Marine Corps Pfc. Ramon Romero, 19, Huntington Park; Killed in Bombing

Even as he took his first ungainly steps as a toddler, Ramon Romero displayed a distinct distaste for being kept from doing things on his own.

“If he fell, I would run to him because I was afraid he was going to get hurt,” said his mother, Maria Romero. “But if I picked him up, he would get mad. He wanted to get up by himself. Even when he was little, he had a very decisive character.”

She laughed as she recalled how her son would return from Police Explorer training meetings only to lead a group of children in their Huntington Park neighborhood in exercise and drills. And she remembered how she worried when he told her two years ago that he wanted to be a Marine. “I told him, ‘Mijo, if you do that, right away they’re going to send you to the war. I don’t want to sign for you,’ ” Romero, 41, recalled. “He said, ‘Mom, if everyone thought like you, this country wouldn’t be free. We need people to defend the country.’ ”

On Aug. 22, Ramon Romero, 19, was killed when a roadside bomb detonated next to his military vehicle in Fallouja, Iraq.

Now, Maria Romero said, it is time for her to practice a lesson that her firstborn son unwittingly taught her many years ago. “I have to be strong like him and not let myself fall, for my children,” she said. “I have to pick myself up because you have to keep going forward.”

A graduate of Huntington Park High School, Ramon Romero wanted to study criminology and become a police officer after leaving the Marine Corps. His family’s travails in Watts, where their home was routinely burglarized, inspired him early on to want to become a cop, his mother said.

For three years, he took taekwondo lessons at the Blue Dragon Taekwondo School in Huntington Park, where an instructor said he demonstrated a thirst for discipline and teaching younger pupils. “He was one of the best students I ever had,” Thomas Duenas said. “He was the ideal student: disciplined, very respectful and always willing to lend a helping hand.”

The teenager saw the Marines as an opportunity to learn skills that would help him as a police officer. In 2003, he began to visit Camp Pendleton twice a month in preparation for boot camp. On July 4, he graduated from boot camp at the Marine base in Twentynine Palms, Calif.

Within days, Romero had shipped off to Iraq, stopping briefly in Ireland, where he sent a letter to his mother dated July 8. “Never in my life did I dream about going to the other side of the world,” he wrote. “I’m prepared for what awaits, and I will take care of myself. Whatever happens, it will be God’s decision. I love you all very much.”

Once in Iraq, Romero told his mom it didn’t look much different from his maternal grandmother’s home in the desert of Sinaloa, Mexico. But he said he came to value one particular bit of advice his mother gave him before he left. “I had told him, ‘Mijo, don’t trust everyone. Look at their eyes; it’ll tell you what they’re thinking. If they hate you, their eyes will tell you. You’ll feel it,’ ” Maria Romero said. “He said, ‘Mom, it really is true that people’s eyes are a window to their heart because there’s some people who see us, and you can see the hate in their eyes.’ ”

She said her son was generally upbeat when he called her, which was almost every day. “I always slept with the telephone on the side of my pillow so I wouldn’t miss his calls,” she said. “Sometimes he only told me, ‘Hi mom, I’m OK. Don’t worry and I love you. I’ve got to go, bye.’ ”

Maria Romero and her husband, Juan, 39, were visiting his family in Tijuana the day Ramon died. When they got back the next day, they saw a Red Cross number on their caller ID, she said. She noticed that her son had not called all weekend. Worried, she called his girlfriend. “She said, ‘Yes, he called me yesterday,’ ” Maria Romero recalled. “He told her that he had to get off the phone because he had to go out on patrol, and that he loved us a lot.”

In a letter, Ramon Romero’s captain told his mother that the young Marine had volunteered to be at the head of the convoy patrol and that his actions probably preserved the lives of others. “He always wanted to be in the front,” his mother said. “Since he was very little, he liked to get ahead.”

Romero was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, 1st Marine Expeditionary Force in Twentynine Palms.

He was buried with full military honors Aug. 30 at Rose Hills Memorial Park in Whittier. He also is survived by a brother, Bernardo, 17; and a sister, Yajaira, 16.