Ramona M. Valdez

Name: Marine Cpl. Ramona M. Valdez

Age: 20

From: The Bronx, N.Y.

Assigned to Headquarters Battalion, 2nd Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Lejeune, N.C.

Incident: Marine Cpl. Ramona M. Valdez was killed June 23 when a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device detonated near her convoy vehicle in Fallujah, Iraq.

Died: June 23, 2005

Pa. soldier killed in Iraq suicide bombing

Associated Press

READING, Pa. — The daughter of a family that moved from New York City to Reading two months ago at her urging was killed in a suicide car bomb attack on her Marine convoy in Iraq.

Cpl. Ramona M. Valdez, 20, told her mother, Elida Nuez, she would re-enlist for four more years if the family didn’t move from the Bronx to someplace with less noise and crime, Nuez said.

“I told her, ‘I don’t want you to die. I’ll move,”’ Nuez said Tuesday. She moved to a small Reading row home in April with her youngest daughter, Fiorela Valdez, 19, and Fiorela’s 2-year-old twins, Justin and Joshua.

Ramona, a communications specialist who wanted to become a policewoman, had originally been expected home in May. But she died Thursday in an attack on her convoy in Fallujah.

Fiorela Valdez said the family is bitter about the war it increasingly regards as senseless, and...