Haley House Fund Benefits From Nam Knights Westside Fundraiser

The mission is simple, the need pressing and deep, and that is to “serve those who served,” said Mary Ann Keckler, a mother who knows firsthand the savage brutalities and realities of war.

It’s not the front that left her son a quadriplegic, but a random diving accident that left him confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

Still, Keckler said, it was “the stresses of war” that left her son, “a good swimmer and a good diver” off his game, and led to his fall from a rope over a lake during leave.

“In war, you do not get any sleep, you’re stiff and not relaxed,” she said.

When her son, who served from 1987 to 1989, came home, Keckler’s life was forever changed as she maneuvered through a new world of health and rehabilitation issues as a caregiver for life.

“I knew what I had to go through,” she said. “Not on my watch was it going to happen to anyone else, if I could help it.”

That determination led Keckler, with the aid of Mary Ellen Harlan and Dr. Steven Scott, to found the Haley House Fund, a charity that houses and supports the families of soldiers cared for at the James A. Haley Veterans' Hospital in Tampa, at 13000 Bruce B. Downs Blvd.

The year was 2004, Keckler said, “and family members were not being accommodated, they were sleeping in their cars, some of them.”

The trio met with Braun and announced the group’s formation at a Greater Brandon Chamber of Commerce event. 

The Haley House Fund works with area hotels to house and feed family members and significant others who come from all over the country to lend support to those who care for their loved ones who come back forever changed from injuries sustained during active duty and training missions.

For a fifth year in a row, the Nam Knights Westside pig roast, held at the Winthrop Pole Barn in Riverview, just west of Brandon, raised money for the Haley House Fund, in addition to some law enforcement charities.

Billed as “the American military veteran and law enforcement motorcycle club,” the Nam Knights Westside organization notes on its Website that over the past four years it has been able to contribute more than $45,000 to the Haley House Fund through its annual pig roast charity fundraiser.

It was at this year’s fifth annual event, April 2, that Braun, a past honorary mayor of Brandon, and Keckler talked about the Haley House Fund and its mission.

“We are supporting veterans and soldiers including those who are among the most injured soldiers of the Afghan and Iraqi wars,” Braun said. The injuries, he added, “are some of the more ungodly,” including “brain trauma, head trauma, amputation and and severe burns, where facial features and chests, arms and legs are disfigured."

The focus of the Haley House Fund is to support the soldier’s caregivers.

“We’re having to train these family members [and significant others] to be caregivers for the rest of their lives,” Braun said. “The hospital trains them and we enable them to be housed and transported at no charge."

Funds to support the Haley House Fund come “strictly from the general public,” Braun said. “I do write some grants, and that has helped tremendously, but events like this, like this Haley House pig roast, are tremendously important. We’re looking for other organizations to do something similar.”

Times are particularly rough for donors, Braun said, but also for the soldiers coming home with multiple traumatic injuries.

“We need donations and donations have dried up,” Braun said. “If not dried up, then significantly less because of the economy. I can assure people, however, that for every dollar they donate 98 percent will go to the mission at hand."

The Haley House Fund, he added, “has very little overhead.”