Stories of Services

Jason Grabau spent 20 years serving in the United States Navy, rising to E-8 Senior Chief. He built his adult life around service, leadership, fatherhood, providing, and protecting. Then the institutions he trusted became the institutions he had to fight.

The first domino fell in 2022, when the Navy issued a Military Protective Order that removed Jason from his home and restricted contact with his family following domestic-violence allegations he maintains were false. Two Escambia County Sheriff’s Office calls reportedly found no indicators of abuse, and two Florida Department of Children and Families investigations resulted in No Indicators findings.

But the consequences of the MPO continued.

The mother of two of Jason’s children subsequently left Florida with the children and went to Arizona without Jason’s consent. Protective-order and family-court proceedings followed there, raising questions Jason continues to challenge regarding jurisdiction, residency, due process, and the way the original military allegations and records followed him from one system into another.

The impact eventually reached all three of his children.

The original situation involved one mother and two children. Records and allegations arising from that case were later introduced in proceedings involving the mother of Jason’s first son. What began with one military order ultimately became a fight involving two mothers, three children, two states, military and civilian courts, and multiple government agencies.

In January 2024, Jason faced a Navy special court-martial.

He was acquitted of stalking and acquitted of the greater domestic-violence offense alleging that he violated a protective order with the intent to threaten or intimidate his spouse. A military judge also entered a finding of not guilty on another specification involving an alleged no-contact-order violation.

Jason was convicted under Article 92 for communicating in violation of the Military Protective Order.

He entered the proceedings as an E-8 Senior Chief and left reduced to E-6.

The consequences did not end with the court-martial.

Over the course of this fight, the life Jason had spent decades building began to unravel—his home, his relationship with his children, his identity as a father and military leader, his reputation, his financial security, and eventually, his psychological stability.

Today, Jason has no enforceable custody or parenting time with his three children. Contact has occurred intermittently when permitted by their mothers, but he has gone months without access and continues fighting to restore his parental rights and a consistent relationship with his children.

The children are living with the consequences as well. They did not choose the disputes between the adults or the institutions involved, yet they have experienced prolonged separation from their father without having a meaningful voice in what happened.

Meanwhile, Jason’s fight expanded beyond family court.

Records raise questions he believes deserve closer examination involving military proceedings, Florida and Arizona family-court actions, interstate jurisdiction, income-withholding orders, DFAS, Veterans Affairs, Social Security, garnishment, and potentially overlapping enforcement actions.

Jason did not begin by trying to take his story public.

He spent years attempting to work through official channels, including the Navy, the military appellate system, congressional offices, legislators, and other government avenues. His military conviction was ultimately affirmed by the Navy-Marine Corps Court of Criminal Appeals, and the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces later denied review.

Through all of this, Jason’s psychological health deteriorated.

He had spent his adult life being the Senior Chief, father, provider, protector, and person others depended upon. As those roles disappeared, so did much of the identity he had built over two decades.

Eventually, he reached psychological collapse.

After years of conventional treatment and numerous medications that Jason says provided little meaningful relief, his recovery journey took an unconventional direction. Faith became increasingly important, as did experiences with ayahuasca, psilocybin, and 5-MeO-DMT. Those experiences became part of rebuilding his identity and finding purpose after losing so much of what had previously defined him.

Today, Jason wants his experience to serve a purpose beyond his own case. He advocates for responsible exploration and research into psychedelic-assisted approaches for veterans struggling with PTSD, TBI, depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, trauma, and the loss of identity that can follow military service.

But his own fight is not over.

Jason is still trying to restore a meaningful and enforceable relationship with his children and obtain scrutiny of the decisions and records that helped bring his family to this point.

We are not asking S.O.S. to accept Jason’s account without question.

We are asking whether the documentary record deserves independent examination.

There are court records, military documents, DCF findings, law-enforcement records, protective orders, appellate decisions, financial records, correspondence with government officials, and other materials that can be provided to establish a timeline and allow the claims surrounding Jason’s case to be independently scrutinized.

His story raises a larger question that reaches beyond one father:

**What happens when an administrative military action begins affecting civilian family proceedings, those proceedings begin affecting other cases and government systems, and a service member eventually finds himself fighting an interconnected web of decisions that no single institution appears responsible for examining as a whole?**

Jason spent 20 years serving his country.

Now he is asking someone to look at what happened when the systems he served became the systems he had to fight.