Marine Corps Reserve Maj. Ricardo Crocker, 39, Redondo Beach; Dies in Grenade Attack
LA Times
In the style of a war correspondent, Marine Corps Reserve Maj. Ricardo A. Crocker sent regular dispatches to his colleagues at the Santa Monica Police Department, e-mails and photographs of life on the battlefield in Iraq.
“Two Marines killed, several wounded,” he wrote Aug. 21. “I was hesitant to write about this, however, it’s the reality of this place. Everyone in the battalion is getting through this.”
In the style of true friends, Santa Monica officers e-mailed encouraging messages, sent care packages to Crocker’s division and kept a spot for him in the station where he worked: A life-size cutout photograph of Crocker in his combat gear stands in the detective squad bureau.
“It was like he was still here,” Police Chief James T. Butts Jr. said Saturday. “We’d see his image every day. We’d read the e-mails.”
On Thursday morning, Crocker, 39, a nearly 10-year veteran of the Santa Monica Police Department, was killed in a rocket-propelled grenade attack in Iraq’s Al Anbar province — a vast desert region that stretches west from the cities of Fallouja and Ramadi to the Syrian border. It is now the epicenter of the nation’s insurgency.
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