Two more New Jerseyans killed in Iraq war

Lawman's loss 'hurts,' says State Police colleague
Thursday, June 26, 2008 BY RICK HEPP AND TOM FEENEY
Star-Ledger Staff

A New Jersey State Police detective on his third tour of duty overseas with the U.S. Army Reserve was killed this week when a bomb exploded inside a local government building in Baghdad.
Dwayne M. Kelley, 48, of South Orange, a major in a civil affairs unit of the Army Reserve, was one of 10 people, including four Americans, killed in the blast early Tuesday. The State Police announced his death yesterday.

"He felt it was his duty to protect his country," said his sister, Sabrina Dalton of Montclair. "He said to take it over there instead of over here. I always asked him if he was afraid or not. He never answered. He always said, 'That's my duty.' He was brave to a fault."

Kelley, a member of the 432nd Civil Affairs Battalion in Green Bay, Wis., was one of two service members from New Jersey killed in Iraq this week.

The Defense Department yesterday said Army Capt. Gregory T. Dalessio, 30, of Cherry Hill died Monday of wounds suffered during combat operations in Salman Pak, Iraq.
Dalessio was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 6th Infantry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division, based in Baumholder, Germany.
Dalessio's stepfather, Tomas Pagano of Cherry Hill, last night said he last spoke with his stepson by telephone on Father's Day.
"I didn't know it was going to be my last conversation with him," Pagano said during a telephone interview. "You never suspect that."
The oldest of eight children, Dalessio was a bachelor, his stepfather said. After getting a bachelor's degree in special education from Seton Hall University in South Orange, he taught for a year before doing some college recruiting for the university, Pagano said.
Then, going through the ROTC program at Seton Hall, Dalessio got a master's degree in international relations and was commissioned in May 2004, Pagano said.
Dalessio began his second deployment in Iraq in April, a deployment that was scheduled to last 15 months, Pagano said. Shortly before he was deployed to Iraq, Pagano and his wife visited him in Germany. Dalessio spoke with his mother on Friday, and they reminisced about that last visit.


"He accomplished so much in 30 years," Pagano said. "If somebody says, 'Just think what he could have done if he lived another 30 years,' I say, 'No, because his life was fulfilled.'"


He and Kelley are the 100th and 101st service members with ties to New Jersey to die in the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Kelley, a 20-year veteran of the State Police, was a detective sergeant who worked in counter-terrorism, serving first on an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force and later in the State Police Counter-Terrorism Bureau, said Sgt. Stephen Jones, a department spokesman.

He was fluent in Arabic and, while serving on the FBI task force, had been sent to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to interrogate detainees.

"He touched many lives throughout the law enforcement and military communities, and he will be deeply missed by us all," State Police Superintendent Col. Joseph R. Fuentes said.
Word of Kelley's death spread over teletypes in State Police barracks across New Jersey yesterday morning.
By early afternoon, a half-dozen troopers had gathered on the lawn in front of the trooper's apartment building in South Orange where he lived with his wife, Manita. His sister said he had two adult daughters.
"He was a quality individual," said Sgt. Guy Packwood, one of the troopers outside the apartment building. "It's a real loss, a major loss. It hurts."
Packwood said he and Kelley came on the job together in the late 1980s and were close. Still, he said, Kelley had the ability to surprise him.

"For the longest time, I never knew he spoke Arabic," Packwood said. "When he told me, I was like, 'Whoa.' I was surprised, but then it made sense. A smart guy."

Kelley served two tours in Afghanistan, the first coming just weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, said State Police Lt. Kevin Tormey, the assistant bureau chief of counter-terrorism.


Kelley's career with the State Police included a six-year stint in the auto unit. When he was reassigned to counter-terrorism, he plunged into the subject, studying Arabic, the Koran and Muslim culture, Tormey said.

Kelley's job involved investigating international terrorism cases in Union, Mercer and Burlington counties. He investigated tips and leads developed from sources in New Jersey and overseas.
"Some of the cases start out as something very small. You have to flesh them out and build on it," Tormey said. "The more you connect, the bigger it becomes. You've got to do a lot of the paperwork, but you're definitely out in the field a lot talking to people. He was involved in surveillance and he was actually going to get involved in undercover stuff. It's what you make of them and he was definitely able to make some pretty good cases of them."

State Police Detective Sgt. Tanya Schultz, a member of the counter-terrorism task force that was sent to Guantánamo, said Kelley was effective as an interrogator because he made a point of speaking initially in Arabic and making sure he respected Islamic culture and customs.

"He would sit down and speak to them in their native language at first, and that kind of ingratiated him to them," she said. "Most of the time, you didn't get information with just one interview. It took rapport-building. He was able to speak to them very easily ... because he was a good listener. You could tell he truly cared about what you were saying."

The Defense Department had not yet announced Kelley's death last night. The State Police said he was killed by a bomb in Sadr City, a large, impoverished Baghdad enclave that once was a stronghold of the Shi'a militia.

The Associated Press reported two of the Americans killed in that blast were soldiers. The others were civilian employees of the U.S. government, one from the Defense Department, the other from the State Department.

The four were part of a provincial reconstruction team, a group dispatched to teach, coach and mentor Iraqis and help them with reconstruction projects.

The team went to the Sadr City district council building to attend a weekly meeting in the deputy council chief's office. The bomb went off just as the Americans entered the room and began talking to the deputy council chief, the council's spokesman, Ahmed Hassan, told the AP.

U.S. troops captured a suspect who was trying to flee the scene, the military said, claiming he tested positive for explosives residue.
The military blamed the attack on "special groups criminals," a term it uses for Shi'a militiamen refusing to follow a cease-fire order from anti-U.S. cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

A witness said the Americans rounded up all the Iraqi guards at the building immediately after the explosion.

An initial investigation indicated the explosion was an inside job and that the bomb likely was planted on Monday to avoid the tightened security that accompanies the weekly Tuesday meetings, an Interior Ministry official said.

Kelley was a 1978 graduate of John F. Kennedy High School in Willingboro, Burlington County, where he was a standout forward on the basketball team. His sister said he played basketball at Rider University before transferring to Rutgers-Camden. He earned a degree from Rutgers in 1985.


Staff writer Wayne Woolley contributed to this report.