Army Spc. Tony J. Gonzales, 20, Newman; killed in explosion in Iraq

On the night of Dec. 28, Tony Gonzales sat down at his home computer in Newman, Calif. to write his only son an e-mail. TJ was serving his first tour of duty in Iraq, and his father wanted to tell him that their beloved Dallas Cowboys had just lost a game.

There was a knock at the door. Two Army officers stood there, under the porch light.

“I could see the uniforms and the medals,” Gonzales said. “I wanted to barricade the door. I just said to myself, ‘No, no, no, it can’t be.’ ”

The officers had come to tell Gonzales and his wife, Marlynn, that their son, Spc. Tony J. Gonzales, 20, had been killed earlier that day in Sadr City, Iraq, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle.

TJ was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 6th Infantry Regiment, 2nd Brigade, 1st Armored Division. He was the youngest of the couple’s four children and, according to his father, “the son that every man would want.”

“We’d wrestle, we’d play football, we’d play army. We used to love to watch the Three Stooges,” Gonzales said. “He wanted to follow exactly in my footsteps, and that made me so proud.”

Gonzales had served in the Air Force and spent 30 years on the police force in nearby Los Gatos. TJ grew up riding around in his father’s patrol car and dreaming of one day wearing an officer’s uniform. His mother said he would have been a natural.

“He was always a little policeman,” she said. “When he was a boy, he was very protective of me and his older sisters.” When his father was not at home, TJ would say, “Mommy, did you lock all of the doors?”

As TJ grew older, he developed his own identity. He loved playing the drums and listening to country western music and he got several tattoos, his mother said. But she said he never veered from the principles that his parents valued.

“We always taught our kids that there is a difference between right and wrong, and we said, ‘You are going to do right,’ ” she said.

In 2006, TJ signed up for the Army. He left for basic training a few months after he graduated from Freedom Alternative High in Turlock.

His unit was stationed in Baumholder, Germany. But he was home on leave in early 2008 -- and one day, he told his mother he was going to the mall.

“He said, ‘I want to go buy a Western shirt and I want to meet some pretty girls,’ ” she said. “It took him three hours because he ended up talking to the salesclerk.”

The clerk soon became his girlfriend.

Before TJ returned to Germany, he gave Deserae Wakefield, 19, a big teddy bear with a love note written on the bottoms of its paws.

TJ and Deserae fell in love over the phone, Marlynn said. She said she was glad her son paid his own phone bill, because he talked to Deserae for five or six hours each night when he was in Germany. They kept talking after he shipped out to Iraq.

He told his family that he bought her a promise ring to commemorate their first anniversary. He was going to give it to her when he came home, in early January.

When TJ’s parents found out he had died, they called Deserae. She came to the house clutching the teddy bear.

“She said, ‘I need to show you something that I had gotten for TJ’ ” Marlynn said. Deserae, too, had a promise ring she’d been looking forward to presenting face to face.

On New Year’s Eve, the family gave Deserae the ring TJ had bought her. She put the ring she had bought for him in TJ’s coffin. He was buried with it Wednesday at the San Joaquin Valley National Cemetery in Santa Nella.

kate.linthicum@latimes.com