WHAT A HEEL: Bum Rush
Jeffrey Rush, 27, claimed to have lost the use of his legs after a rollover crash weeks before his Army unit Kansas was deployed to Iraq in 2004. He subsequently collected $107,857 in benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs and $28,730 from the Social Security Administration, according to court records. “[D]octors could never pinpoint why [Rush] was a paraplegic,” reports The Associated Press, but his story fell apart in 2005 when he and his wife, Amy, sued Ford Motor Co. and the company that made the seat belts in his Explorer Sport Trac for the accident that left him paralyzed and his wife deprived of “consortium and conjugal relations":
While his unit was off to war, Rush snorkeled in Florida and schmoozed at an inaugural ball in Washington in a wheelchair, this time insisting that serving in Iraq cost him his ability to walk. Yet, his legs stayed muscular and he fathered a child with his wife.
U.S. District Judge William Stiehl, an 84-year-old Navy veteran of World War II and the Korean War, sentenced him to more than six years behind bars and ordered him to make restitution in the amount of $314,806.11 for the benefits and medical treatment he received.
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