John Wylie Needham was known as an easygoing surfer who liked to paint and play guitar and bounced from job to job. He knew he needed direction in life. So two years ago he joined the Army and eventually shipped off to Iraq.
This, he thought, would make his family proud.
Late Monday night, when Orange County sheriff's deputies responded to a complaint about an argument at Needham's San Clemente condo, the 25-year-old veteran answered the door naked. He was belligerent and needed to be subdued with a Taser, deputies said. And in a bedroom they found his 19-year-old girlfriend, Jacqwelyn Joann Villagomez, severely beaten.
By Tuesday morning, Villagomez was dead and Needham was charged with murder and was being held in lieu of $1-million bail.
The alleged slaying capped a tumultuous period during which Needham was wounded in combat and returned home late last year with severe mental problems, his family said. He was still in pain from the shrapnel in his legs and back. He struggled with nightmares that left him screaming. He had been hospitalized and medicated, had consulted with therapists and had reached out for help.
But it was Needham himself who appeared to know how fast he was spiraling downward.
"I'm falling apart by the seams it seems the days here bleed into each other I have to find the will to live," he wrote in a rambling posting on his MySpace page. "These walls are caving in my despair wraps me in its web, I feel I'm sinking in, throw me a lifesaver throw me a life worth living."
Needham's family knew he was struggling. But never did they foresee this.
"I can't see him doing this," said his brother Mike Needham. "I know he went through a lot in Iraq. But this is just not him. . . . You can't believe how happy he was until he came back from Iraq."
Needham served in Iraq last year and was awarded a Purple Heart for his combat injury, said Army spokesman Master Sgt. Keith O'Donnell. He was discharged for unspecified medical reasons, O'Donnell said. Additional details about his service were not immediately available.
Villagomez, known to friends as Jacque, was born in the Central Valley. She was raised in Turlock by her grandmother from the age of 6, after her mother died and her father moved to Guam, friends said. She ran track at Pitman High School before moving with a boyfriend to Orange County, where she graduated from El Toro High School in Lake Forest.
