A former US Marine who was privately hired to fight alongside the Ukrainian Armed Forces against Russian soldiers died this week, it has now been reported.
This is a young man named Willy Joseph Cancel Cabrera, 22, whose parents and one of his uncles are Puerto Rican, according to what the press learned.
Cancel Cabrera had been hired by a private military company to join the ranks in Ukraine when he died on Monday, his relatives told the press in the United States.
“I wanted to go because I believed in what Ukraine was fighting, and I wanted to be a part of it to stop (the Russian invasion) there from coming here, and maybe our American soldiers would not have to participate” in the war, the statement said. Cancel’s mother, Rebecca Cabrera.
Cancel Cabrera flew to Poland on March 12 and arrived in Ukraine a day later to fight alongside men from “many countries,” according to the ex-Marine’s mother.
“It was something that he believed in his heart, that it was the right thing to do. He was the type of man who always stepped forward when everyone else stepped back and there were many men who were like that and who were with him,” she said. woman during a telephone interview.
The family of the young man, who was married and had a seven-month-old baby, now hopes that the company that hired him can recover his body and inform them of the circumstances of his death.
“They haven’t found his body,” the woman said. “They’re trying to get him back, the men that were with him, but it was either get his body back or be killed, but we’d love for him to come back to us,” she added.
Cancel Cabrera was a native of Orange County, New York, and earlier this year he had signed on as a military contractor to supplement his full-time salary as a corrections officer in Tennessee.
Cancel Cabrera’s widow, Brittany Cancel, told Fox News that she sees her husband as a hero.
“My husband died in the Ukraine,” said Brittany Cancel. “He went there wanting to help people, he had always felt that was his main mission in life,” she said.
She also confirmed that her husband volunteered to go to Ukraine, but that he had aspirations to be a policeman or a firefighter.
“He had dreams and aspirations to be a police officer or join the New York Fire Department,” she said. “Naturally, when he found out what was happening in the Ukraine, he was eager to volunteer,” the woman recalled.
The young man’s brother-in-law, Devin Tietze Jr., said the military man was also the “type of person who fights for what is right no matter the outcome” and “he always put everyone before himself.” They had met in the Force. Tietze Jr. is also a Marine.
Although this is the first death of a US military in Ukraine, other Americans have already died in the conflict. James Whitney Hill, 67, was killed in an attack in the city of Chernihiv last month. He had been living in Ukraine for 25 years and working as a teacher, according to his relatives at the time.
American journalist Brent Renaud, 51, died after being shot in the neck by Russian troops in Irpin days before Hill’s death.
The Ukrainian government claims that more than 20,000 volunteers and veterans from 52 nations have enlisted in the Ukrainian army’s International Legion of foreign fighters who wanted to defend the country from the invasion ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Meanwhile, the US State Department said it was “closely monitoring the situation”, while again recommending that US citizens not travel to Ukraine “due to the active armed conflict and the targeting of US citizens in Ukraine by Russian government security officials.
