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Tears for fallen son

As Sgt. Jose Gomez is laid to rest, a soldier tells how he broke the news of the death to his mom

BY GRAHAM RAYMAN | Newsday Staff Writer

May 11, 2006

When the time came last month to notify Jose Gomez's family that he had been killed in Iraq, the task fell to U.S. Army Sgt. Albert Llaga, a combat medic and supply officer born in the Philippines.

Llaga, 36, who attended Gomez's funeral yesterday in Queens, said afterward that he got the assignment because the person trained for that job was unavailable. And so, Llaga found himself in the company of another soldier on his way to a small walk-up on 104th Street in Corona.

"It was the toughest thing I've ever done," he said after Gomez's funeral at St. Michael's Cemetery in Astoria. "I would rather charge a machine-gun nest. But I would do it again if it would prevent another soldier from doing it."

About 100 people attended Gomez's funeral at the Our Lady of Sorrows Church, a structure that dominates the mostly Hispanic neighborhood of two- and three-story walk-ups.

The Rev. Thomas Healy told the congregation, "There is no greater love than to give your life for your friend." Healy spoke mostly in Spanish, amid the curl of incense smoke.

Lt. Robert Pruitt said Gomez "exemplified all that is good about the warrior spirit."

Maj. Gen. Bill Grisoli, a senior commander with the Army Corps of Engineers, said Gomez's sacrifice "will make the world a better, safer and more peaceful place."

Llaga, 36, spoke with a reporter after he hugged Gomez's mother, Maria Gomez of Corona. Their encounter came just before Maria Gomez collapsed on her son's coffin in the church and embraced it.

Gomez, 23, a sergeant, was killed April 28 when a roadside bomb exploded near his vehicle. A second soldier also was killed.

He was on his second tour of Iraq, but to keep his mother from worrying, he had told her he was in Texas, attending school. Llaga had no way of knowing that when he knocked on the family's door late last month, he said.

Maria Gomez greeted the two soldiers cheerfully at first, he said. But she did not speak much English, and they did not speak fluent Spanish. The soldiers could not at first convey the bad news.

Then, a bilingual neighbor, watching the scene unfold, came to the soldiers' aid and agreed to translate. They went inside to a little table in the cramped apartment that Maria shares with her husband, Felix Jimenez. Llaga used a prepared statement to convey the news.

"Right away, she says, 'No way,'" he recalled. "'That can't be my son. He's not in Iraq. He's in Texas.'"

There at the table, Llaga paused and wondered for an awful moment whether he and the other soldier had the wrong house, the wrong family. Finally, he said, the news sunk in.

Llaga came to the U.S. to go to law school, but after the 9/11 terror attacks, he joined the Army. He has about 14 months left in the stint and will attend law school when he's done, he said.

Speaking after the funeral, he said, "We should have gone into Afghanistan, rebuilt and left a legacy. As for the other war, it's up to people way above my pay grade."

Referring to Gomez's death, he added, "I wish that the president was there when I was notifying the mother."

Corona City Councilman Hiram Monserrate pointed out that Gomez lived a few blocks from Marlon Bustamante, a soldier killed in Iraq in February. "It's a sad day," he said. "I really wish the conflict would stop. It's inflicting so much pain and suffering on the community."