A Joyce man who had falsely claimed to be a wounded Marine veteran with a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star was sentenced to four months of home confinement on Friday.
Roy J. Scott, 71, was sentenced in federal court in Seattle.
“We hoping for something more severe,” said Terry Roth, one of the veterans who had called for an investigation into Scott’s past.
“House arrest and two year’s probation is pretty light,” the Port Angeles veteran said.
Before his sentencing on Friday, Scott broke down in tears before Magistrate Judge Mary Alice Theiler and asked that she allow him to continue his job on an oil platform off the coast of Africa.
The judge, however, stuck to the recommendations of prosecutors by ordering the home confinement and two years’ probation.
Scott admitted that he had posed as a Marine major.
He claimed to have been wounded in combat in Korea, telling other veterans he had been awarded the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star, said Dan Abbott of Diamond Point, the local commandant of the Marine Corps League.
A telephone call to Scott’s listed number asking for comment was returned with the message that no one by that name lived there.
Scott pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Tacoma in August to using an altered military discharge certificate to obtain Veterans Administration compensation and medical benefits and to unlawfully wearing military medals.
He paid back the VA $21,960 for medical benefits he did not deserve, writing a check for the amount after he made his plea, according to KING-TV.
Eight members of the Mt. Olympus Detachment of the Marine Corps League from Joyce, Port Angeles and Sequim traveled to Seattle in a borrowed van to attend Scott’s sentencing on Friday, Roth said.
“We found this,” Roth said. “We brought the charges. We wanted to see it through.”
“Ray’s an embarrassment and a fraud,” he added.
“He said in court that he had apologized to all of the members of the military he had defrauded.
“He hasn’t spoken to any of us – not one.”
Roth, who served in the Marines from 1959 to 1961, was one of the local members of the Marine Corps League who suspected that Scott’s stories about fighting in the Korean War were false.
“His remembrance of Korea was a little strange in what he was reciting,” Roth said in September.
“A quick check showed he would have been 14 [during the war].”
The Rev. Chip Wright of the Olympic Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship, of which Scott was a member, said on Saturday, “My personal opinion is he is taking care of what he needs to care of and nobody’s perfect. He hasn’t sinned, I see people daily doing horrible, horrible things and it seems those don’t do anything as bad get caught up in the system.”
Roth and two other Port Angeles Korean War veterans – Don Clayton and Robert Mingram – told Abbott about their suspicions in June 2006.
Abbott, who is also the judge advocate general of the state branch of the Marine Corps League, called FBI Agent Tom Cottone, who began an investigation.
After simultaneous investigations by the state Marine Corps League and the FBI, Scott’s membership in the Marine Corps League was revoked and he was charged on Aug. 24 in federal court.
Scott’s military records show that he enlisted in the Marines on Oct. 29, 1953, three months and two days after the cease-fire was signed.
He was given a bad conduct discharge in 1959, according to the records acquired by Abbott.
Abbott did not know why Scott received a bad-conduct discharge.
