With Final Word of Soldiers? Deaths, More Tears, More Sorrow, Some Relief
Josh Haner/The New York Times
Maria del Rosario Duran getting a hug from one of her sons, Bryant Jimenez Duran, while Andy Jimenez Duran spoke at a news conference Friday.
By
ALAN FEUER
Published: July 12, 2008
Maria del Rosario Duran went to have her hair done. After more than a year, they had finally found her boy and the media was there. She had been crying. She needed to look better than she felt.
She stood before the television cameras at her house in Queens, N.Y., two sons at her side, a pair of black glasses hiding her eyes. ?I have a strong pain because I lost my first son,? she told the cameras, sobbing. ?He was a wonderful son.?
That son, Sgt. Alex R. Jimenez, 25, was on patrol on May 12, 2007, near Yusufiya,
Iraq, when his Army unit ? Company D, Fourth Battalion, 31st Infantry, Second Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division ? was ambushed on a road beside the Euphrates River in an attack that killed five soldiers. Sergeant Jimenez and Pvt. Byron W. Fouty, 19, were abducted by their attackers, prompting a manhunt that involved as many as 4,000 American and 2,000 Iraqi troops over the course of several days.
The manhunt failed, and as the days turned into weeks and the weeks into months, the soldiers? families, in New York, Massachusetts, Texas and Michigan found themselves in a painful limbo with their loved ones missing and presumed to be ? though never officially declared ? dead. Then, on Thursday and Friday, soldiers from the Army?s casualty affairs unit arrived at their houses and knocked on their doors. The news was bad, but at least it was news.
...
In June 2007, a Sunni insurgent group released a videotape that showed the identification cards of Sergeant Jimenez and Private Fouty, and a narrator on the tape proclaimed that they were dead. And that was the last the families had seen or heard of them.
Then, on Friday afternoon, the Army released a statement, saying that the search for the men had been suddenly reawakened on July 1 after Special Operations forces captured an individual who claimed to know where they were buried. A week later, on July 8, the statement said, investigators went to a site west of the village of Jurf as-Sakr, where the remains were recovered.
On July 9, the Army sent the remains to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Dover, Del., where they were identified as those of Sergeant Jimenez and Private Fouty the next day. Sergeant Jimenez?s remains will be taken to Massachusetts to be viewed by his father, Ramon, then sent to New York for burial at Pinelawn Memorial Park on Long Island, his family said. ...
Ramon Jimenez sat with friends and family Friday in the backyard of his house in Lawrence, Mass. The mood was warm but somber; jokes and smiles as people arrived gave way to wistful silence.
By 4 p.m., Mr. Jimenez looked worn. ?I ask for blessings,? he told the crowd in Spanish, ?for all the people who have been accompanying me these 14 months. A lot of people have been close to me. Although the wait was heavy, it has not felt as much because of everyone.?
Andy Jimenez Duran, brother of missing Army soldier Alex Jimenez speaks in
front of the family home in the Queens borough of New York, Friday, July 11
Sgt. Alex R. Jimenez
Ramon Jimenez had kept vigil at his home in Lawrence, Mass. They were mourning Sgt. Alex R. Jimenez. An Iraqi insurgent group had said in a June 2007 videotape that he was dead. The Army made the news official this week.
