The leader of a statewide veterans group who fought for homeless veterans in Colorado Springs was in jail in Denver on Wednesday, unmasked as a former mental patient who posed as a wounded Marine officer and 9/11 survivor.
The man, who called himself Rick Duncan — purportedly a former Marine captain and 1997 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy — is in fact 31-year-old Richard Glen Strandlof, a former mental patient who never served in the military and falsely claimed he was in the Pentagon during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, according to David Walsh of the Colorado Veterans Alliance, which Duncan founded.
Walsh, who joined the CVA board at Duncan’s request last year, said his colleagues in the organization grew suspicious of Duncan after discovering “significant inconsistencies” in his personal story.
In a search of the Colorado secretary of state’s office records, for example, they found that the name Colorado Veterans Alliance had been reserved by Rick Strandlof, whom they had never met, Walsh said.
While probing Duncan’s past, Walsh said, the group found evidence that he was a patient in a mental hospital in Washoe County, Nev., at the time of the roadside bombing in Fallujah, Iraq, that Duncan claimed left him severely wounded.
The group contacted the FBI field office in Denver, which began investigating in early May and arrested Strandlof on Tuesday night in downtown Denver on a traffic warrant originating in El Paso County.
“We were all taken aback,” said David Warvi, another CVA board member.
Strandlof is in custody at the Denver County Jail in lieu of a $1,000 bond. He is wanted in El Paso County for failing to appear in court on a charge of driving with a suspended license.
According to Walsh, federal authorities are looking into fundraising by Strandlof conducted under his real name in Nevada. He purportedly raised $25,000 during a New Year’s Eve event near Reno, Nev., on Dec. 31, 2006.
Last year, Duncan drew statewide headlines by threatening to sue Colorado Springs unless it suspended city-sponsored cleanups of homeless camps that he claimed were victimizing veterans.
The city stopped the sweeps in October and is still sorting through legal issues related to the cleanup campaigns along the city’s creekbeds.
Duncan also told his story in televised advertisements for Sen. Mark Udall and Hal Bidlack, a retired Air Force officer who lost his bid for the U.S. House of Representatives in Colorado’s 5th Congressional District as the Democratic nominee last year.
Duncan proved to be a popular spokesman on veterans’ issues. He is quoted in stories as recently as March, when he was interviewed by The Denver Post about a measure before the state General Assembly to cut tuition for veterans.
Among his claims were that he served in the Pentagon during the Sept. 11 attacks.
“The duality of that day, the good and the bad that I saw that day, are forever etched in my mind and in my memory,” Duncan told KOAA television in an interview last year marking the anniversary of the attacks.
