BURGAW — It’s been a tough year for 63-year-old veteran Bruce Benson.
In April he was laid off from his management job at a calibration lab due to the Covid-19 pandemic, then informed he wouldn’t be coming back to work. In May one of his best friends, a Vietnam veteran, fell and broke his back. He said he spent several months driving back and forth to Wake Forest Baptist Hospital, helping him and his wife adjust to his paralysis from the waist down.
But the dagger came on a stormy Saturday morning in mid-August, when deputies with the Pender County Sheriff’s Office pulled onto his driveway in response to a welfare call that was made because Benson hadn’t attended a scheduled church event earlier that morning. One of the responding deputies attended the same church and knew Benson, according to the PCSO.