Four months after I blogged about Bessie Krone, a 62-year-old disabled widow who received a profanity-laced screed instead of a check from the Veterans Administration’s Montgomery Regional Office, I’m happy to report that the local media in Montgomery has finally taken up her cause.
CBS affiliate WAKA-TV aired a story on Krone Monday. “No human being should be subjected to what I have been subjected to,” the widow told Channel 8 reporter Jenna Deery. Here’s the link:
http://www.waka.com/newnews.html
Deery added that she called the regional office for comment and was told that the case is still “under investigation” – government-speak for “we really hope this unpleasantness just goes away.” The VA’s Office of Inspector General in Washington, which has reportedly been investigating the case since September, had no comment either.
However, before the CBS story ran, Krone told me that she called the Veterans Benefits Administration’s 800 number twice in two days to check on her still unresolved $35,000 claim. Both times she was told that her file had been moved to Security Level 8, which means that nobody in the VA is allowed to call or talk to her for any reason.
Krone says one VA operator told her that the only information remaining in the computer system was her claim number, which meant that her late husband Robert, a Navy yeoman first class, had been in the CIA. Krone says this was the first time she had ever heard of any CIA connection, and none had ever been listed in her late husband’s voluminous C-file. As Alice in Wonderland would say, this story keeps getting curiouser and curiouser.
Krone also contends that her late husband’s doctor confided to her that he had been getting calls from VA officials prohibiting him from calling in prescriptions for Robert and repeatedly asking how much longer the World War II vet was going to live.
The VA also reported that Robert Krone was present at a hearing held at the Montgomery Regional Office on August 20, 1998. That’s impossible, his widow says, because that’s the same day he died.
Links to previous Examiner blogs:
