Ryan Jones remembered

WESTMINSTER— First Lt. Ryan P. Jones was the type of soldier who told his mother to send care packages to the men in his unit in Iraq, rather than just to him.

And when one of those packages arrived with a bar of soap wrapped in a note from a grade-school boy, Lt. Jones wrote back.

The boy has carried the letter from the Westminster soldier for two weeks now, said family friend Denise L. MacAloney.

It’s the kind of story friends and acquaintances tell about Lt. Jones, as they remember a man with a generous heart, a degree from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and a devotion to the military.

The 23-year-old combat engineer died Wednesday, in Baghdad, of wounds received when his vehicle hit a roadside bomb, also known as an improvised explosive device, according to the U.S. Department of Defense. Lt. Jones had been assigned to the 4th Brigade Special Troops Battalion, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division out of Fort Riley, Kan.

Also in the vehicle and killed in the incident was Spc. Astor A. Sunsin-Pineda, 20, of Long Beach, Calif., the Defense Department said.

Lt. Jones entered the Army in May 2005 and began serving with the 1st Infantry Division in December 2005. He went to Iraq in February.

A church secretary and a WPI professor were in tears yesterday as they talked about him.

“He was nice to everyone,” said Aline Consentino, a secretary at Holy Spirit Church in Gardner who had Lt. Jones in a First Communion class.

With his smile, energy and happy disposition, the WPI student would brighten up a room, said Frederick L. Hart, head of WPI’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Lt. Jones graduated from Montachusett Regional Vocational Technical School in 2001 and went on to get a degree in civil engineering from WPI, graduating in 2005.

“I knew Ryan. He was a great kid,” Monty Tech Superintendent-Director James R. Culkeen said yesterday morning. “He certainly exemplified what we want a Monty Tech graduate to be.”

When Lt. Jones was a student in the program, Mr. Culkeen taught house carpentry, but didn’t have him in his class.

“If you worked here then, you knew who this kid was,” Mr. Culkeen said. “Some staff members have taken the news quite hard.”

Lt. Jones had been corresponding with the students in the school’s Junior ROTC program, and the students just received a letter from him Monday. Mr. Culkeen fought to keep his emotions in check as he read from the letter while sitting on a couch in his office.

In the neatly handwritten letter, the lieutenant describes his unit’s work clearing explosive devices. After calling IEDs the most dangerous weapon in the insurgents’ arsenal, he wrote: “There have been a few times the IEDs have found us before we found them, but don’t worry, our trucks have enough armor on them to survive most blasts.”

Mr. Culkeen said a scholarship would be set up in Lt. Jones’ name, as the soldier had wanted should something happen to him.

Adam Epstein attended WPI with Lt. Jones, and both were orientation leaders, helping freshmen get acclimated at the school. Mr. Epstein, now assistant director of alumni relations at WPI, said when he initially met his friend, he seemed quiet, but once they got to know each other he really opened up. And he was one of students’ favorite orientation leaders to hang out with, Mr. Epstein said.

Along with serving in the ROTC at WPI, the soldier was a member of the Phi Kappa Theta fraternity, and a movie buff who had rated about 1,500 movies on Netflix, an online DVD rental site, Mr. Epstein said.

“His knowledge of movies was unbelievable,” his friend said.

Mrs. MacAloney, a family friend and the Westminster town clerk, remembers him as an altar boy at Holy Spirit Church.

“He just grew up into such a wonderful person,” she said.

His parents, Kevin and Elaine Jones, weren’t available for comment yesterday. An American flag flew at half-staff in the family’s driveway.

When the soldier’s mother wanted to send him a care package in Iraq, he told her he wanted “my guys” to have the packages, Mrs. MacAloney said.

Mrs. Jones went to work organizing a drive to collect donations for 24 packages for his unit that were packed up at the end of March and sent out.

“She used her worried energies for something really positive,” Mrs. MacAloney said.

His mother already had received some thank-you notes from the soldiers with greetings like, “Dear Lieutenant’s Mom” and messages like, “Now we know why your son’s so nice and generous,” Mrs. MacAloney said.

Lt. Col. Normand Gauthier, the department head of military science at WPI, didn’t know Lt. Jones, but he has served in Iraq, and said that the combat engineer’s work was to go out on the road to clear IEDs.

To accomplish the task, soldiers rely both on what they see — signs of digging or of something unusual — and on equipment, including sensors to detect explosives, Lt. Col. Gauthier said. The work is serious because a lot of people depend on it being done properly, he said.

Rajib Mallick, an associate professor at WPI, served as Lt. Jones’ project adviser and wrote in an e-mail: “Ryan was always willing to help others, and he would help you in such a way that you didn’t know you were being helped. … As I’m saying this, I’m wondering, ‘Why did this happen?’ Ryan was (a) good person and a good student, and he would have helped a lot more people if he were still alive.

“Words seem to be meaningless,” Mr. Mallick wrote. “Ryan was a student you would remember forever for his kind and gentle nature, and his ever willingness to help others.”

From the Worcester Telegram

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Ryan P. Jones dies of injuries from I.E.D.