Fallen Lieutenant's Memory Carved in Stone

[USMCRET6391]

NEW YORK CITY (May 25, 2006) -- A Marine officer, celebrated collegiate athlete and Naval Academy graduate who was slain by a roadside bomb in Anbar, Iraq, Sept. 3, 2004, was immortalized here May 25 when city, Corps and local industry officials unveiled a memorial in his honor in a shady corner of Manhattan’s William Cullen Bryant Park.


1st Lt. Ronald Winchester was assigned to Weapons Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, at the time of his death, according to the words etched into a concrete slab flanked by flowers on the park’s western edge. He was on his second deployment to Iraq. He was 25. And he was a New Yorker “through and through,” said his father, also named Ronald.


Manhattan borough parks commissioner Bill Castro opened the ceremony and explained Bryant Park is the only one in the city to host a memorial to a fallen Marine in the ongoing global war on terrorism.


The Bryant Park Corporation, a not-for-profit organization that invests around $5 million each year to maintain the central Manhattan oasis, made the memorial possible by brining Corps and city officials into the process, which has been in the works since last summer, said Barbara Brookhart, assistant to the corporations executive director.


Winchester’s father considers himself “very fortunate to have this much support from the Marines, the city, the park people.”


“This is a first-class tribute to him. He’s right in the middle of Manhattan,” he said.


After graduating the Naval Academy in 2001, Winchester was assigned to the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, Calif., where he would often remind the west-coast Marines in his unit that he was a Yankees fan, his father said.


In his junior year at the Naval Academy, Winchester played football in the Army-Navy game, which his team won 30-28. His is remembered on the Naval Academy Football Players Association Web page as the school’s most recent graduate killed by enemy action. A guestbook on the Website shows nine pages of notes written to “Ronnie” and his family from former teammates and fellow Marines, included a passage from Sgt. Ryan Hall that reads:


“Sir, I think of the last time I talked to you and the things you said to me, wanting to know the wellbeing of your Marines and not concerned of your own. Your Platoon remembers you always. God bless you and your family.”