SAN MARCOS — When stepping into a leadership role at Wounded Warrior Homes, Rick Espitia knew he wanted to make some changes.
Espitia became executive director of the nonprofit in February 2025 after serving as its president and chairman beginning in July of the previous year. He said the organization’s ambitions were not keeping pace with the needs of the veterans it serves.
“I said, ‘What’s wrong with this place? We’re not growing, we’re static,’” he said. “So by the time the March timeframe came around, I already knew what our new programs were going to look like.”
Espitia aimed to build on the nonprofit’s existing services by expanding transitional housing, addressing a wider range of mental health needs, and creating programs tailored to women veterans and their children.
A veteran himself, Espitia deployed during the Gulf War and retired from the U.S. Marine Corps as a lieutenant colonel after 20 years of active duty and reserve service. He later moved into nonprofit accounting and finance before assuming his current role.
Wounded Warrior Homes operates offices and a food pantry in San Marcos. Its primary services have included providing food assistance to veterans across San Diego County and operating a six-unit facility in Vista for male veterans pursuing education.
Espitia said the program is “not biased about what school you’re in,” as long as participants are working toward a career, they are eligible to stay at the North County site.
Building on that model, the nonprofit opened a home in Escondido last summer for women veterans with children.
Espitia said the residence can accommodate two families and includes a learning center to help children stay on track academically. The program is designed with safety and stability in mind.
“Let’s do it right,” Espitia said. “We’re trying to think of every precaution we can.”
Research from Brown University estimates that during the war in Afghanistan, about 24% of active-duty women experienced sexual assault, with actual rates potentially two to four times higher than official government estimates.
Espitia said participants in the women’s program work with female counselors “because they’re a non-threat,” and also receive mental health services.
New mental health technology
Wounded Warrior Homes has also partnered with Serene Health and Peak Logic to offer Personalized Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, or PrTMS, through a program called Operation Mental Health.
Espitia said he became convinced of the treatment’s value after seeing its impact on his own mental health and that of his son, also a veteran.
Dr. Kevin Murphy, who developed PrTMS, said he has treated more than 1,000 veterans. He emphasized the technology’s potential to address a range of conditions, including anxiety, depression, concussions and autism.
Transcranial magnetic stimulation works by detecting electrical activity in specific parts of the brain using electromagnetic induction through a headpiece worn by the patient.
“The speed of it tells you how many times per second your brain samples the world,” Murphy said.
Murphy said his interest in brain health began while serving as a Navy engineering officer aboard the USS Ranger during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. He later pursued a medical degree at the University of Chicago, specializing in brain radiation oncology, and founded the Stereotactic Radiosurgery Program at UC San Diego in 2005.
He discovered TMS after observing that some patients successfully treated for brain tumors still experienced cognitive difficulties.
“They were having trouble with dyslexia or thinking, or judging, or planning or having problems with the area, either from the surgery, tumor, radiation, chemo or all of them,” Murphy said. “But they’re cured. And my question was, ‘Can I fix that?’”
A healthy brain in a calm state will have alignment in the spikes of neuronal pulses.
“If my attention span area is slow, it’s hard to pay attention. If my attention span area is fast, I’m hypervigilant. If my impulse area is fast, I tend toward impulsive behavior. I’m impulsive. If my impulse area is slow, I procrastinate,” Murphy said. “It’s highly predictable of your behavior.”
He developed PrTMS as a treatment protocol to correct when the brain has difficulty aligning those pulses. It uses a proprietary harmonic approach for each patient to “tune” the brain, similar to a piano, Murphy said.
“Most guys get blown out, the piano’s not tuned,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how hard they try, it’s not going to work.”
Murphy said PrTMS is not meant to replace other forms of behavioral therapy that treat the mind. He compared it to the difference between software and hardware in a computer.
“If I’m going to play right, I need a piano teacher — that’s a therapist,” Murphy said. “We’re the guys that tune the piano.”
In a study Murphy co-authored, four to six weeks of PrTMS treatment resulted in full resolution of post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms in more than half of participating veterans.
According to Murphy, because everyone has a brain, it can fall out of sync in many ways.
“Athletes go, ‘I was unconscious, I wasn’t thinking.’ When musicians play, they aren’t thinking about the chords, they’re just playing them,” Murphy said. “That unconscious sort of zone where athletes go is what we’re finding in each patient. That’s what we’re copying. The zone’s the key thing. What’s your brain look like when you’re in the zone?”
Next steps
Espitia said three people have received a full course of PrTMS so far, but “we’ve got more in the pipeline.”
He has also applied for a grant through Fisher House to expand Operation Mental Health.
Espitia said he is always looking for ways to cut costs and expand services for veterans. He reduced the cost of operating the food pantry and said he would like to double the number of veterans benefiting from that program.
Wounded Warrior Homes also receives donations of dog food from the Helen Woodward Animal Center, which it distributes free to veterans’ service animals.
Espitia is also working to streamline operations and more effectively track dependents — such as veterans’ children — served by the nonprofit to better match services to demand.
“It’s like the cake doesn’t taste any good,” Espitia said. “Why not? You forgot the sugar, right? Add more sugar. So we did all of that, and then we started getting ready for developing the programs.”
