(NewsNation) — As President Joe Biden is preparing to visit Japan, Brittany Alkonis, the wife of an imprisoned U.S. Navy lieutenant, is seeking his release from a Japanese prison.
Navy Lt. Ridge Alkonis was sentenced to three years for a fatal car accident he and his family say was caused by a medical emergency.
Brittany Alkonis joined “On Balance With Leland Vittert,” saying, the push to release her husband may have hit a wall.
She said when President Biden met with Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in January, there was an agreement to create a working group.
“I was concerned at the time that would just be a delay tactic,” she said. “The U.S. has conceded that is a fact, it was just a delay tactic and nothing is moved forward, nothing has progressed.”
In May 2021, Ridge was driving with his wife and children when he lost consciousness and control of his car, which drifted and crashed, killing an 85-year-old woman and her son-in-law.
Brittany Alkonis said she does not know why the process is proving to be so complicated.
“I can’t say for a fact,” she said. “But what it feels like to me is that it’s complicated because a member of the aggrieved family is a well-connected High Court prosecutor in Tokyo, and he and the rest of his family want Ridge imprisoned. … They said repeatedly, they want him to be punished as harshly as possible. And Japan’s giving them what they want.”
Brittany Alkonis warns other military wives, saying the U.S. military is “absolutely not” going to take care of them when serving in Japan.
“It’s not just because of Ridge’s situation, she said. “I mean, that is a huge part of it. But there’s other concerns here. Military families in this country are just kind of consistently losing. And we’re not provided with the legal medical support that we need to function here.”