A yellow ribbon hung on the door of Marine Lance Cpl. William White's boyhood home in Brooklyn, but hope had given way to grief yesterday as his family mourned the first soldier from the city to die in the Iraq war.

White, 24, drowned after his military Humvee rolled into a canal Friday.

"You listen to the news every morning, and all you hear is that this one got killed, that one got killed. That's just something I never expected to hear about him," said White's cousin Ninosca Martinez, 28. "I expected to see him home."

Martinez and other relatives and friends gathered yesterday at the East New York home of White's mother, Martha Holder.

On the front porch of the house were American flags and a framed photograph of White, a 1998 graduate of Bushwick High School, in his Marine dress uniform. He leaves behind a wife, Mychelle, whom he married in September 2001.

As White's family mourned, so did the relatives of two other local soldiers killed in Iraq.

Army Sgt. Eugene Williams, 24, of upstate Highland and Army Cpl. Michael Curtin, 21, of Howell, N.J., were killed Friday when a suicide bomber detonated a car bomb at a checkpoint outside the south-central Iraqi city of Najaf.

Williams' sister, Lori Ackert, told the Poughkeepsie Journal she got a letter Saturday in which her brother wrote that he couldn't wait to return to Ulster County and cook his family a good meal.

"This just brings the family together," said Lori Ackert, 27. "It opens our eyes and makes us realize you can die at any time."

In a statement, Michael and Joan Curtin said their son was a "hero in our eyes."

"He was fighting for our freedom, which we should never take for granted," they wrote.

'He said he was a soldier'

In Brooklyn, White's younger brothers Charles Holder, 18, and Bryan Holder, 16, spent the day comforting their heartbroken mother, who hadn't wanted her son to go to Iraq. "She just didn't want him to go. It's like she had a premonition that something bad would happen," said an aunt, Rita Russell.

White's cousin Althia Russell-Muse, 26, said the Marine's father, Mark White, who recently retired from the Army, offered to do anything to get his son excused from duty in Iraq. But his son declined the offer. "He said he was a soldier, not a fake Marine," Russell-Muse said. "He had trained all these years and now he wanted to do his job."

Martinez said William White, who was with the 3rd Amphibious Assault Battalion of the Marines 1st Division, was to have been discharged in February, but the impending war changed those plans. His mother placed a yellow ribbon on her door in January when he shipped out to the Middle East from Camp Pendleton, Calif.

On March 1, William White sent his last letter home, enclosing a $100 bill to help his brother Bryan pay his cell phone tab. He included a note reading, "If you already paid your bill, keep the dough anyways."

"That's him," Martinez said. "He always thinks about his little brothers. He cared about his family, that was the first thing. He was one in a million."

Originally published on March 31, 2003