Yountville’s Pathway Home will not reopen

A Yountville residential treatment center for combat-stressed veterans that first shut its doors last spring after a deadly shooting will close for good, officials announced Sunday.

The 10-year-old Pathway Home, which suspended operations indefinitely after a former client gunned down the nonprofit’s executive director and two clinicians March 9, plans to continue helping troubled soldiers reintegrate into society in the future, though indirectly.

In part through publication of a downloadable, step-by-step resource guide, the Pathway Home board hopes to inspire service organizations around the nation to replicate a model that has successfully aided traumatized soldiers struggling to rejoin civilian life. The board also hopes to work with Rotary Clubs like the one in Yountville, whose members embraced local veterans and provided them a support network, in addition to community interaction.

But the Pathway Home will no longer offer a residential program. Next month, it’ll relinquish its lease at Yountville’s Veterans Home of California, where the gunman killed three women and effectively brought the highly regarded program to an end.

Spokesman Larry Kamer said Sunday a permanent shift in the mission was somewhat inevitable, given the loss of key personnel, damage to the facility and related licensing disruptions. It also would have been an obvious challenge to reoccupy space associated with such tragic loss and violence, even though the building has been repaired, he said.

“I think people just did not want to work there, and I think people did not want to live there after the incident,” Kamer said. “Who can blame them?”

The shooting occurred as a Friday morning staff meeting at the Pathway Home transitioned into a going-away celebration for two employees. They were being feted by co-workers and clients when a former Army infantryman kicked out of the program two weeks earlier strode in. Heavily armed, Albert Cheung Wong took three women hostage: Executive Director Christine Loeber, 48; Jennifer Golick, 42, a therapist with the program; and Jennifer Gonzales Shushereba, 32, a San Francisco Department of Veterans Affairs Healthcare System psychologist who was more than six months pregnant.

An arriving Napa County sheriff’s deputy exchanged gunfire with Wong, allowing others present to flee. An army of law enforcement personnel still were assembling at the Yountville campus when they say Wong, 36, shot and killed the three women before taking his own life.

Shushereba’s unborn child also died.

Wong’s brother later said Wong told him days before the bloodshed he had been expelled from the program after employees found him with knives. “He wanted to get back at them,” though he did not let on there would be violence, the brother said.

Launched amid growing recognition of the complex physical, emotional and spiritual toll of modern warfare among thousands of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pathway Home offered hope to veterans with such deep emotional battle scars that nothing else seemed to help. Through intensive, innovative therapies, holistic treatments and intentional integration with the local community, participants flourished. Graduates often credited the program for giving them their lives back.

Around 450 veterans with a range of issues, including post-traumatic stress and traumatic-brain injury, passed through its doors.

But funding was always a challenge. After about a 1½-year closure beginning in 2015, the Pathway Home reopened last year to new clients using a new model.

Under Loeber’s leadership, the program focused on early intervention, wraparound mental health services and case management aimed at helping clients pursue vocational training or an education at Napa Valley College.

“It’s more than just clinical care,” Kamer said. “When we talk about wraparound services, we’re talking about helping these vets deal with all kinds of issues relating to reintegration. Sometimes that’s how to balance your checkbook.

“Having people in the community, especially in groups like Rotary, that are kind of plugged in at every level, really helps establish a network that can provide informational kind of care and watch their backs, basically, as they’re preparing to get back into civilian life,” Kamer added.

Six residents who were still enrolled at the time of the shooting have been receiving treatment in its wake through a Napa nonprofit called Mentis. Mentis also has hired one of the Pathway Home’s clinicians, providing important continuity of care, Kamer said.

“These guys have been traumatized all over again because of the shooting,” he said. “They’ve been moved around. So it has not been easy, and some are doing better than others.”

Two of the veterans also are getting help through the Post Deployment Assessment Treatment Program at the Veterans Administration Northern California Health Care System in Martinez, a residential facility where a Pathway Home graduate currently works as a psychology intern. The Pathway Home plans to work with the program, developing its own community base of support, “one of the reasons the Pathway Home was so successful,” Kamer said.

Board chairwoman Dorothy Salmon in a letter to Pathway Home supporters said community involvement is a key part of the model’s success.

“Our focus now is to continue honoring the memory of our fallen colleagues by helping to support other Pathway Home-like facilities, working to support similar VA programs, and partnering with local Rotary Clubs and veterans’ facilities to bring our model of reintegration to communities across the country,” she wrote. “Wherever we can help with developing local networking and fundraising models, we will be there.”