Pentagon policy Under Fire: Soldiers remains to oldest (divorced) parent. [View All]

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The case exposes the shortcomings of a Pentagon policy that awards custody to the older parent in families of divorce
Feuding over son's remains
By DEAN E. MURPHY and CAROLYN MARSHALL
New York Times

SANTA CRUZ, CALIF. - It has been 14 years since Russell Hendrix and Renee Amick divorced, a hostile parting that dragged on for three years in the courts. They clashed over their three children, domestic abuse accusations, alcoholism and money problems.


Now the fallout from that divorce is spilling well beyond their broken family into national military policy. Their eyes rarely meeting across a tense courtroom here, Hendrix and Amick cannot agree on what is best for their eldest son, Staff Sgt. Jason R. Hendrix of the Army, this time not in life but in death.

Jason Hendrix was killed in February by a roadside bomb in Iraq after pulling fellow soldiers from a burning vehicle. His grieving and embittered parents are fighting over who gets his remains, which for the time being lie aside his grandfather's in a Tulsa, Okla., cemetery.

"It has just been horribly devastating," Amick said in tears outside the courtroom, where about a dozen family members attended a custody hearing this week. "I just pray that there isn't another mother that has to go through what I've gone through."

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/nation/3394051