Marine veteran Milo Imrie passed a note through his attorney to the man he assaulted, apologizing for his behavior and wishing he could take it all back.

In the San Mateo County courtroom July 25, Imrie received a second chance, freed after serving 11 months in solitary confinement and returning to plead no contest. He and his victim, lifelong friend Mike Newsom, embraced. A judge sentenced him to probation.

A year ago, the image of Imrie as a free man would have surprised many, from the nine guards it took to wrangle him into a jail cell to the family who witnessed his descent into darkness after the horrors he witnessed in Afghanistan. The Point Richmond resident has made a remarkable turnaround from a life nearly destroyed by trauma and substance abuse.

“Nobody knows how or why war traumatizes our best and brightest young people, and yet they have to pay the price two or three times over, ” said David J. Paul, Imrie’s uncle, a former Air Force officer and professor for the California State University system. “Milo’s paid in double measure already, and for his service, I am grateful. … He is a young man of immense potential.”

The 25-year-old veteran credits nearly a year spent in solitary confinement, on suicide watch, at the Santa Clara County Main Jail as the catalyst for his turnaround.

“I grew up more during that 11 months than I did over the rest of my life,” Imrie said. “The way I perceived the world changed drastically. It felt like waking up.”

After his release, Imrie, who once was declared incompetent to stand trial in the assault case, sought treatment for PTSD and discovered a reason for joy and sense of purpose — the responsibility of caring for dogs at a Richmond animal shelter.

“Work has been very therapeutic for Mr. Imrie,” psychiatrist Ashiq George and therapist Hazel Diane Ayson said in a letter from the Department of Veterans Affairs. “He is a most deserving and impressive young man, and we support any efforts to give him a second chance at life.”

Imrie’s troubles began in the Helmand province of Afghanistan. During a seven-month period from October 2010 to April 2011, 25 of his comrades with the Marines’ 3rd Battalion, 5th Regiment were killed and 200 were wounded. An IED blew up an Afghan interpreter walking near him. At the time, family members said, Imrie, a lance corporal, carried around survivor’s guilt about the death because he had spotted something suspicious on the ground but did not act on the hunch.

On another occasion with the “Dark Horse” battalion, officers ordered Imrie’s dog killed out of fear the animal’s barking would alert enemies.

Imrie was honorably discharged in January 2012, but soon afterward, grief hit him hard when his grandmother, Mary Brookings Imrie-McGowan, died. Only months later, he lost his mother, Margaret Bort Imrie, to cancer. In June, his erratic behavior led to his forced withdrawal from UC Santa Barbara.

Friends and roommates at UCSB said he showed strange behaviors like walking across town with no shoes on and leaving pancakes burning on the stove while staring off into nothing. Then, the behavior turned violent, with Imrie acting out or blacking out after drinking, then waking up the next day with no recollection of his behavior.

“He experienced new onset of depression, psychotic and PTSD symptoms,” Ayson and George wrote. “He also began using drugs and alcohol as a way of coping. This is common among combat veterans.”

Mike Newsom thought it was going to be like old times when Imrie came for a visit Dec. 12, 2012, to Newsom’s Woodside home. Instead, he said, his friend pulled a gas can out of his trunk and asked if there was enough fuel inside to set himself on fire.

Newsom said he grabbed the can, closed and locked the trunk and went to wash gas off his hands.

“I was trying to level with him to make sure he knew I care about him, and started talking about getting him help,” Newsom said. “And he said ‘You don’t really understand the situation. I have to kill you and me both.’ I was looking straight at him and there was no one there I recognized.”

A worried Newsom grabbed the handles of every knife in a nearby wood block, went outside and hurled them onto the roof.

When Newsom turned to recover a knife that fell from the roof, Imrie hit him across the upper back with a shovel. Newsom took off running, down a hill, over a fence and into a nearby house to call police.

Officers found Imrie on a nearby golf course asking random people for gasoline. He was combative and went for one of their guns.

Imrie was charged with multiple felonies for the assault. He remembered none of it, and still recalls only flashes of that night.

“I felt so torn. I should have seen it coming, that he needed help,” Newsom said. “I was mad because I lost my best friend and sad because his world had been shattered.”

Time in solitary

Deemed incompetent to stand trial and exhibiting schizophrenic and suicidal tendencies, Imrie says he began his road to recovery while in solitary confinement. It helped, he said, to be alone with his thoughts, with no one around to blame for his actions.

“Solitary confinement made me realize that the only real thing in that cell that was making me unhappy was myself,” Imrie said. “If I met myself, I wouldn’t like me.”

His father, Gordon Imrie, agreed. “There was a period where we could have bailed him out, but he seemed better off incarcerated,” he said.

Imrie evolved from being despondent and banging his head against the wall to intense periods of reflection — reading, meditating and releasing a “wellspring of thought” through stream-of-consciousness writing.

“Reliving those things is the closest thing I’d equate to hell,” Imrie said. “A lot of things that I didn’t think were in my memory were there. I felt like something was dispassionately presenting them to me, without the excuses or justifying.”

Imrie was deemed fit for release from jail in late 2013, returning to Richmond in time to join his family for the holidays. Several months later, he appeared in court across from Newsom, to whom, through his attorneys, he wrote a note apologizing.

“This huge weight just came off my shoulders,” Newsom recalled. “I think at this point we’re able to put this behind us.”

The Milo Foundation

For Imrie, finding his calling at the Milo Foundation, a domestic animal sanctuary, was sheer coincidence. Founder Lynne Tingle had named the foundation after her deaf and blind Australian shepherd puppy that passed away 15 years before Imrie ever walked through the door.

“Milo started volunteering at the Milo Foundation soon after he was bailed out of jail,” said Tingle, executive director of The Milo Foundation. “Eventually I decided he was such a great asset and so very helpful that we should hire him.”

Imrie has been a full-time kennel attendant since January, two months after he began as a volunteer. His role includes feeding and giving medication to as many as 50 dogs, and he is learning to take on additional responsibilities. He also plans to enroll in a pre-veterinary program within the next year.

In a testament to what childhood friend Ted Marcus called “the sheer force (Milo’s) brilliant mind can marshal when driven by purpose,” the man seems to have found a perfect fit that benefits both Imrie and the animals.

“I see the golden rule in effect — the idea that if you do good, good things will happen,” Imrie said. “‘the American dream’ should be ‘the American deal’ — that if you are willing to work hard, we will find a place for you. We will not let you fall so far away.”

Follow Erin Ivie at Twitter.com/erin_ivie.