The wife of Luis A. Walker, who was convicted this week of sexual offenses with 10 trainees, says people are wrong about her man.
The former boot camp trainer at the center of an Air Force sex scandal isn't a rapist or a sexual predator, Yeimi Walker said. He doesn't belong behind bars or on a sex offender registry, she said. He should be on the job.
For reasons she can't fathom, 10 women lied about her teenage sweetheart, who triumphed over a bad neighborhood in the Brooklyn borough of New York and fulfilled his dream of being in the Air Force.
“I don't understand why it's happening. I just know that I believe him 100 percent, and I believe they put an innocent man in jail,” Walker said, describing her husband as a dedicated father and NCO who loved the uniform. “I'm still in shock. I don't know how this happened, how this came about.”
Days after a military jury at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland convicted Walker on all counts and gave him 20 years in prison, his wife said she understands the Air Force has a problem. Her husband's case is the biggest of six in which instructors face sexual misconduct charges.
But Walker, whose name is pronounced as “Jay-me,” is baffled that he came out on the losing end of a trial that she said had no evidence — no DNA, no eyewitnesses, videotapes or written records. It doesn't seem possible the Air Force would railroad an innocent man, she said, but media coverage and the witnesses hurt badly.
“I may be biased, but these women were caught in lies and they just let it be,” Walker, 25, said. “My husband did not get a fair trial, and I think the military is trying to prove a point. They're trying to make an example out of him.”