Army Sgt. Keicia M. Hines, 27; Killed in Airfield Accident

When Army Sgt. Keicia M. Hines was buried last week in Sacramento, she left a particularly painful void in the lives of her mother, Beverly Coleman, and her family.

The 27-year-old soldier was Coleman’s only child. And because Coleman’s two sisters do not have children, Hines also was an only niece and an only grandchild and great-grandchild on her mother’s side of the family.

Hines was killed Jan. 14 when she was accidentally struck by a vehicle at Mosul Airfield in Iraq, military officials said.

“She was the baby,” her mother said last week before a motorcade of Sacramento police officers and military officials escorted Hines’ body from the airport to the mortuary. “I’m extremely proud of her. The loss is tremendous, but she was doing what she wanted to do. She was just so honorable.”

Hines, who was assigned to the 108th Military Police, Combat Support Company at Ft. Bragg, N.C., was buried Thursday in the veterans’ section of St. Mary’s Cemetery.

As of Friday, 505 American servicemen and women had been killed in Iraq -- 367 since major fighting ended May 1. Hines is one of 56 servicemen and women with ties to California -- five from the Sacramento area -- who have died.

Hines was born in Sacramento and attended Florin High School, where she was a guard on the varsity basketball team, her family said. She graduated in 1994 and worked for a year before the bubbly young woman who loved to baby-sit for friends joined the Army.

Coleman said she had been concerned for her daughter’s safety, but Hines had felt that serving “would give her some stability and some direction and some discipline.”

Hines took basic training at Ft. Jackson in South Carolina, where she met Sean Hines, a fellow soldier and her future husband.

Hines served tours of duty in Germany, Turkey and Bosnia before she returned to Ft. Jackson in 2001, her mother said. On Christmas Eve that year, she married Sean in Detroit.

Last July, while both were stationed at Ft. Bragg, Hines was deployed to Iraq while her husband stayed behind.

When she wrote home, Hines told her mother that she felt sorry for children who suffered from malnutrition.

“She loved children so much,” Coleman said. “She told me, ‘I tell you what, Mama, I will never take anything for granted, and I will appreciate everything I have.’ ”

Hines did not know when she would return from Iraq, but upon returning, she and Sean planned to start a family of their own, Coleman said.

“The last thing she told me was, she wanted to live in Virginia,” her mother said. “She told me Virginia reminded her a lot of Sacramento.”

Hines also is survived by her father, Rudolph Dixon of Chicago; her maternal grandparents, Robert and Mary Coleman of West Sacramento; and a great-grandmother, Ida Wheeler of West Sacramento.