Marine Lance Cpl. Andrew W. Nowacki

Died February 26, 2005 Serving During Operation Iraqi Freedom

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24, of South Euclid, Ohio; assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 24th Marine Regiment, 4th Marine Division, Marine Forces Reserve, Erie, Pa.; killed Feb. 26 by enemy action in Babil province, Iraq.

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Marine from northeast Ohio killed in Iraq

Associated Press

PAINESVILLE, Ohio — A northeast Ohio Marine on his second tour of duty in Iraq was killed by a roadside bomb, his family said.

Andy Nowacki, 24, died Saturday while serving as a gunner on a Humvee that was protecting a truck convoy south of Baghdad, said his mother, Sheila Nowacki of Painesville.

“He’s been in Iraq more than he’s been home the last two years,” she said. “But he was really OK with being over there because he saw the oppression and the cruelty that had happened to the people there.

“He thought a lot of the Iraqi people and he was willing to go back because he thought we were doing so much good.”

Nowacki graduated from Brush High School in the Cleveland suburb of Lyndhurst in 1998, and enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserve the following fall.

His commitment to the reserves was almost up, his mother said, but they “pulled him back in and he was deployed.”

Nowacki was a police officer in Grand River, about 25 miles northeast of Cleveland.

Police Chief Robert Antonelli called Nowacki an “ideal police officer.”