When Stanley Laskowski, a combat veteran of the war in Iraq, dressed himself from head to toe in black and broke into a pharmacy in Olyphant, Pa., to steal drugs in the summer of 2007, it had been four months since he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder at the Wilkes-Barre Veterans’ Affairs Medical Center.
The charges stemming from that incident were dropped and purged from his record and a federal judge this week awarded Laskowski and his wife $3.7 million in the medical malpractice suit they filed afterwards. The lack of appropriate care given to Laskowski at the VA hospital for those few months led to his decline and now permanently-disabled status, the judge ruled.
