Top VA Official Ignored Red Flags About His Disturbed Neo-Nazi Son, Judge Says

A teenage neo-Nazi accused of torching a Texas synagogue last Halloween suffers from “a myriad of mental health issues,” but his parents—one of whom is a respected physician now serving as a high-ranking Veterans Affairs official—never got him the treatment he desperately needed, according to a federal magistrate judge.

Further, the judge said, after doctors at a leading psychiatric hospital evaluated Franklin Barrett Sechriest in 2016 and warned his mother and father that their son “should not have access to firearms,” they subsequently “allowed [him] to acquire a small arsenal of firearms, including one shotgun, three rifles and three handguns.”

The explosive details are revealed in a detention order handed down in December by Judge Mark Lane of the U.S. District Court of Western Texas, and Sechriest’s dad’s top-level U.S. government position is being reported for the first time by The Daily Beast.

Sechriest, 18, was arrested on arson charges last November for allegedly causing more than $150,000 in damage to Congregation Beth Israel in Austin. Criminal investigators with the Austin Fire Department identified the Texas State University freshman using surveillance footage from the temple’s parking lot that showed his Jeep’s license plate. The plate was traced back to Sechriest’s home in San Marcos, where he was living with his mother, Nicole. Sechriest’s father, Vernon Franklin Sechriest, is a U.S. Navy veteran and orthopedic surgeon who was appointed chief of staff for the VA Healthcare System in Loma Linda, California on Nov. 21, 2021—about three weeks after his son allegedly set Congregation Beth Israel ablaze.

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FBI agents seized numerous diaries from Sechriest, which they say contained virulently racist and bigoted entries about Jews and people of color. They also found stickers in Sechriest’s possession, one of which showed a migrant family and read, “No invader is innocent.” Another showed police officers, politicians, and doctors with Jewish stars over their faces. “Would you kill them all to seize your rights?” it said. “The price of freedom is paid in blood.” Other evidence discovered by investigators included “materials commonly used to make Molotov cocktails, signifying his intent to engage in more violent criminal conduct and escalate his dangerousness.”

Following the synagogue attack, Sechriest wrote in one of his journals, “I set a synagogue on fire,” according to prosecutors. Three months prior, Sechriest had been accused of carrying out “an armed robbery of 4 Black victims and a Hispanic victim,” they said in a court filing. Last week, Sechriest was indicted by a federal grand jury on one count each of damage to religious property, use of fire to commit a federal crime, and arson. If convicted, he faces up to 60 years in prison.

In the years leading up to the synagogue arson, Sechriest’s behavior had “dramatically escalated,” according to Lane’s Dec. 15 order.

“That escalation has centered on hatred for other people, an ever-increasing escalation of criminal behavior and a passion for firearms and weapons,” it states. “In June of 2016, [Sechriest] was evaluated at the Menninger Clinic in Houston, Texas. In the wake of that evaluation, a physician prepared a nine-page evaluation of [Sechriest]’s mental health. The physician noted that ‘Franklin does not have and should not have access to firearms.’ Despite that admonition, [Sechriest]’s parents allowed the Defendant to acquire a small arsenal of firearms, including one shotgun, three rifles and three handguns.”

The judge also chastised Vernon and Nicole Sechriest for being acutely aware of their son’s worsening psychological troubles but not obtaining sufficient help for him. “There is no doubt that [Sechriest]’s parents love, care for and want the very best for their troubled son,” Lane said in his order. “Yet rather than implement a sustained mental health treatment plan, nothing consistent was ever done. Instead, based on the current state of the record, [Sechriest] was simply monitored by a parent at home without the benefit of any counseling or medication. That effort failed.”

Daniel Wannamaker, the attorney defending Franklin Sechriest in court, told The Daily Beast that he thinks the Sechriests lived up to their parental obligations.

“I don't believe the parents are at fault,” he said in an email Tuesday night. “They had him checked out at Johns Hopkins, Mayo Clinic and Meninger in Houston. I believe they were trying.”

Vernon Sechriest, who goes by “V. Franklin Sechriest” in his professional life, earned roughly $1 million a year while working at the VA between 2015 and 2021, according to federal government procurement data. As a contractor, Sechriest—the chief of orthopedics and podiatry at the Minneapolis VA Healthcare System until last fall—was not subject to the same salary caps that govern the pay of federal employees. (For comparison’s sake, NIH Director Anthony Fauci earned $434,312 in 2020.)

Sechriest graduated from Johns Hopkins University, followed by the University of Alabama School of Medicine, his official VA bio says. He later became director of a reconstructive surgery practice at the Naval Medical Center San Diego, and taught medical students at Hopkins. In 2015, he was appointed chief of orthopedics at the Minneapolis VA, a teaching hospital in partnership with the University of Minnesota.

“When I am asked for my job description, I always reply, ‘I have the privilege of taking care of the best patients, training the best residents and medical students, and positively impacting the largest health care system in the world… I work at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center,’” Sechriest said in 2019.

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His career, however, has not been all successes. In the fall of 2012, Sechriest was hired as a partner at a private orthopedic group practice in San Diego, according to a civil lawsuit he initiated a few years later against his former colleagues. The suit, which stems from a financial dispute between Sechriest and the practice, accused the partners of violations of labor and business codes, breach of good faith, intentional interference with economic advantage, and defamation for their description of Sechriest to the federal government’s HR department when he applied for his VA job.

In a cross-complaint, the partners alleged Sechriest had “refused” to pay a $398,000 debt to the practice. In one exhibit included in Sechriest’s own complaint that he claimed was defamatory, the practice’s office manager submitted a form to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which was verifying Sechriest’s past employment.

In a space marked “Additional information which you feel may have a bearing on this person’s suitability for government employment or a security clearance,” the office manager wrote that after Sechriest quit the practice with six weeks’ notice as opposed to the six months he had agreed to at the outset of his contract, he first ignored the partners’ request to reimburse them for business-related expenses they said they incurred on Sechriest’s behalf that exceeded the amount of revenue he brought in. Sechriest then changed course, disputing he owed the money in the first place, according to the form. “Accordingly, we question his ‘financial integrity’ and believe this reflects poorly on his general behavior and conduct,” it continues, alleging that Sechriest refused to take certain types of work and often turned down patients who did not have specific conditions he was interested in treating.

“Based on our experience with Dr. Sechriest, we would never again place our trust and confidence in any oral agreement with him and would not engage in any professional or business dealings with him in the future,” the office manager concluded her statement on behalf of the practice to OPM.

In 2021, the Sechriests bought a home in the Austin area so that Franklin could attend Texas State and enlist in the Texas State Guard, according to prosecutors. Wannamaker, Sechriest’s lawyer, said he has been diagnosed with, variously, Tourette’s syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, mood disorder, sensory processing disorder, ADHD, anxiety disorder, and “possible” mast cell activation syndrome, a condition that causes severe allergic reactions.

The family moved around the U.S. quite a bit for Vernon’s career, and Sechriest finished high school during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Wannamaker. Sechriest has no prior juvenile or adult criminal history, and “is financially dependent on his parents,” court records say.

Sechriest has been at the Loma Linda VA for nearly six months. The VA did not respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment and Sechriest’s salary details, but the job he holds was advertised last year at a range of $150,000 to $350,000 a year.

In a previous interview, Wannamaker told The Daily Beast that Sechriest is “not a typical 18-year-old.” He said Sechriest was radicalized online by “far-right-wing ultra-nationalists who prey on people like my client.”

“Right now, we’re trying to figure out if my client is competent,” Wannamaker said. “To me, sanity is still a potential issue. I really need to get to the bottom of what was going on in Franklin’s world, and I don’t think I’m going to be able to do that in the condition he’s in now.”

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Unlike accused school shooter Ethan Crumbley’s parents, who were charged with involuntary manslaughter for providing their 15-year-old son access to the gun he allegedly used to kill four of his classmates in Michigan last November, the Sechriests most likely aren’t criminally culpable for their son’s alleged crimes, according to health-care lawyer Harry Nelson, who is not involved in the Sechriest case. But the apparent lack of sufficient parenting “does seem to show a certain lack of sensitivity to really thinking about the risk they were putting the son at, or other people.” And potential civil suits are another matter entirely. (Vernon Sechriest, whose personal practice was incorporated in the State of Minnesota, dissolved the entity in January.)

“Clearly this is a young man who is beset by rage, to the point of being mentally ill,” Nelson told The Daily Beast. “And this is part of a moment in our culture, where these things are at all-time-high levels. And I think people are struggling to wrap their heads around what we do about it. I just personally think we have to do a lot more to not just focus on the immediate, like, ‘How do we keep guns away from kids?’ but, ‘Why is our society producing so many more people in this category? What can be done? And is there any way that parents can do anything?’ I don’t think there are easy answers here, because a lot of it is really about the way that American life is changing.”

The VA and Vernon Sechriest did not respond to multiple requests for comment from The Daily Beast. Franklin Sechriest remains detained pending trial.

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