By M. Scott Carter
The Moore American
OKLAHOMA CITY
April 05, 2007 06:21 pm
—
The family and friends of Lance Cpl. Trevor Roberts said their final goodbyes to the 21-year-old Marine Monday morning.
Roberts was killed in the Al Anbar province of Iraq March 24, when a roadside bomb exploded under his Humvee.
He was expected to return home in April.
Roberts’ funeral was held Monday morning at Oklahoma City’s Eagle Heights Baptist Church.
Speaking to a capacity crowd, Eagle Heights pastor Rob Olmstead praised Roberts’ life and his commitment to his faith and his family.
“If you had Trevor as a friend, you had a friend forever,” Olmstead said. “He was a man of high passion, commitment and conviction.”
Standing in front of Roberts’ silver-gray, flag-draped casket, Olmstead spoke about the Marine’s love of his parents, his friends, and of his deep Christian faith.
“He could always be counted on,” Olmstead said. “He was always helpful. Whatever it was, Trevor was in the middle of it.”
Roberts, he said, was always looking for “the best way” to do something. “He was never satisfied just doing. He wanted to get beyond that.”
And it was that type of personality, Olmstead said, that made Roberts a good Marine. “He told me he wanted to do this all the way. He wanted to be a Marine because the Marines were the toughest.”
Roberts, Olmstead said, could also see both sides of the Iraq conflict. “His experiences in Iraq were pretty amazing. He was always aware of the culture and slow to judge it. He was open to learning from it.”
Roberts, assigned to Marine Forces Reserve’s 2nd Battalion, 14th Marine Regiment, 4th Marine Division, was in the right rear passenger seat of the Humvee when an improvised explosive device (IED) went off underneath the vehicle, said 1st Sgt. Scott Baker, a spokesman for Roberts’ unit. Another person riding in the vehicle suffered a minor concussion.
Baker said Roberts was one of 30 Marines from the unit who volunteered to go to Iraq and had been in that country for seven months.
“He loved being a Marine,” Olmstead said. “He told his parents that after he got out of the Marines he wanted to be a foreign missionary. Trevor was pretty much a fixture on any trip the church took.”
The church’s other pastor, the Rev. Brad Davis, said Roberts “proved his love” for his fellow man by going to Iraq.
“Trevor expressed his love for God and for people by making the ultimate sacrifice,” Davis said. “He was a remarkable man.”
With a crowd of more than 1,000 watching — including a motorcycle group with “Vietnam Veteran” stitched on their jackets, and older soldiers displaying emblems from the Korean War and World War II — representatives from the Bransetter Funeral Home opened Roberts’ casket.
It took more than an hour for the crowd to move slowly past the still Marine.
“Trever looked past himself,” Davis said. “He was taken from us in the blink of an eye, but he lived a bold, upside-down type of life.”
After the crowd left, family members spent several minutes with Roberts inside the church.
Shortly after noon, the seven-man Marine color guard somberly carried Roberts’ casket to a polished white Cadillac hearse. Standing alongside the car, seven Oklahoma City policemen quietly saluted as Roberts was placed inside the vehicle.
Following the church service, a smaller, graveside service was held. Roberts was buried with full military honors.
Roberts graduated from Westmoore High School in 2004 and attended Oklahoma City Community College. Roberts wanted to study anthropology or sociology.
Prior to the service, a small group of people, affiliated with the Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church, protested the service. The group, which has protested at military funerals across the nation, chanted and sang but stayed about 200 yards from the church.
Trevor Roberts was the 3,246th American soldier to die in Iraq since the war began in 2003.
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