Police shot and killed
Marine Lance Cpl. Andres Raya after he fired on police, killing one and wounding another. Cpl. Raya had been haunted by his service in Iraq, where he found the reasons for war to be a lie.
"It's awful what happened, and we don't want to make excuses because it's a double tragedy," said cousin Araceli Valdez, 23. "But we do know one thing. That man on the liquor store surveillance cameras wasn't our cousin. He wasn't Andy anymore."
Raya's lifelong friend Lalo Madrigal said Raya "just wasn't the same after the war -- he couldn't hold a conversation anymore."
Raya was apparently eager to become a Marine.
Raya was eager to graduate from Ceres High School in 2003 so he could join the Marines, said his recruiter, Staff Sgt. Robert Tellez. He pegged Raya as a possible career Marine, based on his family support and his participation in Marine activities before he left for boot camp.
But when Raya returned to his family last fall, he was questioning the purpose of the war and encouraging his relatives to see Michael Moore's anti- war movie, "Fahrenheit 9/11," said his 24-year-old cousin, Alex Raya.
Apparently the news coming out of Iraq is not even as good as the depressing version we get here.
At Thanksgiving, he told his family he had seen Marines commit suicide rather than continue fighting in Iraq.
"He kept saying it was a war that had no point, that it was all for oil, and it made no sense that we were after (Osama) bin Laden but went after Saddam Hussein instead," Alex Raya said.
"He showed us pictures of this guy's hand hanging off," he said. "He told us about going into homes and shooting them up, and he said he wouldn't pull the trigger a lot because he didn't want to kill anyone."
Read the article. It's too many tragedies for just one story.
