Paula Proxmire, the mother of Navy Petty Officer Randall Smith, left an American flag and a baseball mitt – representing two of her son’s two passions – at a memorial growing near one of the sites of Thursday’s shootings that left five servicemen and the gunman dead.
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Another sailor has died from his injuries in the shooting at a Tennessee military facility.
Kasich tweeted Saturday that the killings had claimed another victim and Ohio has lost another hero. Proxmire said he had accepted a scholarship to play baseball at Defiance College but injured his shoulder and chose to enlist in the Navy afterward. He was originally from Paulding, Ohio and attending Paulding High School.
On a Facebook page that appeared to belong to Smith, he talked about his wife – “4 years ago I married the perfect woman”, he wrote in January – and their three children. “Angie is at work and I get to spend all day with the 3 little Princesses….no better way to spend Father’s Day”, he wrote in June. He had three little girls.
Smith had extensive damage to his liver and colon and underwent immediate surgery. “In case you thought it was about a 3 day weekend, parties or the beach”. While the friend did not think anything of the text when he received it, he told Reuters he now believes it may have been intended as a sign that something was about to happen.
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She said she heard about the shooting in a phone call from a friend. “We are exploring all travel that he has done and we have asked our intelligence partners throughout the world to provide us with any information they may have”, Ed Reinhold of the FBI said at a news conference.
