A Hero's Courageous Sacrifice

"My brother was very courageous," Ricardo Peralta said. "He wasn't scared of anyone or anything."

Still, his older sister, Icela Donald, 24, wished that her brother had not been so brave.

"It doesn't surprise me that he did something like that," she said. "But it kind of makes me mad. He had a family, and we need him."

Donald, who lives in Florida, came to San Diego to be with Ricardo, their sister Karen and their mother.

The family has been accommodating to the media, but know that soon attention will shift. "People will forget about him," Donald said. "That's when it will hurt the most."

When Peralta's body returned to San Diego for burial, his family members were unable to recognize him. They identified him only by the Marine tattoo on his left shoulder.

Family members kept a two-day vigil next to the casket before burial Nov. 23 at Ft. Rosecrans National Cemetery at Point Loma, Calif.

Ricardo Peralta was the first family member to talk to members of the "casualty notification" team. Despite his youth, he knew instinctively why they had come to his house.

Among family members of Marines, there is no greater fear than seeing an official car pull up at their house, with Marines in dress uniforms.

Ricardo Peralta called his mother to hurry home from her job as a housekeeper at a hospital. Once home, she quickly became distraught and ordered the Marines to leave.

Donald said her mother had only recently begun to recover from the death of her husband and her son's fiancee.

Rosa Peralta's husband, a diesel mechanic, was killed in September 2001 when a truck he was working on rolled and pinned him.

In December 2003, Rafael Peralta's fiancee was killed in a traffic accident in Michoacan, Mexico, where she had gone to attend her mother's funeral.

"God is punishing me, but I don't know why," Rosa Peralta said.

Karen Peralta, 13, knows how she will remember her older brother. "As a hero," she said.

Does his heroism make it easier to accept that he is gone?

"No," she said quietly, her eyes downcast and filling with tears.