SUNY official's astonishing accounts called into question
Chief of staff at Upstate Medical University not an attorney, but claims to be
Syracuse -- During a lecture last fall, Sergio A. Garcia, a top official at New York's Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, recounted for the audience his harrowing experience during a deadly April 2011 bombing in Afghanistan.
Garcia, a former U.S. State Department foreign affairs officer, described how a three-vehicle convoy delivering books to an all-girls school in southern Afghanistan was disrupted when a bomb killed many of his colleagues, including Anne Smedinghoff, a young foreign service officer.
"Annie," Garcia said, claiming that he had been her mentor. "She was 23 years old, from Pennsylvania. ... Her first posting was in Afghanistan, which was a little unusual, but that's where she wanted to go. ... I was in the third car, the bomb went off on the first car and, you know, a lot of my colleagues, civilian and military, were killed."
Garcia, 43, evoked the deadly incident during a diversity lecture he gave last year at Upstate Medical University, which is the Syracuse region's largest employer more than 9,500 workers and where Garcia has been a $340,000-a-year senior vice president and chief of staff since his appointment in March 2017.
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