On December 13, 1992, reporters from a half dozen TV stations were waiting outside Dorothy Hajdys-Holman’s front door in Chicago Heights. They wanted to talk about her son Allen Schindler Jr., a sailor who’d been beaten to death a few months earlier by two fellow crew members from the U.S.S. Belleau Wood.
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On October 27 Charles Vins and Terry Helvey had followed Schindler into a public rest room in Sasebo, Japan. As Vins looked on and occasionally joined in, Helvey kicked and punched Schindler until he was dead. Vins later cut a deal with prosecutors in return for testifying against Helvey, and in a secret court- martial was sentenced to only 78 days in a military prison. Hajdys-Holman had been assured by the navy that she would be informed of all court proceedings in the case, but she found out about Vins’s trial from a reporter. Shocked at the leniency of his sentence, she began to suspect a cover-up. “The navy protected him,” she says.
Hajdys-Holman was also having a hard time accepting that her son was gay, something she learned from another reporter. “I don’t know how to explain it other than you just feel so stupid. My opinion of a gay person was someone that dressed up like a woman or had his hand on his hip or his finger in the air or something like that.” But when she met Schindler’s grieving friends at a memorial service she was forced to start giving up her assumptions about homosexuals.
