ATLANTA — Household, buddies and army colleagues are gathering in Georgia as funerals start for 3 Army Reserve troopers killed final month in a drone assault on a U.S. base in Jordan.
The primary funeral service was scheduled Tuesday morning for Employees Sgt. William Jerome Rivers at a Baptist church in Carrollton, west of Atlanta.
The 46-year-old reservist and Pennsylvania native, who’s survived by his spouse and son in Georgia, served in uniform for greater than a decade after enlisting as an electrician. The Army mentioned his abroad deployments included a nine-month tour in Iraq in 2018. His obituary from an area funeral house referred to as him a warm-hearted household man with a “light demeanor and a fierce and decided character.”
Following the church service, Rivers is to be buried on the Georgia Nationwide Cemetery for army veterans in Canton, simply northwest of Atlanta.
A Jan. 28 drone strike on a U.S. army outpost in Jordan killed Rivers in addition to Sgt. Kennedy Sanders and Sgt. Breonna Moffett, who all acquired their ranks in posthumous promotions. They have been assigned to the Army Reserve’s 926th Engineer Battalion, 926th Engineer Brigade, based mostly at Fort Moore in west Georgia.
President Joe Biden met with the households of the fallen troopers when their stays have been returned to U.S. soil earlier this month at Dover Air Pressure Base in Delaware.
In the meantime, buddies, former classmates and colleagues have gathered to recollect the slain troopers whereas awaiting their remaining homecoming to Georgia.
In Waycross, the place 24-year-old Sanders labored at a pharmacy and helped coach youngsters’s basketball and soccer groups, residents gathered at a downtown park for a second of silence shortly after the abroad assault. Her funeral is scheduled Saturday at Ware County Center Faculty.
Preparations in Savannah have been nonetheless pending for Moffett, who turned 23 barely per week earlier than she died. Since then, she has been honored with a ceremony at Windsor Forest Excessive Faculty, the place she was a drum main and JROTC cadet earlier than graduating in 2019. A candlelight vigil was held by Moffett’s employer, United Cerebral Palsy of Georgia, the place she helped educate cooking and different expertise to folks with disabilities.
The deaths have been the primary U.S. fatalities blamed on Iran-backed militia teams after months of intensified assaults on American forces within the area because the Israel-Hamas conflict started in October.
Greater than 40 troops have been additionally injured within the drone assault at Tower 22, a secretive U.S. army desert outpost that allows U.S. forces to infiltrate and quietly go away Syria.
___
Bynum reported from Savannah, Georgia.
Story Continues
© Copyright 2024 Related Press. All rights reserved. This materials will not be printed, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
