A Marine Corps private who is now facing a court martial somehow enlisted in the service despite being diagnosed with autism and being subject to a conservatorship.
Joshua Fry, 21, was diagnosed with autism at age 8. Over the years he spent time in a lockdown treatment center and a group home. His grandmother is his court ordered conservator because he is “developmentally disabled” and “unable to provide for his … personal needs for physical health, food, clothing or shelter.”
Nonetheless, Fry enlisted in the Marine Corps in January 2008 and completed boot camp that spring. Since that time Fry was court martialed because he was found with child pornography and left duty without leave.
Fry’s Marine Corps recruiter and commanders knew about his disability, according to Fry’s attorney Michael Studenka. Furthermore, his attorney alleges that the recruiter took advantage of Fry in order to meet recruitment goals.
Studenka argued unsuccessfully that the military should not try Fry since he couldn’t contract and thereby shouldn’t have been able to enlist in the first place. Currently Fry is awaiting trial and the Marine Corps is investigating how Fry was able to enlist, reports the San Diego Union-Tribune. To read more click here.
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There seem to be a couple of issues at play here: the behavior of the recruiters and autism. I would like to address only the latter. I suspect that if this person had continued to be successful and that the Marines discovered that he had autism and then discharged him, this article would have suggested that he had been discriminated against. It seems disingenuous to advocate for rights without responsibilites, especially pulling out the “poor him” card only when something goes wrong. Having a conservator (in this state at least) means that an individual does not legally lack global competence to require a guardian (and that bar is pretty low for a person with a well documented disability). It’s pretty characteristic of people w/ autism to follow rules (re absent w/o leave), I’m not aware that having autism makes one unable to discriminate between adults and children, and this behavior has no bearing at all on the area in which he was found to need assistance. Certainly we don’t know all of the details of this case, but I am not sure that I want every person who might have autism disqualified from military service.
As a father of a 26 year old autistic man and a professional who has written a few court report for conservatorship, I would like to add my 2 cents. In the state of California there are two types of conservatorships. LPS, for individuals with psychiatric problems, and Probate. Within the Probate court there is the Limited Conservatorship. With any conservatorships the court is taking away a person’s legal rights (conservatee) and assigned them to another person (conservator). With the Limited Conservatorship there a 7 powers that the court can take away an reassign. One of which is the right to sign into contract. To be conserved under the Limited Conservatorship a person first has to have a Developmental Disability, of which autism is an included disability. For the right to sign into contract the person with the disability is assessed and determination is made. Does the disability interfere with making a reasonable sound decision. Individuals with autism have a particular problem called Theory of Mind. They have difficulty putting themselves in another person “shoes” so to speak. They have difficulty telling if a person is joking, telling the truth or trying to scam them…they at time cannot tell. Because of this they are suspetable into being talked into contracts. Whether verbal or written.
Most autistic individual know the difference between an adult and a child. What they lack is a social understanding. My son, who is 26 years old, works and goes to the local community college where he takes coursed in computers, programming, animation etc and receives good grades. He also collects action figure. He enjoys playing video games. For a while he got everything there was on Pokemon. I once took him to a Pokemon movie. After the movie as we went into the shopping center, he saw a 6 year old boy unwrapping a new Pokemon figure. My 6’3 inch 24 year old son, his age at that incident, walked up the the young boy and struck up a conversation about Pokemon an the figure the young boy had.He wasn’t really interested in what age the boy was but the fact he had a Pokemon action figure. Autistic individuals are very restricted in their interest and it is their interest in what the person is holding that attracts them and not the person themselves. He doesn’t go up to other children he thinks of them as kids.