DOB/DOD: June 5, 1966 (Lajas, Puerto Rico) – December 3, 2004; 38 years old
CHILDREN: Three sons, Alex (1989-), Danny (1989), and Jacob Irizarry (1999-). One daughter, Melissa (1986-).
LOCAL ADDRESS: Vista Place; Waterbury
ENLISTMENT: August 1984
MILITARY OCCUPATIONAL SPECIALTY: 19D30; Cavalry Scout
UNIT: Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 1st Battalion, 69th Infantry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division; New York, NY
FAMILY: Father Henry E. Irizarry, Sr. [Army veteran of the 65th Infantry Regiment “The Borinquineers” from Puerto Rico] (1933-2023) and Maria Muñiz (1945-). One sister, Brenda Irizarry Saltachin (1967-). Four brothers, Oscar Velez (1960-), Raul Arroyo (1962-), Jose Irizarry (1963-) and Harry Feliciano (1969-).
DECORATIONS: Awarded the Bronze Star Medal, Purple Heart Medal, Army Good Conduct Medal, Army Commendation Medal with device, National Defense Service Medal with device, Global War on Terrorism Medal (Expeditionary), Global War on Terrorism Medal (Service), Armed Forces Reserve Medal with ‘X’ and ‘M’ devices, Army NCO Professional Development Ribbon with ‘2’ device, Army Service Ribbon, and the Army Overseas Service Ribbon.
CIRCUMSTANCES: Staff Sergeant Irizarry was killed on December 3, 2004, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his Humvee while his unit was on patrol in Taji, Iraq.
OTHER: His family shared that they always knew he would go in the Army because he played with the small, green, plastic Army figures when he was young. They also shared that Henry worked at the scene of the World Trade Center and at the scene of American Airlines Flight 587 on November 12, 2001, in Queens, New York. Also, he was one month from retirement when his retirement was canceled so he could deploy to Iraq.
From The Record-Journal (Meriden, CT) on December 7, 2004
By Matt Apuzzo | Associated Press
WATERBURY SOLDIER KILLED IN IRAQ
HARTFORD — In his final letter from Iraq, Staff Sergeant Henry E. Irizarry told his wife to make plans for a
family Christmas because he was coming home on leave. Instead. Jessica Irizarry is making funeral arrangements. Her husband died December 3rd when a bomb went off near his vehicle in Taji, Iraq, Army officials said Monday. Irizarry, 38, left his Waterbury home in October, his wife said. A 20-year Army veteran, he was looking forward to retirement but reassured Jessica and their children that he’d be home soon. “I worried, of course, but he said nothing was going to happen,” she said Monday. “He was going to come back. Everything was going to be OK.” Born in Puerto Rico, Irizarry moved to the Bronx with his family when he was 13, his wife said. Jessica and Henry met briefly through a mutual trend. When they parted, Henry pestered the friend for weeks to get them together again. Finally, Jessica’s friend passed on Henry’s number, and she agreed to dinner. She immediately noticed his brown eyes, her favorite feature of her husband-to-be. “When he met his wife, he changed his ways a bit and became a family man,” said Sergeant 1st Class Raul Colon Jr., who knew Irizarry for 15 years and remembers catching baseball games and parties early in their friendship. “He loved his wife. He loved his kids.” The family moved to Connecticut in 1997 in search of an easier life, Jessica Irizarry said. They were married for seven years. He had four children and a stepdaughter, family members said. Three of the children live in Connecticut, one in New York, and one in Bridgeport. A factory worker, he loved movies and family vacations to Walt Disney World. Irizarry was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 69th Infantry Regiment, based in New York City. “It is so sad to hear of the death of another soldier from Connecticut.” Governor M. Jodi Rell said. “We are seeing once again that war is taking a heavy toll on our nation’s service men and women, as well as their families and friends.” Henry Irizarry’s mother lives in Waterbury and his father in Puerto Rico. “Staff Sergeant Irizarry bravely answered the call to duty in Iraq, risking his life to spread the cause of freedom and to make our world safe from threats of terror,” New York Governor George E. Pataki said. The Connecticut flag is already at half-staff in honor of Army Lieutenant Michael J. McMahon, who died November 27 in a plane crash in Bamiyan, Afghanistan. Rell has ordered state flags to remain at half-staff until both soldiers are buried.
From The New York Daily News December 7, 2004
By Kerry Burke, Albor Ruiz, and Dave Goldiner | Daily News Staff Writers
BLAST IN IRAQ CLAIMS ANOTHER SON OF THE CITY
New York wept again yesterday for a fallen hero as yet another soldier from a Manhattan-based reserve unit was killed in Iraq. As funerals were being planned for two soldiers, the military announced that Staff Sergeant Henry Irizarry, a son of the Bronx, was killed when his Humvee hit a roadside bomb outside Baghdad. “He loved being a soldier,” said Brenda Irizarry, the slain man’s sister, in her Brooklyn apartment. “Ever since he was little, he wanted to be one.” Irizarry, 38, father of four and a devout born-again Christian, had told his wife in his last letter he hoped to be home for Christmas. Instead, he became the third soldier from Manhattan’s 69th Infantry Regiment of the Army National Guard to die in Iraq in recent days. “Staff Sergeant Irizarry risked his life to spread the cause of freedom and to make our world safe from threats of terror,” Governor Pataki said. Last week, Bronx firefighter Christian Engeldrum and Long Island security guard Wilfredo Urbina were killed when their Humvee drove over a similar roadside bomb near Fallujah. On a windy, rain-swept day, the flags flew at half-staff for all three slain soldiers at the unit’s headquarters on Lexington Avenue and E. 26th Street. “He had been in Iraq only one month,” said Irizarry’s widow, Jessica. “He was a good man.” Even Irizarry’s youngest son knew something was terribly wrong when military officers in full dress uniform came to knock on the door of the family’s home Saturday. Jacob Irizarry, 5, started sobbing when the soldiers started to tell his mom that his dad had been killed in Iraq Friday. “He overheard what the men said and began to cry,” said Henry Irizarry was killed when insurgents set off a remote-control bomb, blowing him out of the right side of his military vehicle, authorities said. Three other men in the Humvee survived the attack near the town of Taji, 30 miles north of Baghdad. Born in Puerto Rico, Irizarry moved with his family to the Bronx as a teenager and graduated from William H. Taft High School. He grew up idolizing his father, who joined the Army and fought in the Korean War. “He wanted to be brave, like him,” Brenda Irizarry said. Irizarry’s wife met him at a party and later cajoled a friend into handing over his phone number. He agreed to a dinner date, and it changed their lives. Irizarry has three sons and a daughter, ranging in age from 5 to 18. Looking for a better life, he moved a few years ago to Waterbury, Connecticut. He joined the Army Reserves when he was 18 but had never been sent abroad until this year. Even though his unit saw plenty of action, Irizarry told his wife not to worry when he called home. “He said, so far, he was okay,” she recalled, choking back tears. Just days before he died, Irizarry called his sister to tell her he was being sent to a more dangerous area of Iraq. “The last thing he said was he didn’t know when he was going to talk to us again,” said Brenda Irizarry. “Then he said, ‘God bless you.’ He always said that. He was a very spiritual person.” The grieving widow said her husband did not agree with the decision to invade Iraq — but believed it was not his role to question his commanders. “I don’t see any clear reason for this war, but what can you do?” she asked. “He was a soldier and had to fulfill his duty.” Brenda Irizarry is happy her brother will be buried with the highest military honors, even though it will not help his four children grow up without their father. “It’s good they’re honoring him. It shows they know what a good soldier they lost,” she said, clutching his Army photographs. “But we’d rather have him home.”
From The Hartford Courant June 30, 2005
By Jonathan Finer and Andy Mosher | Washington Post
TROOPS AVENGE SOLDIER – IN COURT
Connecticut Sergeant’s Platoon Helped Make Case Against Iraqi Roadside Bomber
BAGHDAD, Iraq — As Staff Sergeant Henry E. Irizarry of Waterbury, Connecticut, lay dying last December after a roadside bomb tore apart his Humvee, his platoon fanned out like seasoned homicide detectives. Combing a nearby stretch of pasture in the town of Taji north of Baghdad, soldiers found a wire leading from the charred blast site to a field, where someone saw a head peeking out above scraggly reeds. The man ignored a warning shot, and gunfire directed at him missed. Soldiers gave chase and cornered him in a nearby house, where they took him into detention. They swabbed his hands with a kit designed to detect explosive residue. He tested positive. As a result of their efforts and the work of a team of Army lawyers assigned to the case, the Central Criminal Court of Iraq on May 25 sentenced Ziyad Hassan to 15 years in prison for the death of Irizarry, a father of four from the Bronx who had recently resettled in Connecticut. It was just the second time that an Iraqi court has found an insurgent guilty of murder in the killing of a U.S. soldier and the first conviction of a roadside bomber. “It is very, very rare to catch one of these guys and have what we need to nail him,” said Lieutenant John Dunlap, a staff judge advocate with the 256th Brigade Combat Team, which built the case against Hassan, including evidence from Irizarry’s widow. “They had testimony from coalition witnesses and people who got injured who complained against the one who did the crime,” an Iraqi judge who served on the panel that decided the case said on condition of anonymity. Judges have been frequent targets of insurgent attacks. “There were photographs and sketches in the file and also medical reports. There was lots of evidence, and they are getting better and more experienced at presenting it,” he said. Hassan’s conviction was a breakthrough in the military’s increasingly successful effort to prosecute those who target its troops, Army lawyers in Iraq said. Since March 30, 18 people have received life sentences from the court for crimes related to attacks against coalition forces, said Major J. Ed Christiansen of Task Force 134, which processes detainees and their legal cases. Before that date, the longest sentence handed down had been 15 years. The Hassan case has helped bring about more comprehensive training for front-line soldiers in gathering crime-scene evidence and highlights the challenges facing military lawyers in Iraq’s legal system, which they are still working to understand. For example, before Hassan was convicted, the Iraqi prosecutor on the case sought to have it dismissed, citing an alibi the defendant had offered. In recent weeks, lawyers with the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division — to which Irizarry was assigned — began providing counterinsurgency units with kits containing cameras, explosive detection devices, and pens and paper for sketching diagrams of the events. A slideshow prepared by judge advocates shows soldiers how to photograph crime scenes and place evidence in plastic bags without smearing fingerprints. “Hopefully, you are going to see more of these convictions as our lawyers get a better handle on the justice system and our soldiers get more comfortable with how to gather evidence,” said Colonel William Hudson, staff judge advocate for the 3rd Infantry Division. “People who commit crimes against us and against Iraqi society should be held accountable.” The attack that killed Irizarry, 38, came on the afternoon of December 3 as four Humvees carrying soldiers from the Manhattan-based 1st Battalion, 69th Infantry Regiment, rumbled along a dirt road near Taji, 35 miles north of Baghdad. “The mood was light-hearted and joking,” according to an April 28 affidavit signed by John L. Cushman, a medic who was traveling with Irizarry in the convoy’s rear vehicle. “We were all talking of leave plans and making jokes and picking on each other.” The calm was broken by a thunderous crack that lifted the armored vehicle off the ground. A rush of shrapnel and hot smoke came shooting up through the floor, killing Irizarry and wounding Sergeant Adrian Melendez and Specialist Todd Reed. The legal follow-up to the attack took place just outside Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone, in a round, bullet-riddled building that once housed President Saddam Hussein’s art collection and other valuables. The court hearing the case was created by the U.S.-led occupation authority in 2008 to handle Iraq’s most serious criminal cases. Of the 490 U.S.-held detainees brought before the court, roughly two-thirds have been convicted, according to military data. Most convictions were for relatively minor charges such as illegal weapons possession or illegally crossing into Iraq from other countries. Prosecutions unfold in two distinct phases: an investigative hearing in the chambers of one judge and a trial in one of the building’s cavernous courtrooms, where a panel of three judges determines guilt or innocence. Hassan’s trial began on March 15. Five U.S. soldiers testified, and the judge charged him — along with a brother who was also detained at the scene of the attack — with terrorism. But a month later, one day before the final phase was to begin, the Iraqi prosecutor told Dunlap, the staff judge advocate, he would seek to have the case dismissed. Three of Hassan’s co-workers had come forward to testify that he had been at work when the bombing took place, and the prosecutor said he found their statements credible. “We definitely lacked an appreciation for some of the subtleties of Iraqi law because we didn’t even know when and how they got that testimony in,” Dunlap said. “We were jumping out of our skin, but there was nothing we could do. All of a sudden, we thought the thing was over.” The investigative judge rejected the prosecutor’s move to dismiss the case but changed the charge from terrorism to the more specific offenses of murder and assault and scheduled a new trial for May 25. With more time to gather evidence, Army lawyers collected sworn statements from Cushman, Melendez, and Reed, who were recuperating in hospitals in the United States, and from Irizarry’s widow. Lawyers submitted a DVD of photographs set to the song “Wish You Were Here” by the British rock band Pink Floyd. Pictures of a uniformed Irizarry in Iraq are interposed with shots of his ravaged Humvee and his 5-year-old son, Jacob, standing by a flag-draped casket at his father’s funeral. “We had no idea if this would help or not or if the judge would watch it,” Dunlap said. “But we thought it was a powerful message.” When the trial ended, the prosecutor again argued that the case should be dismissed, citing the alibi the defendant had offered. But the three-judge panel sentenced Hassan to 15 years. His brother was acquitted because of a precedent in Iraqi law that absolves people who help family members conceal crimes after they occur, Dunlap said. “We listened carefully to what the [defendant] said and compared it to all the other witnesses to decide if he was honest,” the trial judge said. “We did not believe the guy. We knew he was lying.” Dunlap and other lawyers involved in the case called it an important victory that would embolden their efforts to prosecute insurgents and a demonstration for troops that attackers they detain will not simply end up back on the streets. But the conviction was of no consequence to Irizarry’s widow, Jessica Irizarry, 26, of Waterbury. “I’m no one to judge anyone,” she said Wednesday. “It doesn’t matter how many years they give him; it’s not going to bring my husband back. God is in charge of justice.” She said adjusting to life without Henry Irizarry has been difficult, especially when she looks at the son they had together. “It’s something I can’t explain to him,” Irizarry said. “He doesn’t understand.” In Baghdad, soldiers from her husband’s unit said the conviction gave them little consolation either. Posted in the entryway of their Baghdad barracks are photos of 17 soldiers killed since they arrived in Iraq. “You lose a friend, and that’s it, he’s not coming back,” said Sergeant Jason Olmo, 30, of Merrick, New York, who was riding in a Humvee two vehicles ahead of Irizarry’s on the day of the attack. “I’d rather kill the guy who did this myself. He’s lucky we didn’t get to take him home that day.”
Honored on the City of Waterbury (CT) Global War On Terrorism Memorial
Memorialized on the Monumento a los Soldados Caidos in Lajas, Puerto Rico.
SSG Irizarry is also memorialized on the El Monumento de la Recordacion (The Monument of Remembrance) in San Juan, Puerto Rico
Staff Sergeant Irizarry is buried in Connecticut State Veterans Cemetery, 317 Bow Lane, Middletown, Connecticut; Section 70G, Site 22.
