Long Island native Matthew Simoni was a decorated Navy veteran who fought for his comrades' rights before losing his own battle with addiction

Lugging a pizza and a bottle of soda, New Hyde Park native Matthew Simoni slogged through the wooded areas that shrouded Long Island’s homeless veterans from their families, friends and the help they desperately needed.

After four tours of duty during the War on Terror, Simoni toured Suffolk in search of those who shared the same scars he carried and were forced to live in tents.  He knew what they were going through because he had lived it.

For 10 years, the Navy veteran saw combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, served in Chad, Libya, Mali and Kenya and provided operational support for the Navy SEALs based in Virginia Beach. When he returned, he had struggled to find meaning in his life. His new enemies became post-traumatic stress disorder, nightmares, depression, addiction and homelessness. 

That was the reason he went to the woods and founded the Bay Shore-based nonprofit Bravo Foxtrot United Veterans Inc. He helped more than 100 of his comrades, according to Jade Pinto, his life partner and Bravo Foxtrot’s vice president, bringing them supplies, helping them with paperwork to get benefits and finding them emergency housing.

But in the end, she said, he lost his own personal battle.

Simoni died on Jan. 21 after ingesting cocaine mixed with fentanyl. He was 41. The man who allegedly sold him the drugs is out on bail as the district attorney’s case against him proceeds, according to court records.

Pinto said she does not know if Simoni meant to take his own life, but despite building a life for himself helping others, he fell into a decline. He had been "uncomfortable" in the year that followed a major medical procedure and had a history of "self-medicating."

"He wasn’t going to the doctor. ... He was slowing down, he wasn’t sleeping," Pinto, 46, of Islip, said of Simoni during the final year of his life. "We should have put all that effort we put into Bravo into him."

Worlds falling apart

Simoni’s story is like those of many veterans whose worlds fall apart as they come home and try and reenter society, only to feel like they are outsiders. There are an estimated 1,273 homeless veterans in New York State, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. That official figure has steadily declined for more than a decade, but advocates say the real figure is likely higher. Many, like Simoni, served in the War on Terror, but the lion’s share of homeless vets are those who were not-so-welcomed-home from the Vietnam War.

"A lot of soldiers, when they are empowered with tremendous responsibilities, they feel, especially as a young man after 9/11, that the world is counting on them," said U.S. Army vet Daniel Jackman, who joined Simoni in many ventures into the woods. "They’re entrusted with millions of dollars worth of equipment. They make bold decisions that a police captain could never make in a million years. Once all that leaves and they come home and start parking cars for a living, there’s a loss of meaning, there’s a loss of value that quite often empties a person. I’ve seen it happen so many times. This is why so many soldiers deal with drug abuse, suicide, addiction, homelessness."

There is no "single event" that leads them to hit bottom, according to Marcelle Leis, a retired chief master sergeant for the Air National Guard and the director of the Suffolk County Veterans Service Agency. Combat overseas can cause physical pain or fester into trauma, which forces them toward prescribed or illicit medications. That makes traveling and holding down a job difficult. So they isolate. They struggle to keep their home life intact. They lose their house.

"All of this, and then there’s the cultural piece," Leis said. "Veterans don’t like asking for help. We are the helping professionals, we go into the firefight."

Help has to find them. Younger generations are not flocking to American Legion or Veterans of Foreign Wars halls as their elders had. Some don’t even submit their discharge paperwork to their local VA facilities to enroll in benefits, one reason Leis said the true number of veterans across the county is undercounted.

For some vets on Long Island, including Manorville native Alan Lockel, 33, help arrived in the form of Simoni. While he believes there are plenty of resources available for veterans — with the exception of housing, which he very much needed — he said there is "a lack of ease of access to them." But Simoni knew the route.

"He was an amazing, selfless man, and he really loved what he did, and changed my life," Lockel said of Simoni. "I was a homeless veteran, battling depression and fighting for benefits. It was like pulling teeth with the VA, and within a year, he changed my life, and then I moved out of New York and now I'm a homeowner."

'Helping his country'

In his civilian life, Simoni "moved around a lot" with his family before he graduated from Herricks High School in 2002, his sister, Melissa Simoni, told Newsday. As a young man, she said he enjoyed hunting with his father and grandfather and toiled through construction jobs and classes at Nassau Community College before "helping his country" by joining the military in 2006. He thought it was the best option for supporting his daughter, the first of three children he fathered with two different women.

His sister said he "never regretted" his extended service because "he always thought that what he was doing was helping," and his fellow sailors "looked up to him." 

When he returned home to North Carolina in 2016, Simoni turned to what he knew, construction. But over the next several months, he couldn’t keep a gig for more than a few weeks at a time. As he fought depression, PTSD and eventually drug addiction, his pregnant wife filed for divorce, his family said. The foreclosure of his house soon followed. He was living on the streets.

Simoni never used drugs before his deployment, his sister said. He turned to them only when he returned home, for "self-medicating because of things that he was going through."

"One of his best friends, he saw die in front of him," Melissa Simoni said. "He went through a lot with that."

He was suffering, Pinto said, from "severe survivor’s guilt."

"He just couldn’t let himself live without everybody else," Pinto added. "When it came to himself, he just couldn’t seem to let himself live the way that I thought he should. ... Whatever happened in the military, he was very quiet about it, and that destroyed him I think."

Coming home to Long Island

In 2018, Simoni's sister bought him an Amtrak ticket up north, picked him up and said she did her best to "give him a home." He took to the kitchen, where he loved to cook quesadillas for her daughter, but hated cleaning. She brought him to the Northport VA, where he started going to individual and group therapy.

"He wouldn’t be able to sleep, he would have very bad dreams," Melissa Simoni recalled. "He had issues leaving the house. Certain things would trigger him. It could be loud noises, just feeling overwhelmed if there were crowds."

The VA prescribed him antidepressants, as well as sleeping medications, she said. Although he was sober for much of the two years he lived with her, "he struggled on and off" with substance abuse, she said.

"He was really trying to get a hold of himself," his sister said. "He would say to me, ‘Melissa, I just feel like I don’t have a purpose anymore, and I need a purpose again.’ "

It was Pinto who helped him find that purpose. The two met when Simoni walked into her Central Islip tattoo parlor in 2020.

Simoni quickly became her "best friend," Pinto said. She empathized with his challenges, particularly addiction, which she knew firsthand.

A short while later, his sister said he "started being more like himself again" and she supported his decision to move out of her home and into Pinto’s. They became a couple about six months later. As they talked about the difficulty of reintegrating into society after the military, Pinto inspired him to help those like him.

Pinto and Simoni supported each other in sobriety and in August 2021 started Bravo Foxtrot. 

"What gave him a sense to carry on was helping others," said Jackman, a retired army sergeant who served in South Korea from 1993 to 1996. "That enabled him to find meaning again, sobriety again, to be strong enough to encourage others to join his cause."

Simoni finally began to thrive. 

"It was very difficult for him to get through the nightmares and the flashbacks, but we did it," Pinto said. "We were able to do it and we were hoping to do it for everybody else."

Reaching out to others

Simoni spent several years searching wooded areas in Amityville, Babylon, East Islip, Patchogue, Riverhead and beyond, either by himself, with fellow vets like Jackman or even Pinto. They shared hot meals and conversations.

“Matt would share his story, and he was a source of hope for people who were struggling to continue,” Jackman recalled.

While many and endured depression or substance abuse disorder, PTSD "was the biggest thing we were up against because that prohibits them from everything," Pinto said.

"They can’t seem to let themselves get ahead because of whatever they’re holding onto," she added. "I personally feel like they punish themselves for whatever happened in the military."

Simoni spent hours on the phone to make physical and mental health appointments for vets like fellow sailor Lockel and to find them emergency housing. In his Bay Shore office, Simoni helped them complete paperwork to get reevaluations for a higher disability rating to cover PTSD and other lasting conditions.

Simoni "really sympathized with me," Lockel said. "I felt like he was a brother of mine."

Lockel had been forced to live in his own car. But with Simoni’s help, he went from getting hardly any disability payments for just tinnitus to being declared nearly 100% disabled.

"There’s a lack of transition," Lockel added. "We were civilians before, but most of us were little boys when we joined. I wasn’t really a man yet. I didn’t know how to do a resume. ... They put you back where you came from but all you know is what you learned while you were in the military."

A downward spiral

After a yearslong stretch of sobriety while helping veterans like Lockel, Pinto said a February 2024 tragedy caused Simoni to relapse. Another veteran who volunteered with them died by suicide. Simoni found his body. Six months later he went into rehab.

Simoni was also facing legal troubles at Bravo Foxtrot, where the landlord had locked him out of the headquarters because he was letting some homeless veterans stay there, Pinto said. 

Around the same time, the "once in a blue moon" fevers Simoni would spike became more frequent. In February 2025, he was rushed into a hospital for an "emergency open heart surgery because of a virus that went to his heart," Pinto said. He had "three tears in aorta" and needed a new valve.

Pinto worried that the physical trauma could reinforce his mental and emotional trauma. She was right.

"Severe depression set in," Pinto recalled, in the months following the surgery. "He started having nightmares again, he started having flashbacks again. ... I think that’s when he started using again."

Pinto said Simoni was "triggered" when going into the hospital for follow-up visits and began skirting medical appointments. He moved into his own apartment in Lindenhurst, where he let a homeless man — who wasn't a veteran — sleep because he "was very sick and he didn’t want him outside in the cold," Pinto said.

That man called Pinto in the early morning hours of Jan. 21, she said, and told her Simoni was unresponsive and needed an ambulance. 

"I don’t think he wanted to die," Pinto said. "But I think he was very sick and he didn’t know what else to do."

Melissa Simoni agrees, and believes her brother lived much of the final year traumatized by his surgery.

"I didn’t think this was going to happen to him," she said. "He got involved with the wrong people, things happened and it was very unfortunate."

She and Pinto hope they can continue Simoni’s legacy. They plan to restart Bravo Foxtrot and help veterans and one day give rise to his vision of a facility that can house and rehabilitate veterans, as well as help them reconnect with their families and communities.

"It’s really hard to continue without him," Pinto said. "But there’s a lot that has to be done, and I feel like there’s so many people that haven’t been helped since."